Most of the time I spend at Sea Otter is working - taking pictures, hiking to photo locations, or on the computer in the media center. But I always make sure to reserve some time for at least a short ride. It breaks up the event for me and allows me to relax a little and enjoy Laguna Seca. And it is a beautiful venue. There’s a huge variety of terrain and although most of the riding is fire road, there is some excellent singletrack, as you can see here.
I took a ride on Friday evening with Steve, from Bionicon and Alan, the Bike magazine Web site manager,. It was crystal clear and the light was wonderful for photos. When they started to drop me, I pulled out the camera and told them we needed to go back for photos (ancient photographer’s trick :D). Then I made them go back and forth on a few of the especially delicious sections of singletrack.
Both of these photos were taken with a Canon PowerShot A640 compact digital camera. I shot them using the camera’s basic auto exposure settings, with some adjustment in Photoshop. If you want to learn some tricks for taking better pictures with your digital camera, read my Digital Camera Tips and Techniques article. There’s a whole page of specific action photo techniques with mountain bike photo samples. Anyone can learn the basic rules and take pictures like these 
