I’m a writer, not a photographer. But I do appreciate photography and believe that top professional photographers, for whom I have huge admiration, are among the greatest of artists. I ride with my iPhone, which has a superb camera and I snap thousands of photos every year, some of which are published, but many that aren’t. This is the first of a series where I give some insight into selected photos that have been snapped with my iPhone.
By Sean Badenhorst
This photo of me sliding through a corner was shot by my son, Cade on 22 January 2022. We were at Summerplace Game Reserve in Limpopo Province and I was really struggling with my left shoulder, which had a chronic dislocation that was getting agonisingly painful at certain angles. Strangely and thankfully it wasn’t that sore when I rode a bike. It had been getting gradually worse after more than a year of what started out as discomfort.
I had planned to have surgery to repair the shoulder about 10 days later and said to Cade that this may be the last opportunity for me to shoot some riding photos for many weeks. We took advantage of the soft, low late afternoon light and the incredible cloud formations and shot a couple hundred photos that afternoon. Mostly of me.
Anyway, I realised over the next few days that the surgery would make it difficult for me to type, ride and drive for quite a few weeks and I had so much planned for the first half of the year! It was a huge dilemma.
My surgeon agreed on a compromise – to give me a cortisone injection to ease the pain and delay the need for the surgery a while. He said that the cortisone might work or it might not. No guarantees. If it did work, it would have a pain-killing effect for anything from six weeks to six months.
Well, 12 months later and it’s still working! I managed to do many, many more rides in 2022 after this one. Even though my shoulder isn’t really sore, it is damaged and I want to regain full use of it so I plan to have the surgery at the end of March 2023.
I snapped this photo on 13 March 2022. The rider is Gauteng’s top female Enduro racer, Julia Kotze and the trail is called Morphine. It’s a pretty gnarly 5km descending singletrack trail at Tranquilitas in Mpumalanga. What you can’t see in this pic is that Julia doesn’t have a chain. The day before was the first round of the 2023 Mpumalanga Enduro Series.
Julia unfortunately damaged her derailleur the evening before the race and it wasn’t possible to repair it as Tranquilitas is far from any bike shop! She had to sit out of the event, but she wasn’t going to miss the shuttle runs the following day. There are some superb descents that you can repeat for a couple of hours with the shuttle and they don’t really require any pedalling, so it wasn’t a wasted weekend for Julia.
The start of Morphine, however, is about a 5km away from the other descending trials. I was on a Specialized Levo SL eBike and I had a Tow-whee chord with me. So I offered to tow Julia to the start of Morphine. It was a little hairy at times when we hit rocks, but I managed to tow along the top of the escarpment trail and almost to the start of Morphine. I went ahead to snap pics of all the riders in our group before tackling the iconic descent myself. The shuttle was waiting for us at the end to take us back to the trailhead – it was a truly memorable experience, which I wrote about here.
I snapped this photo on 13 April 2022. We’d been invited by Monster Energy to experience the build-up/practice days for Darkfest at Hellsend just outside Stellenbosch. It’s difficult to put into words just how ridiculously crazy these freestyle and slopestyle riders are. I did my best with this article to describe the experience.
Anyway, this shot shows two riders about to land on the massive hip jump. These are the best trick and big-jump riders in the world and they make incredibly technical, high-risk manoeuvres seem so straight forward. It’s jaw-dropping stuff to witness up close and we were fully aware of this privilege for the full three days were were there. Besides a softly clouded sky, the mountains in the background add incredible depth the image.
I have quite a few shots in this sequence as I used Burst mode on my iPhone. But I chose to show this one with another person in it on the landing to give some perspective. It looks like these riders are just falling out of the sky, but they’re just incredibly skilled and have huge kahunas! If you can, try and get tickets to watch Dark Fest when/if it happens again this year. Because I got to experience it with my wife, Joanne and son, Cade, it’s undoubtedly one of the highlights of my life. Seriously.
