Mini Projects....

I've cycled for as long as I can remember and have always preferred off-roading to anything else. My first serious cross-country ('mountain-bike' is a relatively new term!) bike was a Silver Fox but I have to confess, I had no idea what constituted a good cross-country bike. All I knew was that it had grippy, chunky tyres that didn't puncture easily, and forks that were straight and wouldn't buckle when I threw it down hillsides ! I swear it was made out of scaffold pipes it was that heavy... So in recent years, there has been an explosion in MTB'ing and you can pay £££££'s for a machine which has similar technology as a motorbike ! But as with most things, i'm not too fussed about having the top kit so long as I get a cracking day out, i'll ride anything ! This started me off on a project photographing cyclists and their preferred methods of perambulation. I wanted to photograph anyone who cycled, at whatever level they could and set about meeting people to achieve this. The pic on the right is taken on the Spen Valley Greenway which is the old railway line made into a bridleway. Ironically, I used to ride my Silver Fox along it way before it was tarmaced over to get to the local woods. I set up some kit one day and haranged anyone kind enough to stop to get some pics. About 1 in 3 stopped and offered to pose, probably more out of curiosity than anything. I set up 2 bare metz's either side of the footpath and one above my camera firing through a brolly, all triggered by cheapo wireless transmitters. I really like the shadows of the bike created by the bare metz and have tried to 'build' this in to the rest of the portraits. The shutter speed is metered to give some depth to the skies and again, the intention is to keep that as a constant throughout the series. It can be a bit of a pain though trying to keep to a 'look' throughout the series as it is beginning to dictate how and where I shoot, but that said, I do like the purposeful-ness of it. The guy on the left replied to a poster that I pinned up in cycle shops across the area. I set up a mobile phone number on a PAYG sim card, knocked out some flyers with the phone number on and offered free prints for time taken and took them round local cycle shops who kindly displayed them for me. I met this chap at his workplace and he kindly showed me all the stuff he'd attached to his bike. The bike was overloaded with lights, speakers for his sound system, horns and was even converted to pull a trailer so that he could go shopping on it ! One word of warning, Hi-viz jackets are a nightmare to light/expose for as they are designed to be highly reflective!