Simon Keitch Photography Blog

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.

8:00AM meeting this morning: Bantham Beach, South Devon. Could be worse, although the only car park there charges a flat rate of £5 regardless of the length of stay! Man, those surfers must have a lot of cash; the place was crawling with them; it’s a big surf break apparently. Was at the beach for a shoot with the good guys at Endurance Life as well as a meeting regarding the details of a forthcoming insanely hard endurance event I’m shooting for both themselves and an editorial client (more on that later…). Bantham is just down the road from the Endurance Life office and provided a convenient outdoor backdrop for the staff photographs; while I enjoy working with a seamless for both corporate portraits and editorial portraits that wouldn’t have been right for a company based around coastal endurance/adventure racing so the beach location and overcast skies (just missed the heavy rain I’m glad to say; it started on my way back) made for the perfect background for the photos. Featured above is Endurance Life Financial and Technical Director James Barker, and below is Customer Service Director Gary Jolliffe.

Some photographs from a recent commercial photo-shoot at the Westmoor Veterinary Centre in Tavistock, Devon for their new brochure. The practice required commercial photos of the staff and premises to give a broad overview of the day-to-day running of the business and illustrate the depth of experience and facilities/equipment on hand. I love that photography takes me to places and gain access to things I’d never otherwise see and experience… I spent a half-day at the veterinary centre and got a brief insight into the workings of a vets’ practice and met some great people while also meeting (and hopefully exceeding) the client brief; made some great frames of the impressive equipment such as the big (really big) microscope above, through to consultations, surgery, and headshots of every one of the 19 employees and partners for their staff profiles. That’s a lot of photos…

I figure that I should probably make more of the fact that I shot the official photographs for the Olympic and World Champion’s own team earlier in the year so here goes. Nicole Cooke is one of the most successful British athletes of all-time, and the first woman ever to to win both the road cycling Olympic and World gold medals in the same year. I photographed Nicole and the Vision 1 Racing Team at a training camp in Italy earlier in year with very little time available and a lot of images required; we have the group photograph in team racing clothing with bike above, also without bike, in the sponsor’s (Nike) apres ride clothing below (again, with and without bike), and then the individual rider portraits both in race kit and casual clothing for a total of 22 portraits all wrapped up within about a hour to fit with the girls’ busy schedule. The images will be used by the team for the 2009 for PR and commercial use, including the team riders’ fan cards.

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.

Last week I shot a commercial fashion assignment for the Silverfish (UK bike/P&A importer) 2009 brochure featuring the 2009 Spring/Summer clothing range from RaceFace. It was a full day on location at Dartmoor capturing everything from the posed model image above to more candid lifestyle and riding images; a lot to squeeze into a single day but we came out a huge variety of images for the client to choose from for next year’s brochure, as well as the 2009 advertising campaign.

While at Newnham Park in Plymouth photographing round one of the Soggy Bottom Winter Mountain Bike Series last week I was also there to shoot portraits of the Shred cycling race team for their 2009 launch in the New Year. Trying to get these guys together in one place for a formal portrait shoot was always going to be akin to herding cats so it was decided to set something up on the race site and grab each rider before the event start. The weather was kind of miserable but the Newnham estate has these big open sided shelters for the clay pigeon shooting that the grounds are mainly used for, so we set up a field studio under one to keep both the gear and subjects out of the rain. I also shot some photo-documentary style images of the team which I’ll be doing some more of over the course of the coming season; below is team captain Steve Toze post race, removing a very sticky energy gel wrapper from his jersey pocket…                                                                                                                                                            

Yesterday afternoon I headed over to the Plymouth Pavilions where the Raiders basketball team were playing their first home game of the season, to shoot some individual portraits of the players as well as the game itself (Plymouth Raiders guard Allistair Gall featured above). The light was pretty bad in the arena and flash photography was completely banned during play which made it pretty tough to get the shutter speed up high enough to freeze the action (ISO 3200/f2.8 to get 1/500th!) but I came out with some good images and expect to get even better shots when the Raiders play their next home game against the Newcastle Eagles, now knowing exactly what to expect from the light etc (this was my first time photographing indoor sports, normally specialising in outdoor sports photography; I enjoy a new challenge and it was kind of refreshing not to have to worry about mud/dust/rain/sun…).