We’ve been waiting to share this project for quite some time but needed to have all of its components complete before we felt happy with sharing it with you.

During the winter months Helen arranged to shoot two of our top UK athletes Kate Dennison and Martyn Rooney, both of whom have competed in two Olympic Games including Beijing and the amazing London 2012. Martyn has been our top 400m runner for quite a few years whilst Kate was  our number 1 pole vaulter. They are a couple outside of sport too which is why we thought this may prove to be a fun and insightful project to work with them on, and they agreed.

The shoot took place at Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium, where for most of the winter months Martyn was training hard in anticipation of the 2013 season still to come. Kate meanwhile has retired from competitive sport and is focusing on other aspects of her life within the work-related arena.

The aim of this shoot was for us to produce a sports-documentary focused project that features the athletes, their training, their personality, their relationship and their environment. As a secondary idea to the shoot we decided to design a small, promotional limited-edition booklet and poster which will be used for our own marketing purposes both from a photography and design point of view.

Helen’s interest in Sports Marketing imagery stems from her background in Athletics, she too has competed at a high level for Great Britain as a 200m runner, training at Loughborough University for many years and as a result has forged close friendships and relationships with some of the UK’s top athletes. Helen trained alongside Kate when they were both at Loughborough together.

When Helen first started thinking about freelance photography she was commissioned by Loughborough University to photograph many of the athletics stars who went onto compete in the Athens Olympics that year. Since then this side of Helen’s portfolio has grown but was put on hold when Notworkrelated formed and along with David they ventured around the world for 15 months. The impact Notworkrelated is having on Helen’s professional practice is obvious when most of her commissions come in the style of lifestyle and documentary photography.

‘I tend to shoot more lifestyle and documentary work with people than ever before and I really think this is down to the travel and documentary side of my portfolio. It has also made me think differently about the way I photograph people. I am interested in sharing something personal about someone and what I love about photographing athletes is I know what they are going through. I think there is so much behind the scenes that is so exciting to document it’s just unmissable stuff for me.’

I wanted to shoot a sports related project without any client pressure or demand and with David joining me as another photographer on the shoot I felt we’d be able to get something gritty out of it, a raw and natural shoot that portrays something about Kate and Martyn, their relationship to sport, to one another and to their environment. We had free reign of the venue and amazing light all day so it worked in our favour to play and create what we wanted to. The empty stadium just adds a further atmosphere to the overall feel of the shoot, usually packed with spectators when they are in competition mode, but silence ensues when the training happens, there is more time to think, more time to analyse and enough space to distance yourself in those quiet moments between step-runs.

It was only when we were editing the shoot that we felt we really had something we wanted to share with people, and between us we brought together a limited edition booklet and poster designed by David.

‘The booklet and poster uses geometric design, utilising a repeated grid structure for the photography and typography layout. This adds form and hierarchy to the overall design. Gill Sans, a sans-serif  font, created in the late 1920′s was used for its clear no-nonsense approach and modernist values.  The front and rear of the booklet uses simple geometric shapes to represent speed, rotation, movement and the competitive need to participate and win. Iconography illustrations represent each sport with simple shapes, lines of movement and colour.’

We wanted to produce something a little different from your average marketing piece by injecting our personality into it, Kate and Martyn have their profile’s as athletes and we have ours too. Because Helen has got personal records as a former athlete it was easy to document her events and add this to her profile, for David though we wanted to add something different so his event is ‘Getting up each day’ and he’s working on his P.B!

We’re really proud of this body of work and as a project that shows what we can both do when we work together combining our photography and design skills, and we do this whether it’s work-related or not.

David has since been commissioned by Martyn to design his new website and Helen recently photographed the UK’s number 1 male Squash player for an editorial feature.

As part of our own promotion we gave away 5 limited edition booklets and posters through a recent blog post with our friends The Printspace.

In case you’ve been out of the country or have had your eyes and ears shut these past few weeks, London has hosted the 2012 Olympic Games and what a fortnight it has been. The coverage has been pretty immense and both through the television and radio waves and we have been hooked. Inspire a Generation…Inspire Roscoe and Rutter too!

