Wednesday, April 27, 2011

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

Monday, April 25, 2011

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.
ViCiOUS RIDE POSTER2

Thursday, April 21, 2011

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?

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

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!

Friday, April 15, 2011

Condor Catalogue, 2011

Condor Catalogue, cover
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.
condor cycles catalogue 2011
101023Condor (14)

Monday, April 11, 2011

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.

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Contour GPS HD helmet cam

I've been after a helmet camera for a while and last week I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Contour GPS HD. It records in 1080p @ 30fps or 720p @ 60fps. It's small, it's pretty easy to use, but what about the quality?
I had a go with it yesterday out riding with Roo, and I was a bit disappointed with the colours, exposure and white balance. The raw footage from camera is the bottom video here — the colours to my eye are way oversaturated, and that's with the contrast reduced from the stock setting by about 20 per cent (you can do this in the software bundled with the camera). Check the vid at 4.08: purple gloves, orange frame and red grips, all way overstaurated.
The video at the top is my colour corrected version. I'm no expert with Premiere Pro — I'm still on the steep bit of the learning curve — but by dropping the saturation, altering the white balance, adding a bit of sharpness and contrast (with high radius unsharp mask) I think it looks a bit more natural.


You'll notice I come really close to crashing at the end of the video. Roo's a monster and had been beasting me around Surrey for 50km and nearly 3hrs by the time we got here. I was in pieces. Details of the ride on Garmin Connect.

Saturday, April 02, 2011

Ronde Van Oost Lancashire


Ronde Van Oost Lancashire, originally uploaded by Andy Waterman.
Had a great ride today in Lancashire on Alan Crossjunkie's rival to the Tour of Flanders, the Ronde Van Oos Lancashire. He's somehow managed to cram 1800m of climbing, countryside, and cobbles into an 80km ride. It was a long drive up there, but it was well worth it.