EPC Online: Red Bull Crashed Ice National Championships

To add to Jon's post I was also at the Red Bull Crashed Ice event. It was a crazy event to watch and just impressive that the athletes were able to successfully navigate down that track. Seeing a 2 story hill with a U-turn at the top to go back down was impressive.

My initial intent was to go to the event on Friday and skip Saturday based on the size of the crowd expected. I showed up Friday at 4pm and scoped out where I wanted to stand against the boards and based suggests from others I talked to and never left my spot until the end of the night around 9pm. If I would have moved 3 ft I would have lost my spot against the boards. I was using my Canon 7D and 70-200mm mostly shooting around 70mm at 800 shutter speed, F2.8, 1600 ISO.

I took this below picture and right away I knew it was the best picture I would take of the night if it turned out sharp when I got it on the computer. That night I loaded that single picture to Facebook on my photography page and posted a link to it on the Red Bull Crashed Iced event page at 12:30 that night. By 4am I was getting emails from Red Bull wanting to purchase rights to the photo to use it for media editorial usage...
The image has been shared on Facebook all over the world. I have several comments that I can't read because they are in other languages. Many people I talked to on Saturday had already seen the picture on the Red Bull page.

After spending most of Saturday in the media tent getting paid for this shot I was able to get a media pass for that night. I had a great time and was able to talk to several of the athletes during the day.

Here are some of my favorite shots.
You can find the rest I posted on Facebook
Craig Madsen Photography

Red Bull Crashed Ice St Paul 2012
Red Bull Crashed Ice - Champs