Simon Keitch Photography Blog

I photographed HTC-Columbia cycling team member Mark Renshaw for the latest issue of Cycle Sport Magazine; a super-quick speedlight portrait in a very cramped hotel room just prior to the team presentation at the Tour Of Switzerland. I arrived on location at the team’s hotel with Cycle Sport staff writer Andy McGrath nice and early so we’d have plenty of time to scout the location and work out a shot-plan. Unfortunately HTC-Columbia were staying at what must be the only hotel in Switzerland without a chocolate-box view; just a motorway and some pylons… Any options we did have ultimately went out the window though after meeting with the team’s PR, who initially had some trouble tracking down Mark and eventually found him on the massage table in his room. ‘Do we have any time constraints?’ we asked the PR. ‘No, none at all. Oh, but Mark has to be on the team bus by 7:15PM’. A glance at our watches reveals that it’s already nearly 6:20PM… By the time the interview is wrapped up and Renshaw climbs off the massage table I realise that there’s no time to move outside so I grab a Nikon speedlight and a Lastolite Ezybox softbox and move into the small space left by the soigneur as he kindly folds up the massage table and moves it to one side while Mark grabs another top to wear. Ran through a few different expressions/options before Mark apologised for not having more time and legged it out the door for the Tour of Switzerland team presentation. Mark Renshaw can currently be seen leading out Mark Cavendish at the Tour de France and is widely regarded as the best lead-out man in the business; it’s a tough career decision to forego your own success and personal glory however and it’ll be interesting to see if he does eventually step up to winning races for himself.

The new issue of Cycling Active magazine is on sale this week featuring my work on the cover from a recent cover shoot assignment for them plus a couple of  bike test features that I shot for them also. Outdoor sports cover shoots like this one can be a bit of a headache from a logistical perspective as typically there’s a long list of things that need to be pulled together and criteria met, and while I can organise most things the one thing I have no control over is the weather. Blue skies were on the list which are probably easy if you live in California but here in the UK they’re not quite so common plus we’re blessed with some of the most unpredictable weather in the world so you can never rely too heavily on the forecast. This shoot was originally planned a week earlier than the eventual shoot date; models, location, bikes, and clothing were all arranged but I woke on the morning of the shoot to heavy, dark, 100% cloud cover despite the original sunny/blue skies forecast so we had to postpone. A few days later we were hit with a heat wave and of course my models weren’t available… I couldn’t risk missing the window in the weather so a couple of emails were sent out and new models and location were found in Cornwall; weather was incredible this time without a single wisp of cloud in the sky, but it didn’t last too long with cloudy skies back a couple of days after so I was relieved to have gotten the shoot in the can. Big thanks to Bike Chain Ricci for all of their help and to cover model Chis Opie who can normally be found at his day job riding for the Pendragon/Le Col/Colnago cycling team.

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.

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 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:

Swiss rider Fabian Cancellara took his third World Championship jersey today when he won the 2009 World Time Trial Championships by an incredible 27 seconds over the Silver medallist Gustav Larsson of Sweden; Cancellara showing once again that when on form he’s unbeatable in the discipline. I thought I’d take this opportunity to pull a few unpublished photographs from my Procycling Magazine cover shoot earlier in the year; a much tighter cropped alternative photo from the above set-up ran double page spread in the original interview but this one and the two out takes below have never been published or publicly shown previously. Fabian was a pleasure to work with and a true gent, he even went back to his hotel room to find a team jersey to wear for the shoot when the team management didn’t deliver one to the location (a not so glamorous but very large conference room in the team hotel’s basement) as arranged.

