Contact Sheet - Geoff Waugh shoots Steve Peat

Steve Peat is the UK's best known mountain biker, but he has his own heroes; and that was the title of the feature from which this set of images evolved - Heroes for Heroes.

The commission brief was to take a shot of Peaty with a picture of his hero. Anyways, lucky for me Steve decided his hero is former champion motocross and supercross racer Jeremy McGrath; lucky because I had already shot McGrath and only had to print off an inkjet portrait and pop in it my bag. We decided an outhouse of Steve's Sheffield farmhouse would make the best location. As you can see from the first series I shot wide (12-24mm lens) from a ladder with Steve thrusting the print up at the camera. We laid out a racer jersey McGrath had given to Steve, along with Steve's Santa Cruz XC bike, and I left the other clutter in the frame to make it busy. (It is natural for people to want to clear up and make everything neat when a photographer is coming when very often we want the compete reverse!)

The following frames involved propping the bike up and fixing the print to the frame with masking type whilst adopted the various poses as instructed, and shooting with a 17-55mm lens at the wider end. The last frames are more conventional mid length to close ups which I thought the magazine would want for its files for use at a later date. I lit the images with my faithful old Quantum Q-Flash T2 heads which are still going strong after many a fall, and Pocket Wizard Plus II radio slaves. For the record the magazine ran one of the first images, and often that is the case...