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.

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.