I made these portraits of Frank Schleck back in January this year while on assignment for Procycling Magazine. The Saxo Bank team were based in a hotel on the Spanish island of Mallorca for a week long team training camp; their first of  the year and their first with the new Saxo Bank sponsor, also their first on the new bikes supplied by Specialized. I was on location with staff writer Ellis Bacon primarily to photograph the Swiss Olympic and former World Time Trial Champion Fabian Cancellara for the cover of the March issue, but as part of my brief was also asked to photograph the other riders and team management (including team owner Bjarne Riis who accompanied the riders on the final day’s training ride) on a more casual basis wherever possible for the magazine to keep on their stock file. I really love the above image – so much so that I have a framed print on the wall above my desk – but as far I’m aware it’s never actually been published. I asked Frank if I could take his portrait as the riders were getting themselves organised outside their hotel and next to the team truck one morning, and he instinctively took off his jacket so I could photograph him in his Luxembourg National Champion’s jersey (Frank lost the title later in the year, but to his younger brother Andy so it’s still in the family); it was first thing in the morning and the sun was still behind the buildings surrounding the town-centre hotel, which provided a really beautiful soft ambient light; as much as I love lighting my portraits (which is a big part of my style) it’s important to recognise those times when adding strobe light will actually detract from the image (Annie Leibovitz wrote in her At Work book that “I’ve never been able to make strobe light look as beautiful as natural light”).

With the images now delivered and my legs starting to get back to normal it’s time I blogged about my assignment last weekend for Men’s Fitness Magazine and EnduranceLife.com.  I arrived on location at Port Isaac in Cornwall at 9:30PM last Friday to meet the Endurance Life crew at the starting point of the Classic Cliffs 57 mile (91KM) Ultra-Marathon; the milage alone doesn’t do the epic nature of the course along the coastal path of north Cornwall and Devon justice however so click HERE to view the profile/elevation drop and gain. I’d been assigned to cover the race for the event organiser Endurance Life, and Men’s Fitness Magazine who had entered a two man team into the race; twin brothers Nick and Steve Tidball of Vollebak who will be writing about their experiences in the next issue. The race got underway at midnight and the overcast skies made for zero visibility although it was relatively warm at least and the storms seemed to have blown over by that point. Boscastle was my first stop on the route at the second checkpoint at 13 miles into the race; one of the race marshals guided me up the steep path to the top of the cliffs above Boscastle and as I struggled to stay on his heels with 30lbs of camera equipment at 1 o’ clock in the morning I knew I’d be worse for wear come tomorrow. From this vantage point I could see the headlamps of the runners appear from far on the horizon and then slowly make their way towards me; a large group came through at one point and the cluster of bobbing lights gradually moving nearer was strangely beautiful.

The inky black darkness of the night doesn’t make for great photos however so I was glad when the sun finally started to come up and give me a little light to work with. The cliffs above Widemouth Sand provided some amazing views of the cliffs and surrounding hills although by this point in the race the competitors were already starting to get very strung out which meant a lot of waiting, and unknown to myself at that point one of the two-man Men’s Fitness Team had dropped out at sunrise with a foot injury. Fortunately one of the marshals eventually caught up with me and relayed the information, and so I packed up and moved on. I later caught up with Nick, the remaining Men’s Fitness team member at the Devon and Cornwall border and shadowed him through the next two valleys.

Hartland Point; the 50 mile checkpoint was my last stop along the course; the coastal path starting to flatten out a little by this point (relatively at least) although many of the competitors had dropped out by this stage due to either injury or fatigue. I hiked up to the top of the cliffs and sat in the long dry grass looking back towards the bay and waited for the runners to come through on their way to the checkpoint below. It was 14 hours into the race at this point and being a sunny Saturday in July there were plenty of tourists around, looking over at me curiously and a few stopped to chat; amazed that yes, they’re running 57 miles, no not cycling, on the coastal path rather than the road, and all in one day.

Final stop was Clovelly; a beautiful but odd Devon fishing village built into the (very) steep hillside; access to which can only be gained via a large gift shop and laying down nearly six pounds per person; essentially the Disneyfication of the archetypal fishing village. No motor vehicles are permitted within the village and any haulage required is done by donkeys that pull sleds up the steep cobbled alleyways; although for tourists who feel unable to walk the half-mile from the car park down to the sea there is a Land Rover bus service available which presumably circumnavigates the village itself. While shooting runners as they arrived at the finish I set up some lights and photographed Nick from the Men’s Fitness team as soon as he arrived; he looked (disappointingly) good for having just run 57 miles and been up for 40 hours and counting by his brother’s estimation. I shot a few more frames of Nick and Steve and some of the other competitors before deciding I had everything I needed, packed up and hiked back up to the car for the coast-to-coast drive back home; I arrived back almost exactly 24 sleepless hours after I left, exhausted but happy with my take.

Above: Nick Tidball – Men’s Fitness Team – 57 Mile Portrait

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.