December 30th, 2008 §
I photographed the last Raiders basketball game of 2008 at the Plymouth Pavilions last weekend which is always an interesting challenge; I’ve written on here in previous posts about the difficult conditions at the basketball arena; it’s pretty much dark in there, there’s no flash photography permitted, and yet you have to freeze the action of athletes competing in a very fast paced sport. For this game I used a 70-200 2.8 VRII Nikon lens on a D3 body and pushed the ISO out to 6400 to get a shutter speed of 1/500th and the images still look great; I don’t normally have the need to shoot at such a high ISO but it’s good to know that when it’s required I can still deliver high quality images even under the worst shooting conditions.
December 17th, 2008 §
Issue 49 of Shred magazine is now available and features the images I created during a portrait sitting and short interview with US National Road Cycling Champion Tyler Hamilton when he was in the UK earlier this year with the Rock Racing team at the 2008 Tour of Britain. The article runs as the cover story and spans eight pages inside so pick up a copy to see the full feature.
Also featured in issue 49 of Shred Magazine are a few of my photographs from the 2008 Bontrager 24/12 mountain bike endurance event which was held over one very hot and dusty weekend at Newnham Park this summer: DPS image below features Shaggy of Team 69′er.
December 7th, 2008 §
I love location portraits; the diversity of the assignments and the perpetual challenge of creating great images anywhere from a company boardroom to a remote backcountry location are always hugely rewarding despite the headaches that inevitably arise. I really felt up against it on Friday night however when I was assigned to photograph two local cyclists (James Smith and Rob Willcocks) for an interview in the next Shred West magazine. As instructed I met the two guys I was to photograph underneath an overpass of the A38 in Plymouth; they were only available for the photo-shoot in the evening and the location was in complete darkness when we arrived, not to mention the wind and rain blowing through. We found a good looking pillar covered in graffiti that was relatively shielded from the weather to act as the backdrop and drove a car in to throw enough light onto the scene from the headlights to see what we were doing. We kept the lighting simple to give the dark, gritty look that the editor was looking for and the subjects were kept to the right of the frame to allow for text to be laid over the left of the image for the final layout.