We were lucky enough to get our hands on some Olympic tickets for London 2012 thanks to the Roscoe parents putting in a successful bid for the first night of Track and Field and we also picked up some tickets for the Women’s Team Foil Fencing event taking place at the Excel Arena.

It has to be said that we loved our Olympic experience. Starting with the fencing, which neither of us have any prior knowledge of we just liked the thought of getting to one of the lesser known Olympic sports. En-route we were greeted with Thai tourists eagerly anticipating one of their top table tennis players, always drawn to a group shot we couldn’t resist sneaking one there and then.

In the Excel arena Boxing, Judo, Table Tennis and Badminton were all taking place with more events going on there in the second week of action. Within the fencing competition we saw lots of competitive action too and Team GB were out in force attempting to go through the rounds. Fencing is tough to follow but we could tell who were the favorites  through the rounds with Italy and France having the most International support in the crowd. Happening in the Excel arena that day also saw an epic Judo silver medal from Team GB’s Gemma Gibbons, so there was a lot of buzz at Excel throughout.

The next day we were so excited to be taking our turn at the Olympic Athletics Stadium accompanied by Jan and Den (Helen’s parents). We’d been staying in Bromley for a few days and were very pleased with the transport links, the underground ran smoothly all around central London and the free Zone 1-9 railcards which came with the tickets were well used. For our final night we opted to camp with the parents out in Theydon Bois. A campground that is right next to the train station and a 25 minute ride to the Olympic Park. Perfect.

Once we were in the Olympic Park we were greeted by a pretty slick security procedure and thousands of people doing the same, so another thumbs up on that side of things too. The amount of people in the park was amazing, quite overwhelming and the buzz was so exciting. We managed to explore the park pretty well walking towards and around many of the other sporting venues finishing our stroll in Park Live where a large double sided screen attracted even more thousands of people checking out the action in the velodrome. For some people this was where they would watch the action from. Perhaps our biggest criticism about the park was that they could have done with more screens around as there were big queues for getting into Park Live, which at peak times operated on a one-in-one-out basis.

At 6pm we made our way to our seats in the Olympic Stadium, spotting Catherine Merry on the way in doing her bit for Five Live Sport. We were quite high up in the stadium with seats pretty much opposite the 100m finish. After the initial excitement and photographs of us in there surrounded by nearly 80,000 others doing the same we started to enjoy the action. Greg Rutherford was going in the long jump qualifying, little did we know we were watching a champion in the making and also Jess Ennis competed in both the shot put and 200m as part of her Olympic winning performance. It was all quite overwhelming at times and Helen had to fight back a few tears each time the roars from the crowd got behind a home athlete, especially Ennis, she is a little star!

We also saw the 100m qualifying rounds which saw race after race go under 11 seconds, fast!! The women’s discus qualifying took place and the men’s shot put final saw the heavy weights in action with the finishing event being the light-weights in the women’s 10,000m final. Never has a stadium applauded such an event on the first night of action. Jan and Den were in Athens and Beijing and were astounded by the support.

Our biggest annoyance was the use of music whilst competitors were trying to achieve their physical peak performance. Music pumping straight into the audience was just a little too much at times when trying to concentrate on a certain event. We appreciate that they were appealing to the mass audience who want to see a show, and perhaps this compensated a little for the price of tickets…who knows, surely the athletic performance is a show enough in itself? And why Ben Sheppard was there…it’s not X-Factor, this is the Olympic Games!

Taking this aside we were thrilled with our Olympic experience and wanted to go again and again to support the athletes from around the world, competing at the highest level. This is something to be admired and we felt proud that the British pulled off a fantastic games, a wonderful Olympic Park and look at where we finished on the medal table, fourth, wow! Not bad for a country of 60 million!

In September we’re back in the Olympic Stadium for the Paralympic closing ceremony and in between we may try to sneak in a few tickets for Paralympic action, which is set to have more of a following than in any other Paralympic Games in history.

The day started with rain, so we packed up and drove back into Queenstown where we stocked up on some food from the supermarket and the Mediterranean Market on Robins road. They stock loads of international goodies too but it’s all a little too tempting so we settled with what we needed and got out!

