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about experimenting with a Holga toy camera on this shoot at the time which can be viewed HERE plus here’s some more unpublished out-takes from the shoot below.

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…).

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.

I get a lot of questions about the kind of equipment I use on location, and although I’m not much of a gear-nerd I do find it interesting to see what other Photographers are using to get the job done so here’s a few details on the standard gear I use for most editorial and commercial work; additional equipment can always be hired as and when required but it’s rare that I have the need.

First up; good bags are essential. The LowePro Vertex 200AW has been my main bag for the past couple of years and I chose it because it was big enough to carry the essentials but small enough to meet the airplane carry-on requirements, while being relatively comfortable when walking or hiking despite the fully loaded weight of 20lbs. There’s also plenty of pockets for memory cards, gels, filters etc, as well as  a pouch for a laptop which easily swallows the 13in MacBook I have for working on location. In here is a Nikon D3, a bunch of Nikon lenses and SB800 speedlights, Pocket Wizard and Skyport radio transceivers for triggering the lights, a Nikon D90 for video and production stills plus emergency backup, and loads of spare cards, cables, batteries etc.

My second bag is a LowePro Magnum AW shoulder bag which holds my Elinchrom Ranger Quadra kit: two heads, one pack/control panel and two batteries, plus cables etc. The Quadra kit came in a lovely purpose made hard case which looks pretty slick but I didn’t find terribly practical so it all went into the Magnum which works great although I’ll probably need to re-think it when I eventually get around to picking up a second pack.

Lastly I have a Kata lightstand bag which I bought after way too many times struggling with carrying stands (I’ve noticed that the new Manfrotto stands neatly clip together but sadly I only have one of those at present…) and houses a whole load of various Manfrotto lightstands, boom arms, and Elinchrom, Photek, and Lastolite light modifiers as required. Also on stand-by are rolls of seamless, various reflective panels and a Manfrotto tripod (important to have a good tripod although I’m not a fan of using them generally).

Any questions please hit me up in the comments and I’ll respond as soon as I can.

Grant Jenness - Kodak Portra NC 160

I think that anyone who started out in the darkroom as opposed to Photoshop can’t help but romanticise about film to some degree; digital technology is so good now but it still lacks that tangibility of analogue. As well as having a very different look and feel to the images themselves the whole process is very different and as much as I love and have embraced digital photography, pushing a Compact Flash card into a slot just isn’t the same as loading a roll of film. I’ve been flirting with using film again for about a year or so after exclusively shooting digital for several years, but it wasn’t until late last year that I decided to start seriously using film again. I’d kept a casual eye out for a used Hasselblad for a long time – probably a couple of years – and with so many photographers jumping ship to digital there’s no shortage of used film cameras for sale at a fraction of the price you’d expect to pay for a pro level digital body alone, and I eventually picked up a 1994 – the year I left school! – 501C.

I’ve always used 35mm systems so medium format has been an interesting learning experience in itself along with the unique idiosyncrasies of the Hasselblad design. Square format, a waist level viewfinder – as well as the flipped view of the viewfinder screen which made me feel drunk at first - and manual focus all combine to provide a completely different way of working to my DSLR, but after the steep initial learning curve I’m enjoying the process as well as mixing cameras and formats; I get bored so easily that I’ve occasionally wondered if I have some degree of ADD, and I’m finding that chopping and changing between such different cameras and formats keeps me focused and creatively inspired. I’m hoping that some clients may ask for film for certain assignments but in the meantime I’m shooting film both for certain personal projects and alongside digital for assignment work where possible and appropriate and at the very least in those instances it’ll give the Art Director another option which is always important, and especially so I think with digital now being so ubiquitous. I actually read an interview with a gallery owner recently where they stated that although they believed that film doesn’t necessarily produce a ‘better’ (that is a subjective word of course…) print it does have a greater perceived value as it’s a disappearing medium. Food for thought.

Rob Clark - Kodak Portra NC 160

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.

I’ve been meaning to experiment a little more with the Holga 120N since I picked one up nearly a year ago; if you’re unfamiliar with Holga they’re a Chinese company that produce 120 film format ‘toy’ cameras that feature not only a plastic body but also a plastic lens; the cheap construction produces photographs that have a distinctive quality (or lack of it), plus you never know what you’re going to get back from the lab. I specifically ordered the Holga 120N as it features a hotshoe for mounting a flash, with the intention of hooking it up to some lights; there’s something pretty hilarious about plugging a Pocket Wizard radio transceiver into the hotshoe of a camera that costs less than £20 including shipping from China, and then syncing it with a 750 watt flash head and power pack… The frame on the left is (obviously…) from the Holga, shot on Kodak Tri-X 400 and straight out of the film scanner (no additional post production), while the right hand frame is from the Nikon D3. The subject is Devon based artist Clem So who’s a huge talent and was a great pleasure to work with; we got a lot of great images from the shoot so I’ll blog some more about my sitting with him in due course.

Update: finally got a decent scan of the Holga/Tri-X negative (the above was a lo-res scan straight from the lab); what a difference… You can really see the Holga weirdness on this; looks like something from a drunken dream.

I recently photographed the 2009 Tour of Britain winner, Norwegian cyclist Edvald Boasson Hagen of the Columbia team for an interview featured in the current December 2009 issue of Cycle Sport Magazine. Boasson Hagen and the Columbia team dominated this year’s Tour of Britain with Edvald winning four of the eight stages along with the overall win. At just 22 years old he’s an incredible talent and unusually quiet for a sprinter; the sitting was on location at a team hotel during the Tour of Britain so I only spent a few minutes with him, but he was very quiet, a little awkward and self conscious which I found endearing bearing in mind that he’s just signed a deal with the new Sky cycling team reported to be worth 2.5 million pounds.

And some out-takes that didn’t make the final article: