Just when I had given up on winter after one more warm spell, it came back with a vengeance. A couple of days of snowfall and cold weather, and we have a contender for the best weekend of the winter!To get things rolling, we had the annual snowmobile event in Los today and I wanted to try my hand at action photography. I tried it last year as well, but the results were not up to much. This time I located myself on top of the race course at Furuberget, which I figured would provide the best action (I had stayed halfway last year and it wasn’t so good).

I also got to ride on a snowmobile myself. I’m sure it didn’t go quite as fast as it normally goes, but I hung on to my dear life anyway. Then these guys come racing up the hill and exactly how they don’t get thrown off their rides is beyond me… respect!

Photographing the action was something of a challenge. Because the movement was almost directly towards me, focusing was difficult – the camera can’t keep up. So I used the pre-focusing method instead, hoping that the rig would emerge where I had focused and then it was just a matter of keeping the finger on the shutter. I was half expecting all of the pictures to be soft, but I got a surprising amount of keepers so I’m pleased! I would have wanted to keep shooting, but there were no racers left and my fingers and toes were deep frozen anyway.

After a hot cup of tea to warm me up, I was ready to go skiing. This was the first time in three weeks that I’ve come near the gear and after a few kilometres, I felt the pain in my heels again. I was wearing two pairs of socks, and the bloody boots still chafed! What is the matter with them?! Well, blisters aside, it was a nice skiing trip. Since it was late afternoon, the light started to fade a little bit, helped by the snowfall. Not many pictures, but thoroughly enjoyable.

And tomorrow, I’m finally off to the zoo. In an ideal world I would also go skiing, but in my chafing-boots-world I will skip that.