Wednesday Wallpaper

[wilkin250r]

What's up with this week's Wallpaper? In the last few weeks we've had people like Cliff Beasly and Josh Creamer, and then we get some shlump from out west that nobody has ever heard of?

That guy looks like he could barely race to the toilet after his morning coffee, let alone race an ATV...

:blah: :devil: :muscle:

[chucked]

how'd you like it?

[wilkin250r]

The quad was okay. Easy to ride, comfortable, but like any off-brand quad with a CVT, the power wasn't stellar.

Meeting up with Harlen was a freaking miracle, however. He just happened to be staying at a little po-dunk hotel casino out in almost the middle of nowhere, and he happens to ask my wife for directions. It wasn't planned, he knew that I lived somewhere in the area, but he had no idea that I lived that close, so we hadn't coordinated anything at that point. She recognized his ATVRIDERS.COM shirt and talked to him.

When my wife called me, I was shocked. Of all the people that she would tell me she ran into in Topaz Lodge, Harlen Foley wouldn't have been in my top 1000 guesses. I would have been more likely to believe she ran into Mel Gibson rather than of Harlen Foley. :cool:

[chucked]

Get out, great story lol

[wilkin250r]

It actually worked out really well for the both of us. I got to take the day off work to go riding, which is always a plus, but Harlen needed pictures of the Kymco in action.

The Eastern Sierra ATV Jamboree is a decent size gathering, a couple hundred riders strong and they organize several rides to interesting locations throughout the area, old mining locations and such. It takes place over several days.

When I got on the phone with Harlen, we coordinated that he would go on one of the organized rides the first day, get the whole group coverage and all the pictures. The second day I met up with him and we separated from the pack so we could concentrate on the photo shoot without holding up the rest of the group, so we just did our own thing.

It was really interesting seeing everything that goes into these photos. We scouted locations, we did several passes with different speeds and different body posture to get the right shot.

[wilkin250r]

One of the hardest aspects was getting the quad to perform. It's really difficult to get the back end of a CVT quad to slide, it's not like I could come in hot and dump the clutch to get the tires spinning. And I didn't always have room to over-steer it to get the back end to kick out, either.

Even more difficult with a rider that has no experience with photography, so I have absolutely no clue what he's looking for, the aspects that make a good shot or not. He really had to coach me on my body movement, how the motion looks on camera, and the aspects I need to pay attention to to make the photo turn out.