Simon Keitch Photography Blog

Tear-sheet from the new edition of Arts+Culture magazine featuring one my portraits of Devon based Anglo-Chinese artist Clem So. I blogged about experimenting with a Holga toy camera on this shoot at the time which can be viewed HERE plus here’s some more unpublished out-takes from the shoot below.

The new issue of Cycling Active magazine is on sale this week featuring my work on the cover from a recent cover shoot assignment for them plus a couple of  bike test features that I shot for them also. Outdoor sports cover shoots like this one can be a bit of a headache from a logistical perspective as typically there’s a long list of things that need to be pulled together and criteria met, and while I can organise most things the one thing I have no control over is the weather. Blue skies were on the list which are probably easy if you live in California but here in the UK they’re not quite so common plus we’re blessed with some of the most unpredictable weather in the world so you can never rely too heavily on the forecast. This shoot was originally planned a week earlier than the eventual shoot date; models, location, bikes, and clothing were all arranged but I woke on the morning of the shoot to heavy, dark, 100% cloud cover despite the original sunny/blue skies forecast so we had to postpone. A few days later we were hit with a heat wave and of course my models weren’t available… I couldn’t risk missing the window in the weather so a couple of emails were sent out and new models and location were found in Cornwall; weather was incredible this time without a single wisp of cloud in the sky, but it didn’t last too long with cloudy skies back a couple of days after so I was relieved to have gotten the shoot in the can. Big thanks to Bike Chain Ricci for all of their help and to cover model Chis Opie who can normally be found at his day job riding for the Pendragon/Le Col/Colnago cycling team.

I love any assignment that involves travel, but the truth is that I don’t normally get much time to take in the local culture when working on assignment. It’s sort of like a ‘taster’… And I do have a mental list of places I’d like to go back to with more time to explore and enjoy. Last week I was in Switzerland for a few days working on a magazine assignment and I did actually feel like I got to see quite a bit of the country; mainly thanks to the 300km drive from location one to location two through the Swiss mountains which made for a pretty interesting day.

Work location one: 32 degrees

Swiss motorway; beats the hell out of the M4

Hire car at 2478 metres above sea level at the Nufenen Pass and temperature now at four degrees

Quite a lot of snow still considering it’s June

View from the front of hotel two; back to hot with humidity thrown in for good measure

Room without a view

Big thanks to writer Andy McGrath (my travel companion for this trip) for shouting at me every time I drove on the wrong side of the road (hard to break that habit…).

View from the balcony; room 203 Classic Hotel Leysin in Switerzerland.

If you happen to find yourself on board a BMI Baby flight anytime soon you’ll see a feature in their Yeah Baby in-flight magazine’s current Summer issue that I shot for them on location at Watergate Bay near Newquay on the north coast of Cornwall a few weeks ago. The shoot happened to coincide with a short break already long planned at the Headland Hotel (location for the 1990 film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches) in Newquay on that weekend so when I got the email from the magazine’s Picture Editor I jumped at the chance to mix a little business with pleasure.

Despite visiting Newquay a few times over the years I’d never previously been to Watergate Bay just down the coast. It’s a pretty unique beach; very wide and completely flat; the sort of beach which which lends itself very well to kite buggying although there were none on the beach while we were there. As with most outdoor shoots the weather was a worry and we anticipated a disaster first thing as we woke to black skies and intermittent rain and of course the client wants blue skies. This time we got lucky though and the sky soon brightened with some beautiful diffused light coming through the early haze and the sky got bluer as the day went on. The assignment was to include portrait and documentary photography of the people either work or leisure on and around the beach including the team of RNLI life guards, Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant which overlooks the bay, and the surfers competing in the 2010 English National Surfing Championship. Big thanks to Yeah Baby’s Picture Editor Julia Holmes for assigning me, to Art Director Julia Murray for doing such a great job with the layout and image selection, and finally to Editor Ginny Cummins for being such good company on location and making the whole shoot seem easy.

Out-takes:

A tearsheet from the current issue of Runner’s World featuring a photo I shot for the magazine’s double page ‘Rave Run’ section. The location is on the north Cornwall coastal path near Bude (the GCHQ satellite base can be seen on the horizon on the right hand of the frame). We shot at a few different locations across the section of coastline until finding this spot which was about a half-hour hike from the nearest car park. I’m not normally a big fan of tripods but I had decided to experiment with shooting some panoramas to try and give a sense of the space and terrain. The final full pano featured below is a total of 14 vertical frames (shot with a 24mm lens); obviously the image had to be cropped to fit the full bleed double page spread format but it still provides a unique super-wide angle perspective plus lee-way for positioning within the page.

My first experiment with video; I bought a Nikon D90 a while ago for shooting video and as a (relatively) compact back-up body and this is my first attempt. The few things I’ve learnt while making this video so far include; editing video is really (really) tedious, syncing the vocal track is a complete pain, and I really don’t like being on that side of the camera. Clearly I have a lot to learn but I really like the cinematographic quality that you can get with the new HD-SLR bodies and although I don’t plan to make anything too involved I am thinking about the potential to produce some short vignettes if and when time allows.