June 16th, 2010 § § permalink
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…).
June 8th, 2010 § § permalink
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:
