2023 AMSA OFf-Road Series Round 4
Kevin Dupuis (BFD Moto/Husqvarna Canada) cleans the first set of obstacles in the FML section on his way to 2nd in the Pro class of the 2023 Vega Hare Scramble.
© Noel Flatters / Superfine Media
I packed up my car this past Friday morning and headed about 500kms north up from Calgary to the Timeu Staging Area (NW of Fort Assiniboine) to shoot the 4th round of the AMSA Off-Road Provincial Championship Series - the Vega Hare Scramble. This round was going to be using a Hare Scramble format over a 25km (about 15.5 miles), mostly flat, sandy, and forested course. This event was also Round 4 of the Western Off-Road Championship (WOC) series, which brings together the Alberta and British Columbia enduro/off-road series.
The drive up to the staging area was pretty easy, Just a bit less than 5 hours from Calgary, with only a little bit of gravel and dirt roads at the very end of the trip. As expected, my Focus hatchback had zero issues getting across that. Once I got to (and past) Edmonton, though, the smoke from the B.C. wildfires started to get really thick. This had me concerned as I was planning to camp at the staging area in a tent. I definitely didn’t want to be inhaling those levels of smoke for the 24 hours or so I’d be on site! Luckily the smoke cleared up a bit by the time I got to Barrhead about 45 minutes south of the location, so all good. It was still smokey, but not to the point where I’d need to turn around and find a hotel somewhere further south!
Camping turned out to be a great time! The enduro/off-road motorcycling community is so chilled out and welcoming. Met lots of people, had great chats, and made new friends after I got set up. It reminds me a lot of the mountain bike racing community back in the 90’s, with how fun and down-to-earth people are!
I got up early Saturday morning and got myself and my gear ready to shoot before the mosquitos came out in full force, so I was happy to get that win! I had walked the course near the staging area the night before to scope out some prime shooting locations that were easily accessible on foot, and I sought out spots that would showcase the riders' skills, the excitement of the race, and the beauty of the area. By strategically positioning myself at these key points, I could capture high-intensity moments, intense emotions, and tell the stories of the race in my images.
The start of the race was in a deep sand clearing just outside of the camp site. It featured a very short section off the start to a 90 degree left hand corner that would obviously get deeply rutted out as soon as the pro men went around it in the first start. From there, a few more corners led to a longer wide-open straightaway that took the riders into a short 2-line exit from the sand pit of the start out onto the trails. After a bit more scouting in the morning I was able to pick a great spot that gave me great overall views of the start, and a tremendous head-on perspective of racers battling for position towards the exit of the start area.
After all the start waves had made it out onto course I headed over to the hard enduro feature of the course that took riders through the lap/finish line. This infamous section is name ‘FML’, which seemed pretty appropriate! The organizer of the race jokingly said that FML stood for ‘For More Learning’, which cracked everyone up. Again, I picked a spot inside FML that would allow me to shoot pretty much every feature of the section, and have backdrops that helped me show the context of the race and the struggles/emotions of the riders as they went through it.
For the next location I went to a little spot on the approach to FML that would allow me to capture images of the racers at high speed around a sandy bermed curve with both the forest and pit area as my backdrops. This turned out to be a great spot for me, and I was able to get some great panning/motion-blur shots, as well as sharp high shutter speed ones. I could also keep an eye on the pits to help me track what was going on in the race, and chat with some of the racers and fans, which is always an added bonus.
From a technical perspective I was shooting on the Fujifilm X-H2 system, and exclusively used my Fujinon XF 16mm - 55mm F2.8 and Fujinon XF 50mm - 140mm F2.8. I find that in most enduo race photography scenarios these lenses give me the range to capture up close panning wide-angle shots that showcase the speed /intensity of the races, and also capture the dynamic skills of the athletes with some great lens compression. They also allow me to get the perspective/context shots and the middle distance and detail shots for storytelling. They’re both fast and sharp lenses, that combined with the X-H2’s great (and now updated) focusing systems, give me tremendous reliability and a high hit rate rate for sports photography and action photography. With all of the smoke and mostly cloudy skies, I had to shoot at bit higher ISO than I normally do in the altitude and harsh sunlight of southern Alberta. No problem though, I was able to keep it around 400 mostly, which is still well within acceptable noise range, especially on the Fujifilm X-H2. The shots definitely a bit flat given the environmental factors, but using my card calibrated colour profile for the X-H2, the classic Fujifilm colours still looked great! The only thing of note I had to do while editing was to add more dehaze than I might normally in order to account for the smoke and all the dust being kicked up as a result of the sandy race course.
The only real regret I had from the event was that with some delays in the races and post-race administration I wasn’t able to shoot the podiums as I had a pretty hard 6:00 p.m. departure time to make it back to Calgary before midnight. Next time! Overall the Vega Hare Scramble is a great event in an unbelievably beautiful and remote location. It was a ton of fun to shoot this event, and I will absolutely try to make it back next year!
cheers | noel.
