It's All Downhill

After work, Monday morning after a Sunday night, Scott the security guard and I went to give some moral support and coffee to our friend Henry. His crazy endeavour was to cycle for 24hours straight on the Ruderock downhill track here in Queenstown... Cycling back to the top at the end of each descent. His goal? to raise funds for Unseen, a charity that helps human trafficking and helps prevent human trafficking. He has a relatively modest target for such a feat but he deseves to break the £250 goal after completing 29,000ft in 24 hours. Thats the height of Mount Everest in one sitting... sitting on saddle sores no less! 

To help Henry reach his target and find out more about his aspirations to ride 1,000,000 vertical feet in 1 year, have a look at his Just Giving page.

As for the picture? I could talk about it all day, between the time we got there and the time he came back around after this, we only had one chance of getting this shot in the dark. It really was a shot in the dark. Scott knew how much I wanted the shot and understood he may end up being my 'assistant' but that didn't phase him as we set of at 5.25 to drive up Coronet Peak and find Henry. 

My original idea was to get Henry's light trail with a clear sky filled with stars or Milky Way but clouds stopped that and we trecked up the hill a bit, under Henry's instruction, to find a suitable vantage point that would give us a view of Queenstown and his descent. I took two cameras, set up one to take this shot and one a bit further down with the fish eye lens. To make things worse, I hadn't checked the battery life in a couple of weeks and there was only 1% left, potentailly leaving us with one picture from the fisheye and only one run in the dark to get it right. I sent Scott down the track a little to our other vantage point, you can see him crouched beside the track in this picture, and we both nailed our one and only chance to get it right. After that the camera with the fish eye died. Perfect timing you might say. You can see both of these pictures by clicking here. This will take you to my website