In September last year I headed to Spain for a few days on location at the Vuelta a Espana for Cycle Sport Magazine. As well as shooting portraits for a handful of interview features my brief also included shooting a 14 page photo feature - Vuelta Unseen – capturing some of the behind the scenes goings on and other moments not normally seen in the regular television and photo coverage. I’ve finally gotten around to making an edit from the huge number of photographs for a web gallery which you can see above or in glorious full-screen goodness at my portfolio site here: Vuelta Unseen Gallery
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.
Here are a few candid portraits of Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel from an interview with him backstage at the Plymouth Pavilions stop of the Black Procession European tour. I shot a mixture of film and digital during the interview with Rocklouder but these are all film scans; the digital images look great but the square format and grainy black and white film stock (Ilford Delta 3200) suits the candid documentary style perfectly I think, and I’ve found myself choosing this super-high ISO film stock and going with the available ambient light a lot more recently.
I first met documentary film maker Mark Kidel last Summer when he was in Plymouth to film one of my photo shoots with performance artist Francesca Steele – Mark is producing a documentary about Francesca’s bodybuilding performance piece ‘Routine’ – and we’ve met up a few times since with me turning the camera on him more recently. Mark has forged an amazing career producing and directing films on a broad range of subjects including artists as diverse as Ravi Shankar, Mario Lanza, and Tricky, was a founding producer of the groundbreaking BBC arts documentary series ARENA and even collaborated with Peter Gabriel on the concept for a world music festival that eventually grew to become the world famous WOMAD festivals. For more information about Mark Kidel’s work head over to http://www.calliopemedia.co.uk/
