Autumn is in the air and the landscape is changing rapidly, with the Alps currently looking near their finest. I had a clear schedule this weekend so I set myself the challenge of capturing myself in an action self portrait. Wanting to keep things in Switzerland, I found three locations that all offered something a little different aesthetically. This first image was taken at the highest point of Villars ski resort, just as the sun was setting on Friday night. Despite being one of the first stops of the weekend, I think this came out as my favourite shot.Saturday came around and I ventured just across the valley to the Portes du Soleil. All of the images in this blog post are self portraits, with a tripod mounted camera being triggered by a pocketwizard remote (look closely at the images and you can see one in my hand). Using a fast frame rate I was able to work around my shortcomings as an athlete, including having a goofy running stance, belly hanging out (which is very easily done in Compressport), or a horrible gurning face. It also meant that I could capture sequences that didn’t quite work out. Like this one.
This second day almost had an English Lake District type feel to it, with the terrain working perfectly as camouflage for my feline companion.
Sunday was all set to be a down day, so I didn’t expect to get much from it. Waking up to a blue sky but with the threat of the afternoon closing in, I quickly made my way right to the edge of Switzerland to the spectacular Emosson dam. I’ve been up here once before to Photograph an 80km trail race and was blown away by the views. Ideally I would have ventured higher up into the mountain range but time and weather was not on my side. It’s funny how I had to hike for about an hour on the first two days, whereas the dramatic views of Emosson were 5 minutes above where I parked the car…
So there we have it, 3 days of shooting and a couple of different results. All of the images carry a slightly different vibe, but as a group go to show of how beautiful Switzerland is right now. With the colours starting to pop, it makes me want to stay outside all day everyday.As soon as those first snowflakes start falling the trails will all be over until next year.
Category: News
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Capturing Myself
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Insights
Insights is a new area of Tim Lloyd photography that runs parallel to this blog and my main portfolio site. Regular viewers of the blog might have seen the new menu on the top right of this site, with the new microsite being live now for a couple of weeks. The idea to introduce an Insights area to the site came to me whilst out shooting the 2014 Tour de France. With an extremely large event of this nature large amount of images are captured, with often only a handful of finished images making their way out to the various media outlets. What the new Insights aims to show is my projects in a new light, with a large number of images being used to illustrate a certain project.
The race proved a perfect area for introducing this new section, See the finished results here, as the 9 stages that I attended each had certain features that would differentiate them from every other stage. Rather than being fed a string of images that all look similar to each other, the viewer is instead taken on a journey that travels from the teams through to the action.
With interactivity at the heart, the viewer has the ability to navigate between projects checking out images, quotes and full screen galleries from each stage. Rather than just seeing one or two shots from each day, there is now much more work to check out encompassing a range of formats from lifestyle to action.
The Tour de France was a perfect launchpad for this Insights microsite, and as more suitable projects are completed, they too will be added to the site. In the meantime, i’d love to hear some thoughts on the site. Let me know your opinions, they’re always great to hear.To head over and check out the new Insights then just click here. -
The Peloponnese
I was sat down at my desk this morning when i noticed that my window was leaking due to the incessant rain that Switzerland has been experiencing this summer. In amongst trying to cure the leak I was reminded that it rained for 24 consecutive days in July. Now thats a statistic for the pessimists amongst us.
Luckily for me, I recently escaped this gloom and headed over to The Peloponnese in Greece for a couple of weeks. Staying just on the tip of the Greek mainland, the daily routine centred around the ocean, venturing off for some great excursions under some stormy skies.
