The 2018 Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

rubencress(75)

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This week the DGR'18 was organized in many cities around the world. One of them was a city nearby in the Netherlands, and it was today. A few weeks ago I got in contact with some biker girls @matthijsgroen clipped and asked them if they wanted to shoot someday. I totally love their style and was sold right away when I saw the video-clip Matthijs did for them. They were really cool and easy-going right from the start, yay! I mean, vintage classy motorcycles and good-looking studs, that's like having a full bingo card in a crowded retirement place. As if you were eating chocolate banana pancakes on the go, added with whipped cream and cherries on top. Pretty bloody awesome!

Pancakes aside, today was all about DGR, so let's dive into that real quick.

The Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

While checking out our agenda's, the girls told me about the DGR, which is a huge charity worldwide. If you never heard about the DGR, like me, I can tell you it's one of the most admiring, relaxed, and great charity initiatives that I now know about. While there are many great initiatives that raise money for charity, I feel that DGR is more than just raising money for charity: they bring people together, that, in a pretty bad ass way.

Bikers all over the world come together where they meet, talk, and ride together for a cause. While the sight already is pretty amazing. It's more like a family with a strong message to the world that can easily be translated into many, many ways. While browsing the DGR website I learned about how this tradition started. It was inspired by a photograph and later injected into the world to combat those who have a negative stereotype opinion about bikers. And yep, that's sad but true. People often have an "negative" opinion about bikers (this is why I think female bikers who participate in this event are even more awesome). To those who have that kind of opinion: Over 120.000 bikers worldwide have raised millions of dollars for men's mental health. How you like 'em now?

"Influenced by the tragedy of losing one of our ride hosts to depression, from 2016 we have seen a change in our health fundraising goals. Now, the funding of men's mental health programs is a Distinguished Gentleman's Ride focus, in addition to prostate cancer research through our new official charity partner The Movember Foundation and the support of our title sponsors Triumph Motorcycles and Zenith Watches." - DGR

So far, the Dutch alone raised over €260,000.- for this cause this year. That's pretty friggin' amazing for such a small country! [Add something about being proud and Dutch here]. Seriously, to all of those who participated in any way, you guys are amazing!

It was a great day, the weather was amazing, all the people were relaxed and everybody was having fun. Even though I had some troubles with waking up this morning, when the coffee started to kick in everything was fine. Here are some of the shots that I pulled off, a few with eyes half-open and some of them when I was more awake. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

I sure had a lot of fun today! I wanted to ride a bike myself for a looonggg time, but never took lessons. Don't know why, but after gotten to see all these bikes it sure made me wanna get one now. If you are curious who the bikers are, check out @HarleyDutchies. I already have another shoot in mind. Hopefully, they are down with that and we can shoot again with less time-pressure and a location that we can pick ourselves.

How was your Sunday?
Ruben