So here we are already, racing towards the end of January 2015! Can someone please tell me where the time goes? I’d like to find it and kick its ass.

Have you taken a look around the new website yet? You’ll notice some huge changes to the layout and navigation, plus everyone now has the chance to purchase most of the images found on the site. If a picture is for sale then a little shopping cart appears above it in the toolbar. Clicking on it will give you options ranging from personal use downloads (maybe some art that you want to print and hang yourself), to Corporate Licenses for businesses and the media. Everything’s pretty straight forward I hope, but I’d definitely appreciate some feedback from you all at this early stage.

January is usually a quiet time for me and probably most photographers in the Northern Hemisphere, but thankfully there’s been enough happening to keep me busy. Two weeks ago, for example, the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten printed a massive full-page advert for the Nykredit Copenhagen Marathon, which you can check out below.

The full page Nykredit Copenhagen Marathon promo for Sparta

The brief for the picture was simple: get a few members of NBRO Runners to jog along Dronning Louises Bro (a wide bridge in the city centre) and make it look relatively empty of traffic.

I arrived half-an-hour early to scout out a decent spot where I could get high and look down on the runners. I even enquired in a few shops if it was OK to shoot from their upstairs windows. The answer was yes, but the windows wouldn’t open wide enough. So instead I reverted to plan B – a step ladder that I found lying abandoned in a stairwell. Remarkably I actually found the owner of the ladder in a restaurant and asked if it was cool to use it for 10 minutes. Like all Danes I meet, he didn’t give a shit and was only too happy to assist.

At 3:30pm the runners arrived and group leader Anders suggested they run right down the middle of the road. It was a daring idea but one I liked, so, with cars, buses and cyclists screaming past continuously, we got to work.

My assistant carefully held on to the ladder, which I had positioned on the central reservation along Nørrebrogade. Her instructions were to catch the camera first if I fell, and worry about me later. But with the light fading and the rush hour traffic increasing, time was against us and we had to work fast.

Taking ridiculous risks as usual to get the shot.

Every 30 seconds or so we were given a window of easy traffic as the lights turned red, so in those moments the runners got in to formation and started jogging towards me. Unfortunately there wasn’t a single shot without some kind of vehicle in the background, but I thought I could worry about that later. And within five minutes we were done.

Back in the lab I started the “fun” process of elimination, whereby I had to choose which picture looked best, despite most of them all looking identical. I eventually found one with just one van in the background and immediately got rid of it in Photoshop.

Next I did a few basic edits to the sharpness and contrast, before converting it all to black and white and then popping the colour back in to the runners. Funnily enough I usually take the piss out of photographers who do this, but on this occasion it actually seemed to work. I don’t know, you tell me.

You can see the full high res version of this picture in my Action and Sport gallery, so go and do that now, please.

Interestingly, you might like to know that I’m writing this in my cellar, because the cleaners have arrived – well, just the one today – and he’s taking his time.

Bye

P.S. The next Blog entry is gonna be a cheeky fairytale, so make sure you tune in next Wednesday!