Vote Here! Singletrack Forum Photography Overall Winner

We’ve been through all the entries and got it down to a shortlist of three finalists in each of our categories. It’s been great to look through all the images, and nice to hear the different tales behind the pictures. You’ve got until Sunday 7th Jan to get your votes in, and then we’ll tot up the results and reveal the winners. Remember, it’s just for fun! Here are your finalists – with titles we’ve made up to help make the polls easier, so don’t judge folks on any bad puns!

Make sure you vote in each category:

• Open
• Bike Life
• Just Riding Along
• Gnarpooning
• Out There

And finally… pick your overall favourite

This is the image you like most out of all the finalists across all the categories.

Thanks for playing along, we hope you’ve enjoyed seeing all the images. We’ll probably try and do something similar next year, so get out there and get snapping!

Here’s a little word from Chipps – his Editorial back in Issue 102 – on taking more photos:

In our recent issue – the milestone #100 – one of the 50 Top Tips was from me about photography. Not how to shoot, or what gear to buy. Just a plea to take more photos.

I’ve just been searching through my old slides, looking for some photos from the 1990s to go with the film ‘Mountain Biking: The Untold British Story’ we’re involved in. I’ve taken photos of mountain biking since I started riding at the end of the 80s. Somewhere I have photos of my first off-road ride, my first mountain bike, my first Malvern Classic. They’re all in boxes and files somewhere. Not especially well organised, but I know for sure if I have a particular shot or not and, given enough time, I can dig it out.

When I started writing about bikes for a living, my photography hobby came with me and I made the move
to slide film – an expensive and unforgiving medium, but one that was used by magazines exclusively back then. Over the years, leading into the early days of Singletrack, I kept shooting slide film for work and prints on a compact for
my social pics. Artistically, my photos were never that well composed – I’m more of a ‘shoot and move on’ kind of photographer. I’d accrued around 10,000 slides and countless prints at last count – then digital cameras came along and I now have hard drives stacked full of shots as well. Many of them completely rubbish!

As the years have gone by, all of those photos have improved. Not the focus, or the composition, but in their importance and value to me (and usually to others). Every photo is a glimpse into a time that will never happen again. Every unique moment captured in a photo is one that is spared the fading of memories and cements a point in time in a way that several people’s recollections of the same event can’t.

Why am I so keen on this particular activity? Because, you never know. You never know when you’ll need a photo
of your old bike, of what you were wearing in 1996, of who came on that ride when it all went wrong, or what bike you were riding when you did High Street. What is commonplace now will be interesting, or retro, or hilarious in ten years time. Even photos of your cranks, shoes, helmet and tyres will provoke ‘And I used to ride with that?’ responses in a decade. With nearly everyone having a phone that takes photos, it’s even easier, but I still don’t see enough people recording those mundane now, but important in the future photos.

As you’ll probably know, we lost our Deputy Editor, Jenn, to cancer recently – and much of this issue is a celebration of her life. But trying to find enough photos of her, on and off the bike, is a surprisingly hard thing – even though she was often sitting in the same room, or on bike rides, with people with cameras, she managed to evade many of them. So, as I say, take photos – you never know when you’ll want to look back on a scene that will never, can never, be recreated for all the money in the world.