The Red Brick Church in Berkshire, NY

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I live next to a church that sits right on the corner of Route 38 and Glen Rd here in Berkshire, N.Y.  It's a pretty neat looking old building.  I have no idea how long it has been around for - I'm guessing a while anyway.  Admittedly, I don't spend much time in churches - most of my Sunday's are at races or football games. I did happen to pop into this particular church a year or two ago - they were having a bake sale, or maybe a blood drive?  I don't know - I forget now - but I had to physically go inside of the place.  Once in I happened to get a peak of the main room where the pews and stuff are.  I decided right then and there that I had to speak with the "Padre", as I call him, and see if I could get permission to shoot the interior of his church 'cause it looked pretty cool in there.  :)  ( I'm guessing maybe he's a "Minister"?  It's not a Catholic church -- I dunno what kind it is -- but I like Clint Eastwood's use of Padre from some of his old westerns ... <grin>  )

The Padre' here at this church - he's a pretty cool and interesting guy whom I have met on more than a few occasions locally and he was more than willing to hear me out.  We agreed that I should just keep in touch and let him know if /when we wanted to see if we could do this.  That was late last summer.  This past Thursday morning I happened to notice that the (now low and early rising sun) was basking the church once again as seen in the top photo.  It was time to speak with the Padre' ...

My thinking is that the church, being situated and facing more or less to the east, early morning sunlight would be best.  I'd hoped to catch the stained glass windows getting illuminated via mr. sun and the interior in general taking on a nice "glow".

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I'll be adding more photo's to this post over the next few days ..  I wound up bracketing and doing some HDR as it was pretty dark in there.  We turned up a couple of the lights but that just killed the atmosphere that I wanted / was looking for so - tripod, cable release and slow'ish shutter speeds were the order of the day.

This was a learning experience ...  wouldn't mind trying a do-over.  | Click the photo to view it larger | Click here to view it really large (3600px)

Last ones ...

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WNYOA Round 5 / Greek Peak

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Round 5 is in the books.  Mother nature was NOT kind to us for the majority of the week leading up to the event itself.  Only on actual race day did she finally relinquish the wet and miserable grip that she had been stubbornly clinging to and let mr. sun come out.  This was, unfortunately too little, too late.  Conditions were wet.  Not terribly wet - trust me - WNYOA has seen, and raced in, far worse - BUT had we had just one or two straight days of dry weather ....  {sigh}  "Woulda, coulda, shoulda ... "  But as many in the race family say, "... it's a hare scramble, deal with it".

And so we did.  :)

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This is just a quickie post to get out some random "faces in the crowd" candid type stuff that I like to do from time to time.  The shot of Bobby J. with trash in his hand is one that he actually asked me to take.

<EHEM>  People - NOT COOL.  You want to keep having good venues to race at?  Quit leaving your shit trash all over the place!! </EHEM>

I deployed mr. remote for both the big bikes AND even the quads.  Yeah -- thats a major trust thing right there ...  lol!  I wound up shooting a LOT of images -- gonna take a while to go through all of them and weed out the bad ones, make first round picks, and then whittle that down to keepers that will wind up getting posted up to the galleries.

Anyway ...  enjoy!

-=- jd -=-

WNYOA Round 4 / Arcadia Bark Busters

The little ones were going so fast today that their teeth were falling out.  Well ok -- not really...   :) | Click to view the photo larger

Round #4 is in the books and the WNYOA family / series now settles into period of rest and recovery, fix and repair (of both machine and body) as there is a break coming up between now and Round 5 at Greek Peak on the 15th.  Arcadia, as I learned in speaking with even promoter Jerry Bulman earlier today, has a historically "low turnout" of ridership due to a couple of things.  Namely distance - it is, by comparison, a good drive away from the typical WNYOA event.  Today's event did set an Arcadia racer attendance record though topping out around approximately 600'ish riders - not to shabby.  A little light by WNYOA standards but again ..  not bad.

Nick Davis *blew* the AA's away.  Ben Bouwens (again!) appeared to have grabbed the early lead but apparently went down pretty hard and never really got back into podium contention.  I don't know where he finished.  | Click the photo to view it larger

Last year at the Dan Leonard event, Dallas Micha and his crew set a high bar standard for how an event should be run.  That bar was then met and in some cases exceeded for the next several events back to back over the next few weeks.  Congrats to Jerry and his crew for establishing this years high bar standard (in my opinion anyway for whatever that may or may not be worth....  ).  Parking, scheduling, numbers of workers, the course itself and course marking, and lastly getting the races off pretty much on schedule ...  check, check, check and check.

Here are a couple of grabs from todays event ...  little ones on the pee wee quads -- sorry folks - I didn't make it up there on time to catch you.  ( this event really was pretty far away ..  road trip! lol! )  I'll catch you at Round 5.  Hopefully one of the other shooters caught you ...

Timmy Murphy did not get the greatest of starts in the AA's but did battle his way to a 2nd place finish on the day.  | Click the photo to view it larger

This guy (sorry man...  I don't know as many of the quadders as I do the bikes) Thanks to an eagle eyed reader I can now update this and state that Greg Covert grabbed the early lead in the AA Quads.  He apparently never relinquished it either and went on to grab the win on the day!  |  Click the photo to view it larger

There will be many, many more photo's coming in the next few days folks - I'll likely be posting them to facebook as well as (obviously) be populating the galleries.  Standby and keep checking back!

-=- jd -=-