Simon Keitch Photography Blog

Issue 51 of Shred magazine is now available featuring my photos of British cross-country mountain bike legend and Giant Global Team rider Oli Beckingsale on the cover and illustrating the feature interview; I shot these images way back in the summer in Oli’s hometown of Bristol and it’s great to finally see them in print. Read on-line or order a good old fashioned hard-copy HERE or pick one up from any good UK bike shop.

These advertisements for the 2009 Fall/Winter range of jackets from Canadian mountain bike components and clothing company RaceFace are now running in UK magazines featuring photos that I shot a few weeks ago for the UK RaceFace distributor Silverfish.

I’ve been meaning to experiment a little more with the Holga 120N since I picked one up nearly a year ago; if you’re unfamiliar with Holga they’re a Chinese company that produce 120 film format ‘toy’ cameras that feature not only a plastic body but also a plastic lens; the cheap construction produces photographs that have a distinctive quality (or lack of it), plus you never know what you’re going to get back from the lab. I specifically ordered the Holga 120N as it features a hotshoe for mounting a flash, with the intention of hooking it up to some lights; there’s something pretty hilarious about plugging a Pocket Wizard radio transceiver into the hotshoe of a camera that costs less than £20 including shipping from China, and then syncing it with a 750 watt flash head and power pack… The frame on the left is (obviously…) from the Holga, shot on Kodak Tri-X 400 and straight out of the film scanner (no additional post production), while the right hand frame is from the Nikon D3. The subject is Devon based artist Clem So who’s a huge talent and was a great pleasure to work with; we got a lot of great images from the shoot so I’ll blog some more about my sitting with him in due course.

Update: finally got a decent scan of the Holga/Tri-X negative (the above was a lo-res scan straight from the lab); what a difference… You can really see the Holga weirdness on this; looks like something from a drunken dream.