Memorial Day weekend found a lot of kids and really old kids on minibikes in a field in Big Springs, KS. The Best of Kansas race was rained out, but the mini bike races and the hare scramble race on Monday ran on schedule. As usual, race promoter Perry Keegan put on a good event for racers and their various-sized entourages as well.

The field was humming with the sounds of 50cc minibikes on Saturday and Sunday nights. These guys were on the gas and three wide through the corner.

Even the intrepid promoter got involved in the fun and games at one point. He endured a power to weight disadvantage and made it through on his advanced skill……and the fact that most of the racers in most of the classes crashed at some point.

We’ll have to wait and see whose name ends up on the Best of Kansas traveling trophy for this year.

I took a little road trip to Arkansas this weekend to give my daughter a little bit of time with the grandparents, and to accompany my brother Jason to the NEPG National Enduro. We rolled in Saturday to get signed up and to catch up with that Shan Moore guy from Trials & Enduro News.

It was a bit soggy in the pits, but the ground seemed to be holding up pretty well. At signup, we got in line behind Alex McRee and his parents. Go to your latest issue of dirt rider and open up the back cover and you’ll see him. The gang from Seattime.co were in the pits and had an awesomeness competition going. Mr. McRee decided to hop on the rowing machine and within a few seconds, had beaten the nearest time by a full 2 seconds. It was a pint full of awesome, but I was afraid that he was going to dislodge the chain in that poor thing. The folks running signup had us through the line with a working transponder and on our way to the t-shirt sales and Muscle Milk pickup spot in short order. Everyone was really nice, but my first inkling that things weren’t going to go so well for me was the map to the spectator spots handing under the signup tent. It appeared to have been written on the back of a paper plate or something that happened to be lying around at the last minute and it had no road names on it. If you’ve ever been to this part of Arkansas, you’ll understand why that’s a bit of an issue.

After a bit of wandering in the pits, we ended up at the Leo Vince tent for a complimentary sound test. Ted Campbell, the company’s US race manager was there with the dB meter and had the bike tested in no time at all. The WR450 was a bit on the high side of the noise scale, so he shot my brother an offer on a new 94dB can that he just couldn’t pass up. There’s nothing like going to the race and scoring a good deal on some shiny quiet parts! Ted’s a good guy, so look him up if you’re near one of the remaining enduro races.

Sunday found my brother and I driving down I-40 in the rain, then onto I-30 in the rain, and then the rest of the way to the Social Hill exit…you guessed it, in the rain. We pulled into the gate and the sticker from the previous day’s check-in had washed off of the windshield. The chap at the gate put a pink one on the truck…said it was the same color as my brother’s underwear…..how he figured that out, I really don’t want to know. I had planned on puttering about with a pro photographer that works for Dirt Rider, but he had been told that the water was rising and that he would probably need some extra time to get out to the course to shoot. My bro had found another person from his row to hang out with, so he was able to dump out his bike and gear and let me have the truck to go runnin’ in. With a 5 mile ride just to the first special test, there was no way that I was going to be able to walk the course like I usually do. I went looking for the first spectator spot and couldn’t find any sign of it aside from the arrows directing me off of the main road. I ran until I hit a T in the road and knew that I wasn’t going to find the spot. I did see a yellow fence as described in the cave painting on the ‘map’, but it looked like some good’ol boy’s driveway and I had no desire to smell buckshot, so I passed.

The second spot was easily found, as it was marked by a parking lot full of AR Dirt Riders crew and their rides. I spoke with Tom Steel, who was a really nice fellow, and I was pointed in the right direction. There were a few folks coming down the trail when I showed up and one of them was Dale from MXPhotography.com. He’s a great guy who travels around to a lot of the bigger races with his wife and they have a mobile print lab setup in his trailer. We discussed how dark the trail was, the ins and outs of photographing dirt bikes and then we started hearing them. I got my lights set up and began waiting…and waiting. The trail was routed within hearing distance of where I was, but it took a while before anyone made it to where I was. Of course, it didn’t take the rain very long to get to where I was. Thankfully I had taken the poncho that my dad offered because it got a good workout. This was the deluge that hit about an hour after the first riders were off the line. It passed just in time for the first riders to begin coming in and in no time the hotshots from the 20s rows were roosting by. It was really something to see those guys going that fast, in what essentially was, the dark.

I shot until I didn’t hear bikes any longer and after four hours, headed back to the pits. I found my brother over by the scoring trailer and a big bluish mudpile that resembled his bike. It turns out that he had come to his senses and stopped one test short of the spot where I was set up to make photographs. Even so, he was able to finish 4th in his class and come out with no injuries. That’s a good day.

