I spend this weekend climbing high on the “amazing super dad” scale showing my kid the time of his short life… oh and I took photos of monster trucks and banger racing, but that was just coincidental…

Read on to find out more and check out the photos inside…

I’ve seen monster trucks before, even here in little Denmark, but they said that I’d never seen anything like these trucks before…. and they were right.

Last saturday me, my son, and I packed up our estate car, and headed to Copenhagen where we would hook up with at couple of friends of mine. This trip had been planed for well over a month, and was supposed to be a father&son trip. Just three friends wanting to make their sons happy… But in reality I saw this as an opportunity to shot the show with my Canon 70-200mm L f: 2.8 USM lens and my Canon 1000D.

Normally you can’t bring a DSLR and lens to Parken, Denmarks national stadium and this weeks impromptu track for the Monster Jam Monster Truck show, shipped in from the mighty U.S. But for this show big cameras were allowed according to Livenation.dk the planners of the event.

So, just to make sure we called the venue to make sure that we were indeed allowed to bring the gear we wanted.

After being reassured by the project manager, I started getting my gear ready to go.

As you’ll see below I got my camera inside, but it did get kinda scary at one point… To get in to the stadium there a two doors, or security post if you will, you have to pass.

Just to make sure that we were allowed in with my DSLR before even getting in line, I asked one of the security women standing around if I were allowed to bring my DLSR with me… I showed her the lens and camera and she told me that it wouldn’t be a problem…
So we get in line; first checkpoint allows us through, just like the other security girl says, no problem.
Next checkpoint, where the revolving counting table thingy is that counts all the spectators, and they stop me… AFTER my 6 year old son went through… So he’s standing on the other side while dad argues with security guy #3, who says, “hey you cant bring that in here”…
Long story short, he calls his boss, who then comes out and lets me through. Apparently the had had a briefing before the show explaining all this with the cameras, but guy #3 hadn’t attended that particular meeting.

I shot all the shots in manual, ’cause the light was steady inside (the had the roof set in place over the stadium. Fiddling around with the shutterspeed I finally settled on 1/125 of a second, to get the motionblur in the wheels and background I was looking for.

When all was said and done, I shot well over 1500 shots, but with only about a third of them in focus. Of those 500+, 40 was worth showing here.

I’ll show you two of my favourites here, but check out my portfolio for the rest of the shots.

The show was divided into two parts, first part was a race with two trucks at each side of the track, trying to catch each other (okay, not really, but that was how I explained it to my kid) and the second part was a freestyle competition where the drivers were given 90 seconds to do as many insane stunts as possible, and an extra 30 seconds if the cars were still drivable after the initial period.

IMG_4644-1

EXIF: ISO 200 - f/2.8 - 1/125 - "El Toro Loco flying high"

Grave Digger, the main truck in the show and last years freestyle World Champion was the last on the scene and really tore up the track.

IMG_4885-40

EXIF: ISO 200 - f/2.8 - 1/125 - "Grave Digger going vertical"

All in all a really great evening with tons of entertainment for the kids, so If you have some time to spare to make your kid happy, and an interest in photography, which i guess you have, or else you wouldn’t be here, go check out this monstrous marmalade thing a’ ma’jingy…

Oh, and did I mention that it was loud??

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