Who Would Actually Buy A Bike Park Photo?

I’m either waking up this morning with a hangover of celebration, or dragging my ass in to work with a sad hangover of defeat. Regardless, I’m looking forward to a productive day of work and hoping that our new overlords treat us fairly, for a few months at least. I was hoping this week to provide you with something more blatantly and brazenly political than last week’s episode, but I’m bad with math and calendars. (to the majority of our audience, who reside outside of Canada, Dave is referring to our Federal Election that took place last night. Hopefully Dave’s happy with our new PM -Ed.)

This would also be a great time to discuss the poorly judged circus that made millions for sponsors, paid peanuts to the participants, and left one of our most well liked riders with a critical injury.

Instead, this.

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Hey Uncle Dave,

What’s worse- people that actually purchase Whistler Bike Park photos, or people that post the free sample photo, with the watermark stamped on the image, all over their Facebook page? Discuss.

All the best,
An amused rider

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Dear Arms:

It is common these days for any relatively life endangering activity enterprise to serve up some sort of photo or video servicing option. Skydiving. Bungee jumping. Roller Coastering. Certain malls on Black Friday. Whether they employ a teenager with a point-and-shoot or a pro with a closet full of gear, with a captive audience, these businesses know they can carve a substantial chunk of money out of us because we seem to be incredibly motivated to prove to our friends that we are cheaters of (sanitized and pre-packaged) death.

And then there is mountain biking. All that time and energy spent off in the woods with only a few tall tales to show for our efforts? How gloriously pre-millenium. Unless you’re a teenager with wealthy friends, chances are very good that you don’t have any high quality photos or videos of yourself riding a bicycle. Hours and hours of terrible Gopro footage, sure, but nothing that a sane person would want to share with their acquaintances. As a result, quality visual documentation of our sport has been concentrated on two groups of people:

1) Professional riders.
2) Media hacks.

If you don’t fall into one of these two camps, no professional photographer is going to spend several hours in the woods lugging thousands of dollars of equipment so that you can ride your bicycle around and around and around again, screwing up shot after shot. What a gap in the market! You can see how the capitalists are rubbing their hands in greedy anticipation. People with more money than sense? Ever present risk of injury? A young demographic looking to document the entirety of their lives? It’s pretty much rivers of dollars tumbling through the Whistler landscape, ripe for the taking.

So in steps Coast Mountain Photography. Predatory fat cats on par with Bain Capital. Exploiting mountain bikers and making literally hundreds of dollars in the process. On any given weekend, there they are, camped out in the Bike Park, clinging to the side of the mountain so that they can shoot photo after photo of yokel after yokel after yokel.

I mean, fuck those guys. They deserve our scorn and mockery. With all that money they’re making providing us with timeless memories they can probably afford their rent and food each month. I’ll bet they’ve probably even paid off all of their camera gear.

And don’t bullshit me.  I know that every time you come tearing down Crank-it-up and you catch a flash out of the corner of your eye, you’re heading right back up to ride that trail again, throwing extra “whips” and “scrubs”, hoping the photographer is good enough to catch your “blinding speed” and “huge air”.  And when you get home that night, you’re on that website, clicking refresh, refresh, REFRESH, just waiting for that photo that is going to kickstart your professional mountain biking career.

So what gives?  What’s with the hostility?  It feels mis-placed.  I see what you’re saying, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.  I’ve come up with a few reasons why you might be angry.

You’re a professional rider and feel people need to earn the right to have their photo taken

As a borderline media hack who sometimes has his photo taken, I can understand this sentiment. You can only hear “it looks horrible, do it again” so many times before you realize your skills (relatively speaking) in documenting this sport come via words (arguably), not photographs. I don’t warrant this attention and you’re right to look down your nose at me and any others that use money (or potential therof), bribery or “coverage” to trick professionals into taking their picture.

You’re offended by Selfie/Instagram/Facebook Culture

I hear you brother. Sometimes I just want to eat a bowl of soup without somebody taking a photo of it.

But the social media riding photo is the ultimate lifestyle token. You’re showing people that you:

1. Are wealthy.
2. Are a badass.
3. Live life in a more interesting fashion than they do.
4. Don’t live near a surf break.

Unless you’re a really terrible rider, this is the perfect use of social media. Either embrace it or move back to your parents’ cave.

You feel really strongly about Internet Piracy

In most cases, my opinion on Internet Piracy is that it doesn’t go far enough. Why have we stopped at just stealing shit off the Internet?  We should be banging down the doors, breaking windows and sorting ourselves out with office supplies and furniture.  Lord knows I need a new desk chair.  These assholes have cried poor for so long, treated artists terribly for so many years, but have, amazingly, managed to once again stack the deck in their favour.  Only true sociopaths can continually figure out fresh, creative and deviant new ways to screw over artists and creative types.  These fuckers deserve every trench coated loaner pirating movies with a handicam and every torrent that rips a dollar out of their pockets.  After all, it’s only piracy when you do it on a small scale.  Ramp it up and you can call it a business model.

But take the multi-national entertainment corporation factor out of the equation and things change.

I know that 25 bucks seems like a lot of money for a photo.  But the idiots posting watermarked photos on Facebook are (figuratively) throwing giant buckets of warm piss right in the face of Coast Mountain Photography.  They’re (once again figuratively) stealing Coast Mountain Photography’s lunch while Coast Mountain Photography has their backs turned so that they can complete a lens swap so that the photos of these imbeciles riding look a bit less terrible. Nowhere else in this world can you get a professional photographer to turn the lens in your direction for 25 bucks. It’s kind of amazing that it is even possible.

So, you need to judge people less, and the people posting watermarked photos on Facebook need to pay up.  Shame them until they do.

Sorry,
Uncle Dave

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Congrats Arm! You win TWO watermark-free bike park photos from Coast Mountain Photography – a $50 value (bikeparkphotos.com). We didn’t even ask them – but we figured they wouldn’t mine. Hopefully they’ll honour it or Uncle Dave will have to shoot the photos.

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Would you like Uncle Dave to apologize to you? Send him a question.

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What about you? Watermark or no?