peSeta Cycling Caps video oddity

This is bonkers and rather good. What draws so many creative people to bicycles?

Brooks saddles campaign

This is good to see: proper, quality photography, with proper models, props and crew, and — one assumes — a proper budget (especially for post-production). Well done Brooks, it's refreshing to see a bike brand (albeit one that is extending its reach into the world of the hipster) taking its advertising message this seriously, and not cutting corners to get there. Bravo!

The campaign was shot by Frank Herholdt, more from Brooks at brooksengland.com

Vicious Velo Royal Wedding Day Ride

If anyone fancies joining us for 150km of Kent and Sussex Hills rather than staying in and fawning over a pair of toffs getting hitched, be our guest. Details over at the ViCiOUS VELO blog.

Spring schralp session

Second video in a week - impressive huh? The Rapha Condor Sharp video has gone crazy — 3000 views and counting, in three days. CRAZY!
Anyway, we thought we'd go and have a play around at making a video for our longterm test bikes at MBR. This is the result. I know the opening title is lame, but the sunshine does that sort of thing to people. I won't say sorry for that.
The rest of it is pretty nice though I reckon. Danny and Mick are really easy to shoot, I'm less easy — at least, it's less easy to make me look fast — which is why there's less of me in it. What do you reckon?

Rapha Condor Sharp at the Rutland-Melton CiCLE Classic 2011

On Sunday I got the opportunity to go and shoot video at the Tesco Rutland-Melton CiCLE Classic. If you've not heard of it, check out the vid below. It's a crazy race, that zig-zags across the countryside (the course looks like the organiser Colin Clews just dropped a ball of wool on the map) taking in all the worst, non-maintained roads in the area. So that means lots of farm tracks, lots of gravel and lots of punctures. I was following the Rapha Condor Sharp team round as part of my Condor tie-in. It worked out great as Zak Dempster won, although I'm sure he'd be first to say it was a huge team effort — every time you see them in the video, the men in black are on the front.

With any luck, I'll be doing more of the same at the Lincoln Grand Prix. In some ways it should be much less stressful as the course is a simple loop, so it should be easier to get around, plus, the full RCS team will be there, so I can — fingers crossed — hop in a team car and get some behind the scenes footage. We'll see.
Do me a favour though and "like", or just embed, the video above — the more hits this video gets, the more keen the team will be to want to do more!

Condor Catalogue, 2011

The 2011 Condor Cycles catalogue is available now, and it's jam packed with shots by me. The cover shot is one of my favourite shots ever. It was taken in Condor's Bermondsey warehouse last autumn with my Sigma 30mm F1.4 lens. A lot of the shots used inside the catalogue come from our trip Italy this February. There's a video from this trip coming out very soon - finger crossed. I can't wait to share it.

Forest of Dean weekend

We just spent a really relaxing weekend with our friends Al and Vic and their little boy Caleb staying at a Forest Holidays cabin in the Forest of Dean.

Obviously I took my bike and had a good explore around an area of the forest I've not been in before, and I took the opportunity to experiment and shoot some video. More than anything I wanted to try out some stuff with Premiere Pro with colour correction and creating pans using the software (shooting at 1080p and putting that into a 720p timeline). I've not tried slow-mo previously, but I think it creates the only real moment of comedy in this clip.