Last week I met up with British professional cyclist Yanto Barker of Le Col/Colnago for a location photo-shoot to create promotional/commercial images of Yanto for him and his Le Col clothing company which will be launching later this summer. We shot the images at two remote locations on Dartmoor, Devon over the course of two evenings while the London based cyclist was back in Devon (where he grew up) briefly after riding the Totnes-Vire stage race over the previous weekend. We got a little lucky with the weather and found overcast but dry conditions at both locations and made the most of the perfect late-evening light augmented by a simple one-light flash set-up. We squeezed every last minute of light out of both days, shooting until well after the sun went down at both locations and got a good range of images from the full length cycling clothing with bike portrait above to the casual-clothed portrait below, as well as a good range of action photographs, wide-angle landscape and tight headshots combining to provide a versatile range of images.
As promised in the previous post; here’s a quick slideshow featuring some of my favourite images from the Alberto Contador cover shoot that I shot recently for Cycle Sport Magazine that didn’t make it to print.
The new June 2009 issue of Cycle Sport Magazine is now available from all good news agents featuring the portraits that I created for this cover story of Astana team rider and Lance Armstrong team-mate Alberto Contador; winner of the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, and Vuelta a Espana grand tours over a timespan of less than 18 months. The portraits illustrating the interview were all created on-location in a hotel on the outskirts of Contador’s home-town of Pinto; a small Spanish town about a half-hour or so drive from Madrid. With just 15 minutes agreed to by Contador for the photo-shoot the pressure was on but I managed to squeeze several different looks and a lot of options out of the extremely tight timeframe and limited location. While scouting the location at the hotel in Pinto I picked up an email from the magazine’s picture desk notifying me that as they were right up against the deadline, they would need the images on their FTP server by the start of business the following day… and the interview had already been bumped to 7:30PM meaning I was in for a late night. Fortunately I’d already checked into the hotel at the location as the writer I was with was to continue south to Granada immediately after we wrapped-up – leaving me to make my own way back to the airport for my early morning flight back to Gatwick – so I stripped down the equipment, grabbed some dinner and hunkered down in the hotel room to make the selects, post-production adjustments and retouching and transmit the finished images via the hotel wi-fi. I got a few hours sleep while the images were uploading, then checked-out at 6:00AM; my taxi already waiting for me in the dark outside the hotel entrance for the transfer to Madrid airport. The finished article and cover look great but as ever there were a lot of good photos that didn’t make it in so I’ll update the blog with a slideshow featuring my favourites out of the images that didn’t make it to print as soon as I can.
Last week I met up with British professional cyclist Yanto Barker of Le Col/Colnago for a location photo-shoot to create promotional/commercial images of Yanto for him and his Le Col clothing company which will be launching later this summer. We shot the images at two remote locations on Dartmoor, Devon over the course of two evenings while the London based cyclist was back in Devon (where he grew up) briefly after riding the Totnes-Vire stage race over the previous weekend. We got a little lucky with the weather and found overcast but dry conditions at both locations and made the most of the perfect late-evening light augmented by a simple one-light flash set-up. We squeezed every last minute of light out of both days, shooting until well after the sun went down at both locations and got a good range of images from the full length cycling clothing with bike portrait above to the casual-clothed portrait below, as well as a good range of action photographs, wide-angle landscape and tight headshots combining to provide a versatile range of images.