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First Week of Le Tour
What a roller coaster the first week of this years Tour de France has been. I made the journey up to England for one of the most incredible weekends of cycling for Le Grand Départ. Managing to get out on the bike myself, I relaxed under the blue skies, caught up with friends and talked over our predictions for the tour. Little did we know how much carnage would unravel over these first days. Whilst boarding the ferry, a cursory glance to the skies confirmed the change in weather. Long gone was the beautiful sunshine of the Yorkshire Dales, replaced by heavy rain to greet the riders for the infamous stage 5 and the cobbles. Chris Froome was to abandon early on, having fallen before even reaching the feared cobbled section. For the rest it felt like an exercise in damage limitation.The image above was from the Champagne region yesterday as we made our way to the stage. Not quite the picture postcard image that I had in mind whilst planning the first week of Le Tour, but quite fitting for how the race has so far panned out. With the mountains on the horizon, it can be sure that the second week will throw up many more twists and turns along the way. -
Roles Reversed – VO2 Max Self Portrait
I’m a big geek when it comes to sports performance. A vast majority of sports that I photograph rely on the human endurance capabilities, with trail running and the cycling grand tours really highlighting what professional athletes put their bodies through. Of course, any talk of cyclists and endurance often descends into the authenticity of certain performances (even more for me with a girlfriend who works in the anti doping industry), usually highlighted by dominant displays by riders such as Team Sky’s Chris Froome. Moving away from the “Armstrong Era” I like to believe that the these sports are coming to a period where the battles we see out on the course are down to physical shape with the strongest winning on the day.At the complete other end of the spectrum are the people like me. I also love to compete in endurance events, with trail runs over a variety of distances up to the 160km mark. Any question marks about my performances largely go unnoticed. A large part of that is down to the fact that i’m not very good. The dream is still there, of course, that come the last weekend in August i’ll be at the sharp end of the field competing with the best distance runners in the world as I descend into Chamonix with 168km of the UTMB course in my legs. I much prefer to shy away from the reality that is crawling over the line 20 hours since the winners, along with the 20,000 strong cheering spectators, have long since left.My VO2 Max was an eye opening experience. I’m not sure everyone would like it as a birthday present (geeks like me rejoice at this type of thing), but for performance analysis, along with training recommendations, I think it’s an incredible tool.Time to shift that 3.5kg of excess weight.Self portrait setup – Camera: Canon EOS 1D Mark IV – lens: Sigma 15mm Fisheye – Additional: Intervalometer to record image every 10 seconds, Manfrotto magic arm and clamp to hold camera in place -
Updated Portfolio – The Tour de Romandie
A new portfolio depicting two days of the recent Tour de Romandie is now available to view on my website (check it out here). With the cycling season now in full swing I wanted to approach one of the lesser known races to document some of the story behind the action. The Grand tours (The Giro D’Italia, The Tour de France and The Vuelta) have strict policies that sees the race route closed for hours before a stage with limited access to the riders. The Tour de Romandie on the other hand allows almost unrivalled access to both the route and the riders giving me an opportunity to cover a number of positions during the two days.
Britain’s Chris Froome came out of a Spring period with question marks over his head due to fitness concerns. All of this was laid to rest though as he showed a dominant prowess on the climb up to the Swiss ski resort of Villars leaving one of his main rivals, Vincenzo Nibali, in his wake. If this is a sign of things to come then we’ll have an electric Tour de France later in July.
