Let’s celebrate another unicycling year, and post the best pictures of 2022 in this thread!
As usual, I want to create the World Unicycling Calendar for next year, with twelve pictures exclusively from this past year. The calendar will be available for free to anyone as a pdf file to print a paper copy for yourself. I will post details in this thread once I’m done. I’ve been the editor of the World Unicycling Calendar since 2011. Previous calendars can be found in this forum (use the Search function).
On the calendar I want to include a wide spectrum of disciplines such as muni, road riding, track racing, urban, freestyle, team sports. Keywords: action (as opposed to posing), expert riding, spectacular, amazing, remarkable, funny, technical picture quality, composition, gorgeous scenery.
Please post (or link) your pictures on 27 December at the latest, to be elegible for the calendar. It’s OK to post low-res, because if the picture would pass pre-selection I’ll contact you for a high-res version.
In addition, I will browse through the “Pictures of your latest ride” thread for posts made this past year.
NEW: As of today, the World Unicycling Calendar has a home, see World Unicycling Calendar, with lots of info.
2022 Nov - Sea Cliff Bridge, New South Wales, Australia
Event: MS Gong Ride. An annual event raising funds for Multiple Sclerosis research. This year raised 2.5m AUD.
Largest cycle event with max. 10,000 riders ride 79km from Sydney to Wollongong.
After several years of cancelled “Spring Cycle” events in Sydney, it went ahead this year.
This image got onto page 14 of the Sydney Morning Herald in October - of approx 8000 riders, I only know of myself and @BruceC who did it on unis.
This is at the south end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and Bike and uni riders are not allowed to ride on these lanes of the bridge usually. The normal bike lane is just at the western side in usual circumstances and currently ends with steps at the north end (but that situation of steps should change sometime soon).
@bruceC can be seen in the pic - he is just behind the guy in the fluoro yellow jacket and the small kid.
If the image is not good enough quality, a higher resolution image can be bought. But I don’t personally mind/care.
I know you’ll have loads of great images to choose from!
I have 8 of them in my longlist for the calendar (which currently has 79 photos).
Your “star player” in the Rest-Of-The-World basketball team is Belgian rider Mathias Bracke, who is also the current World Record holder in IUF slalom with 17.32 seconds. I’ve known him since he was 8 years old, when he just got into unicycling.
Wow! I saw his fast time in the results, but didn’t realize it was the new WR! I used to dominate the Slalom (formerly called Obstacle Course) since the course was redesigned in 1989 and had increasing speed records until Unicon 11, when Swiss rider Marc Haefliger (spelling may be wrong) dominated every Track race. It’s such a great event combining speed, power and precise control to get fast times.
BTW when I was asking about favorites, that was a question for everybody. It’s good feedback for me as a photographer as well!
Were you part of that group? Which one were you? On the lower part of the ride, I was just struggling to keep up (and not be coated in moon dust) and I know I was surrounded by some of the best Muni riders on earth, but am not great at getting names.
Folks, I’ve added some more images to my Calendar gallery. Klaas commented about the loss of my camera and why no Freestyle photos. The “good” camera was already gone by then.
So I added a couple of photos of our car, a basketball group shot just for fun, and a bunch of Freestyle, all taken with cell phones, some by my wife Jacquie. Plus there’s a few from the track, including the men’s Wheel Walk final. I included several videos also, since I still haven’t gotten my Unicon photos uploaded for public viewing…
Mathias’s result in Unicon was not so stellar, mainly because the IUF Slalom finals were cancelled due to the weather. Still enough for World Champion though. His WR time is from the Einrad Cup Münsterland competition last September (Germany), but I have some doubt you saw those results John.
This still (unedited, only reduced in size) is from “Full performance, Expert male Individual Freestyle”. Photo-technically probably not the best shot, but I like the dynamic effect.
I played sweeper and tried to make sure no one got left behind up to that part of the trail. On that steep part, I couldn’t help myself and just rode through until that section/drop in the picture, it was nice and difficult but still very much rideable for me.
If anyone has podium shots from award ceremonies, that can be a big help. Unfortunately I don’t know who’s who among the Japanese riders currently.
I was scrubbing through some of those videos in the process of choosing what to throw in that album; the other type of image I like from Japanese-style riding is sharp turns with lots of lean. I think the same guy did one right in front of the judges table; that might be pretty cool as well.
That frame grab photo of the guys riding across the lake was mostly “enhanced” by cranking up the Vibrance and adding some contrast; these are things you lose with JPEG and video compression.
