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Holy Cowes, that’s quick!

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:22:13 +0100

In a desperate attempt to escape the non-stop rain storm that we call summer up here in the Lakes, I headed down to the sunniest spot in Britain for a week - the Isle of Wight - in early August, to shoot the most famous sailing event on the calender, Cowes Week. The attraction of this world class sailing-fest had been nagging at me for some years and then out of the blue, my publisher (sic) asked me if I would care to pick a great British sporting event to photograph as part of a new series of books on - well - great British sporting events. Without hesitation I picked...The Isle of Man TT. No, they said, we don’t think so. OK, then how about Cowes Week? YES - great idea, go for it. And so it was that I trundled onto the Southampton ferry with my camping trailer and camera bag on a warm Sunday evening feeling just very slightly deja-vue’ish because I was in fact born in Southampton but left at a very early age (1 year old i believe). It had been a long time. Anyway - the point of this ramble is not about my childhood but to write about how I am totally and utterly converted to awesome spectacle of Class 1 IRC Maxi’s and IMOCA racing yachts tearing up the Solent at unbelievable speeds. And even faster and every bit as spectacular are Extreme 40’s...the F1 racing bullets of the sailing world. Full carbon fiber catamaran hulls with huge state of the art rigs and a crew of 4 including a token celebrity, jousting around the racing marks not 200 meters of the beach, and for the most part planing on a single hull looking like they about to fall over - which they do sometimes; it’s quite a spectacle. And it makes great pictures. Colourful, fast and furious, full of beautifully graceful shapes and lines glinting and sparkling in the afternoon sun - what more could a sports photographer want? If there any would-be sailing photographers out there who haven’t been to Cowes Week yet, I urge you, book your place for next years event right now, you wont regret it. The book, by the way, will be on the shelves in early 2010 and I’ll be back on the IOW next year to do it all again. And maybe the TT too.

The North West Coastal Trail

Thu, 9 Apr 2009 21:00:54 +0100

Clearly, keeping a Blog on a regular basis, is a job for people with more time on their hands than me, as this is only the second entry I’ve managed to make in - oh, 5 months! Still, I don’t suppose it was missed. I’ve been kept busy over the winter months working on an interesting project documenting the North West coast from the Dee estuary to the Solway Firth. This is in preparation for the governments bill on open access to the entire English coastline for public recreation. Note “English” coastline - the Welsh and the Scots are presumably making their own arrangements. The brief has called for landscape and recreational images exploring the whole coastal region, highlighting the rich and diverse opportunities available but the most diverse aspect of all this for me has been the weather! It’s a constant source of mystery to me why so many photography projects are undertaken during the er, challenging winter months that we enjoy up here in the North West, but I believe it has something to do with annual budgets, tax periods and year ends. I can tell you that transforming a frigid and wind-swept northern beach into what might be taken for a balmy and delightful summers day, between lashing gales and driving snow is, in my humble opinion the true mark of a professional! Having said that, it’s certainly easier to do with seascapes than with landscapes. At least there’s no obvious foliage, trees and other flora to give the game away and in truth, when we do get those bitingly cold and crisp winter high pressures, the air is so clean and clear that seascape photography is actually very easy - as long as you’re careful to exclude any brave souls walking the dog, wrapped up as if for polar travel.

The sun is warming the land. Spring has sprung. So at long last it looks like I get to shoot some people doing stuff - walking dogs, riding their bikes along the proms, strolllng barefoot in the sand - that sort of thing. It’s been a long old job but the end is in sight - then what will I do? Actually I can tell you. In between the day-to-day bread and butter work I shall be doing a photo-book on Cowes Week, the Isle of Wight sailing festival. I bet there’s no wind!

Grizedale Forest Ace Race

Sat, 4 Oct 2008 12:14:43 +0100

Adventure racing is all about challenge; personal, team, situation, fear, time, ability, fitness and all the other challenges that you can imagine, not least the challenge of trying to camp in 6 inches of standing water. For me, shooting the Grizedale Forest Ace Race series in the Lake District, the challenge came in the form of rain - huge, copious, vast, floods of it. The event was off-on-off then on again only days before the weekend start and eventually many aspects of the original plan just got binned - there’s only so much risk you can put a competitor through in the name of adventure. Rain is the photographer’s worst enemy. How to keep the lens dry, the electrics working, the pictures sharp and the motivation going - these are the challenges of the outdoor photographer when the wind is blowing 50 mile an hour spray in your face.

Fortunately, I have a solution - kind of. I grabbed the big “golfing” umbrella from the back of the Land Rover, clipped a webbing belt around my waist and a cord onto the umbrella to stop it blowing away in the gale and shoved the brolly handle down the front of my jacket. Now I had a roof of sorts. At least it would keep the worst of the water off the camera as long as I kept my back to the wind, and I could still use two hands on the camera. Actually it worked pretty well.

The other great innovation that saved the day was my new Nikkor 18-200 VRll. With the ISO pushed up to 400 and the active VR working overtime, I could shoot reasonably wide to good telephoto without lens changes - a surefire way of getting everything wet. So I captured the racers struggling to make headway up Coniston Water in Sit-on’s with gusts of over 55mph, runners battling into the stinging onslaught and bikers braving the flooded roads. Finally, the abseil station at Hodge Close had a real surprise sting in the tail - a flooded divers tunnel to escape from the quarry bottom which involved wading through ice cold water in near total darkness! Yes, I went in and got the pictures - and yes I got wet, very wet.