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Freeride World Tour Portraits
I feel lucky to have an association with the Freeride World Tour. This season has been my third year working alongside the team, with a number of great relationships being formed along the way. Over the past year my workload has switched over to the junior Freeride Tour which runs parallel to the main event. Don’t be fooled by the name though. Despite them being classed as juniors, some of the skiing i’ve witnessed by them simply blows my mind.Verbier is the final showdown on the tour and like almost every event this season it was disrupted due to the weather. The juniors event went off without a hitch just over a week ago, freeing up my schedule for the main event that was postponed until this Saturday. I’d received an interesting commission from ESPN to shoot finish line portraits, keeping my back firmly turned to the action that was unrolling. With some of the riders crashing out and others elated with their results, there was a mixed bag of emotions shown in the above images.This marks the start of the end in terms of the 2013/2014 winter. Maybe it will be remembered as the winter of discontent by many. Sure it was a challenging one but productive nonetheless. With the changing of the clocks and the lengthening days i really can’t wait now for summer. -
Paris – Nice Kicks Off Cycle Season
I’ve spent hours this winter mulling over the 2014 cycling calendar, with the Paris – Nice proving to be a perfect starting point for a body of personal work that I have planned out around this years road cycling circuit. I have a pretty good idea of action related images that I’d like to photograph during this season, but the thing that excites me most is the lifestyle that you can capture along the way.Unlike the sport, you have little control over what lifestyle is presented to you, with each race or set of fans being unique to that occasion. Once you’ve witnessed the crazy carnival type atmosphere of the Tour de France, the Paris – Nice seems an almost quaint affair. The image above depicts a group of locals ascending Mont Brouilly towards the end of the fourth stage of the tour. Nestled in the vineyards of the Beaujolais region of France, this hilly top just 14km from the finish proved steep enough to really string apart the peloton.This type of cycling photography really is a lesson in preparation. With a round trip in the car of 7 hours it’s important to know exactly where you’re heading on the stage as the athletes only travel past you once (more often than not, all at once too). 7 hours in the car for two action images makes you start to realise how dedicated you must be to grow an action portfolio in this sport. I’m looking forward to mine growing though, along with capturing great lifestyle shots like the one above, en route. -
Getting Prepared
I’ve been running around this week trying to fit all of the little pieces together before i head off home for the Christmas break. Getting prepared included giving my camera bag a much needed spring clean of sorts, with me adding a Canon EOS 1D Mark IV to my lineup along with a Canon 1.4x Extender II to get a little additional reach from my lenses. The Mark IV version of the 1D has since been replaced by a newer flagship model (Canon EOS 1DX), but with finances to consider I opted for the “cheap” older edition. I can’t wait to get out in the mountains and put this camera to work.Speaking of mountains, the snow has finally arrived (again). Since skiing some early season lines back in November there has been no snow, literally nothing. An extremely cold and dry period fell around the Alps with December not seeing any precipitation, until now that is. Yesterday saw the tides changing and winter seems like it’s ready to begin. A word of caution has to go out at this stage. Despite everyones eagerness to get out there and catch up on the lack of early season opportunities, this unusual weather is about to cause havoc to the avalanche risk here in Europe. The recent conditions have been likened to the 2005/2006 season which saw a record 57 avalanche deaths in France alone. This excerpt taken from Piestehors.com sums it up,
Avalanche expert Alain Duclos cautions,
“we’ve not seen these kind of conditions for a number of years across the Savoies and Hautes-Alpes. The warm temperatures at altitude are unable to refreeze the snow on shaded slopes and this is coupled with a strong temperature gradient. Anything that falls on top of this layer will be particularly unstable.”
Just last week I was sat down for dinner with French photographer [lobo_button url=”http://domdaherblog.tumblr.com” bgcolor=”#fff85f” color=”#000000″ target=”_blank” label=”Dom Daher”] and we briefly touched upon the number of friends that have been lost to the mountains. “Too many” were the words that were mentioned. Lets make sure we all try to have a safe start to this season.
As for the start of mine, after a ski over in Chamonix tomorrow i’ll be heading back to the UK for some festive cheer, along with a couple of running races. Then it’s right back to the thick of things with the Swatch Skiers Cup over in Zermatt as my first port of call. Watch this space for updates along the way.
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New Look Tim Lloyd Photography
Tim Lloyd Photography just got a whole new look.With Autumn having come and gone and winter fast approaching, I thought that this would be the best time to roll this out.Having been working on this for the last few months, I’m excited to announce my newly designed website for Tim Lloyd Photography. Working in conjunction with the guys over at APhotoFolio, I’ve managed to build a HTML 5 website that is optimized to work across all devices, from desktop computers to iPhones. Along with its fresh new look, the website includes user-friendly navigation with several drop down menus. These menus lead to an array of new images and a whole host of previously unseen work.Alongside the main portfolio, i’ve also started from scratch with my blogging platform in the shape of this WordPress blog. I did have a brief fling over at Tumblr, which i do plan to keep up-to-date, but found WordPress to be the more solid platform moving into the future.See below the attached screenshots, and don’t hesitate to tell me what you think of the site. I’m looking forward to the site growing with the portfolio developing over time.
