MTBcut's Hannah Barnes was recently out in Åre, Sweden for the Scandinavian Photo Challenge as part of Team UK. The team comprised of Miss Barnes herself, Rich Cunyngham, Mike Smith and Helen Wainright on the bikes with Canadian photographer Grant Robinson behind the lens.
Team UK eventually finished 2nd behind Camilla Stoddart's team. Here's Hannah's report from the event:
Last weekend I arrived in Are, Sweden for their annual bike festival. I was there as part of one of the five teams invited to take part in the Scandinavian Photo Challenge. Five of the world's best mountain bike photographers from around the world were invited to take part in the competition, each selecting four riders to be in their team. The photographers were Grant Robinson from the UK (whose team I was on), Mattias Fredrikson (winner of Deep Summer Photo Challenge 2009) from Sweden, Kristoffer Kippernes from Norway, Camilla Stoddart from New Zealand, and Marcus Gerber from Germany. I had never done anything Iike this before so it was really exciting.
I arrived a day before the rest of the team, so I drank lots of tea, ate local fika (cake) and caught up with head judge Seb Kemp. We did the Pilgrimsloppet race on Sunday, an XC race for the festival. It had lots of fast fun singletrack, and went through a field of scary cows galloping about, and through farms and people's gardens with ladies topless sunbathing who were cheering and waving! I was on my Orange 5, so I was really happy with 2nd female. Then there was a kids race doing a lap of the church, the race organiser and commentator is the local vicar and a total dude and rad biker!
The rest of our team arrived and it was great to meet everyone. The other riders were Helen Wainright, Mike Smith, and Richard Cunyngham. The organisers got all the teams a sweet apartment to stay in, with a drying room and sauna, which was amazing for after the long days of riding.
We had three days to shoot a variety of riding and lifestyle shots, and two days to edit a 5 minute slideshow with music. We made a rough plan of what theme we wanted to have, but each day had no real structure and our team seemed pretty laid back in comparison to the others. Each day of shooting was long and full on, especially as the sun never set so each day ended when we all had jelly arms and were delirious and starving! We had every type of weather, from scorching hot to torrential rain, thunder and lightening. The riding in Are is amazing, there are about 5 lifts in the bike park with so many great trails down and around the mountain, between 15-40 minutes long. We saw lots of lemmings and some caribou, which we tried in a delicious stew with mash.
On Friday night the slideshows were shown in front of 700 spectators at the award show. Camilla Stoddart got top honours, with our team second, and Mattias Fredrikson third. It was a fantastic week and Are is definately a place to keep coming back to!Hannah and the remainder of the MTBcut team are kept looking good, safe and fast by iXS Sports Division armour, Nuke Proof Precision Engineered Products and custom anodised Straitline Components.
The slideshows will be online soon, one slideshow will be released each week starting with last place. Look out for them at http://www.arebikefestival.com/
Scandinavian Photo Challenge slide shows will appear soon on http://www.dirt.mpora.com/
All images appear courtesy of Grant Robinson http://www.grantrobinson.com/
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