Mountain Trials 2008.

An event close to home is always nice from a travel perspective. With Merritt, British Columbia being only an hour drive away from home it was a short trip to get ready for the Mountain Trials 2008 regional event.

I had learned a lot about rally car photography since Rocky, and was lucky enough for this event to meet up with Dave Harvey from flatovercrest.com, and Jason Teale, both incredible photographers and experienced rally veterans. Their sites can be found at (http://www.daveharvey.ca and http://jasonteale.com/) . We headed out to the first stage with the flatovercrest.com crew and set up to shoot the first two passes, I had some issues with my polarizer and was nearly hit by a car that overcorrected a bit too far at the bottom hairpin turn of the first large hill in the stage.

The weather for this event was gorgeous, with brilliant sunshine resulting in some major sun burn, and massive dust clouds for dramatic photography. During the Cochrane stage of the rally I set myself up in a drainage ditch after a cattle guard to get some nice shots of the cars whirring past that corner. I quickly got a lesson in caution as I was forced to move due to the rock kick up as the cars passed. I received a few small bruises on my back from rock impacts and took the lesson to heart. Rally photography isn’t the safest form of photo journalism out there, we need to be careful.

I learned a lot from Dave and Jason about rally photography, and spending the day with them was a great experience. We made it to three of the stages in the rally, barely making it into position on Helmer as martials had just closed down the stage for traffic so we had to run through the forest for roughly 2.5 km to get to our set up position at a rather nice hairpin corner. This stage resulted in some fierce competition with many of the top 10 finishers placing within seconds of each other! Very exciting!

The event, covering two days, was extremely rewarding photographically, and I look forward to re-visiting the site for the Pacific Forest Rally later in the year!

To view an entire photoset from the day please visit = http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrsmedia/sets/72157605801845585/