Simon Keitch Photography Blog

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:

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.

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.

As I mentioned in the last post here, I recently photographed the Inov8 sponsored adventure racer Alli Northcott for an interview in the current issue of Shred West magazine; I met Alli while shooting an adventure race for the event organiser Endurance Life and had already briefly discussed the possibility of meeting up for a photo-shoot at some point so it was a happy coincidence when the editor of Shred asked if I could shoot an outdoor environmental portrait of her for an interview in the next issue. The wheat-field location in the image is just a few feet from my front door and is somewhere that I’d had in mind for a while for a portrait, and it was ultimately chosen for this assignment as we live within just a few miles of each other and Alli’s heavy race/work schedule dictated that the location would have to be close to her home (we ended up doing the shoot very early one Saturday morning, not long after sunrise – we got lucky with the weather…).