This weekend is the first event of the new MORE series. (Midwest Off-Road Events) Steve Leivan is putting this thing together and it’ll be fun to see what he comes up with. I’m most excited to see just how much riding time the PeeWee riders get. It seems that they kinda get the shaft at the races. It’s not that they’re mistreated, but they get to ride in the truck for the same amount of time as everyone else, but they only get to typically ride for half an hour. The MORE series may be changing that situation. Hit their website and see if it might be worth the trip for your little riders.

This morning I decided to make the switch back to the old way of ordering photos through my website. I decided to move back to the old PhotoReflect setup that I was using and folks started having trouble ordering through it. For the hassle that it provided me, I figure that I’ll just keep the 18% off the top that they were taking and do it myself. The photos are still out on the photoreflect page, so they haven’t gone anywhere. I know switching around stuff like this is a pain in the butt from the customer side of things for sure, but it’s even uglier on the back end.

I’m sure that I’ll have it working by the end of the week. If anyone has any questions or concerns about how/what/where/when/why, please just send me a note.

Thanks for stickin’ with me!

I don’t know how many other old users of Photoreflect there are out there, but I’m wondering if more folks than me are having trouble. It seems that when a customer makes a purchase, they get an error stating that their credit card info is wrong, so they enter it again and try again. Well, each time that they try, it’s creating an actual order. My customers are dirt bike racers and don’t give up easily, so I’m having to refund two or three orders for every one that I take in….and this sucks.

Zenfolio anyone?

It looks like this will be the itinerary for the next month or so. Of course this could all change depending upon whether or not I can earn enough from photo sales to get me to the next race.

20March – FMHS – Bolivar, MO
27March – FMHS – Sedalia, MO
27March – BJEC – White Rock
03April – MATT Trials – Excelsior Springs, MO
03April – FMHS – Milford
10April – HBGP – Baldknobber
17April – FMHS – Walters Ranch
17April – BJEC – Mansfield, MO
24April – Kingsville MX
30 April – MWTA Trials 2-day – Omaha
01May – FMHS – Warrensburg 1
01May – BJEC – Leadbelt – Park Hills
14-15May – Race MORE 2-day – Eldon, MO
20May – Kingsville – Night MX
22May – BJEC – Train Robbers
27May – Kingsville – Night MX
28May – Best of Kansas Weekend
29May – FMHS – Big Springs

Saturday started the new year off with a bang, quite literally. Some sort of percussive device started the race and startled me while I was half a mile away setting up my photo gear. It was a little cold for standing around behind a camera, but it looked to be a perfect day for riding and helping out a good cause. Below, a rider gets a little bit frisky with the throttle on the tires in the EnduroCross section, but gets by without falling…on this lap.

It was a good day for racing. Mark Burghardt and his brother came down from Iowa to mix it up with the Forward Motion AA gang. This image was at a little bit of a jump that, if overjumped, would put the rider into some pretty serious tree limbs. I guess it’s a good thing that it was right after a pretty sloppy section that didn’t allow much speed.

More photos can be seen here.

This was an interesting race because of the scheduling, but the scorekeepers and race crew did a wonderful job. It was a great day to be out playing! I spent some time in the grass track this time around and I hope everyone enjoys those. The PeeWee course had one little turn that kept tripping the kiddos up, but they all seemed to be having fun and I bet they all slept well after the race.

I don’t really know if anyone other than myself has had to figure out how to organize the photos from one of these type events in post, but here’s what I do. Usually I come home with 7-800 jumbled up images from the PeeWee class all the way to the Trailriders late Sunday evening and start downloading. Lightroom adds keywords, puts things in their proper places, and then kicks out the previews. I work through the previews using the X key quite a bit and at the same time, I put them into classes based on rider/bike number if I can see a plate. Motocross goes by classes and can be figured out by taking a photo of the schedule or of your hand to tell you which moto, but for a Hare Scramble you get numbers in order for most of the first lap, then it’s all over the place. For me, it’s easiest just to use the number pad for 6-9 and the number line for 1-5. Lightroom lets you assign a star for 1-5 and a color for 6-10. When I’m done with a run through them, I hit ctrl-backspace to dump the stinkers, then start sorting by class using the star or color filter. Since I host these in my own space, I run them through mogrify and watermark them before they are output into the folders by class number at 640pixels. I then import the 640pixel photos all at once under the main event folder and run minimal previews. From there it’s off to the web module for output and then to the web using FileZilla.

I’ve learned a lot in a year of doing this and many of the tips and tricks have come from the Lightroom Queen.