The drive to Te Anau took around 3 hours and when we arrived the weather was looking much better. Our first stop was at the DOC office where we bought a $2 leaflet highlighting all of the half and one day walks in the area. As we don’t have the best backpacks for hiking we didn’t want to go out on one of the classc 3-4 day walks, which would have been really good.

The most popular tramp in New Zealand is the Milford Sound Track and we knew when we arrived in Auckland back in November that there wouldn’t be any space for this hike until March. The Routeburn and Kepler Tracks are really popular also and so we do vow to complete one of these great walks when we return to New Zealand in the future. (This has already been decided!) From Te Anau we booked a kayak tour of the Milford Sound departing on the 17th, meaning we would have a few days to explore Fiordland and do a few hikes.

That afternoon we hiked at the end of the Kepler Track for around 3 hours which took us to the last hut on the walk, the Moturau Hut. We stopped for a few pics before sand-flies ascended upon us and we turned around quickly to head back to the van. We camped that night at the free DOC campground located at Queens Reach. After finding a pleasant spot to camp amongst the many other campers we cooked our meal and enjoyed an evening of food and Peep Show.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f/2.0, Leica 90mm f/2.8, Zeiss 18mm f/4 ZM processed in Lightroom 3)

We went out for a bike ride with one of the Chinese girls’ Sylvia who was staying in the dorm with us, she was friends with another of the girls working at the hostel. It was good to have her with us as she could help us to find our way by asking the locals which way to such and such a place. She wanted to go to a specific village called Xixhou which is about 20km away from Dali old town. We wanted to cycle through some of the villages closer to the lake so we could explore the farmland, the most direct way would be to cycle along the high way for the entire ride but that’s no fun, so we compromised and spent some time cycling to the villages and some time catching up and taking the highway to the furthest place.

The farmland in Dali is very lush and extremely beautiful to photography. During our stay in Dali the sky was a perfect blue and it was a very comfortable temperature indeed, only being cold in the shade. By night it dropped significantly but we had electric blankets to cope with this!

So we took in the scenery around us, some farmland, some lake and some road. It was stunning. We got to Xixhou at around 3pm and ambled through the village market before stopping for some very good value soup rice noodles. For 3 of us to eat it cost around £2.80, and the food tasted really good. The only bad thing was a local guy pestering us for left over food and drink, he wouldn’t leave us alone and eventually got what he wanted. Still the setting took us away from this. We continued out of the village and took the road to some older parts of the area. Once more fantastic views, terraces and buildings surrounded us.

We decided to make our way back at around 4pm and set off for Dali. We were going quicker than Sylvia on her lady-like bike so we waited for her every so often, plus the drivers on the road aren’t the most reliable often overtaking two cars in one go so we wanted to make sure we were all with us. When we got back Sylvia joked about how fit we were compared to her and she said she’d only ever ridden a bike once before in her life. Considering this fact she did very well indeed.

When we got back we ate at an Indian restaurant down the road from our hostel and enjoyed more chai. Back at the hostel there were a few more travelers, Helen got chatting to Jane who she’d seen at various other places around China. It’s very easy to bump into people when you use Hostelworld for recommendations on where to stay. Many people also choose to travel through South China from Vietnam as it’s a good route and the weather is pretty good in Yunnan.

So it was our last night in Dali and we really loved the town and the hostel had a nice vibe too. We decided to nip back to Bakery 88 the next morning to get some take-away sandwiches with very good cheese and meat! Yum!! We also sneaked in a few more granola slices.

The bus back took the scenic route as part of the highway was closed but this wasn’t a bad thing as it meant we got to drive through some more beautiful countryside and villages. It was quite a luxury bus with only a few of us on board, and we got back to Cloudland at around 7pm. We had some food, chatted away and got ready for our flight to Guangzhou the following day.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)

Having had a great experience with the Chinese Cultural Center last week on the Great Wall of China hike we booked up another tour for the Silver Mountain and Pagoda Forest which are about 1.5 hours out of Beijing at a cost of 250 RMB each. We arrived early as usual due to not knowing how bad the traffic would be and relaxed with a coffee and green tea. Our comrades for the day arrived and we began introducing ourselves and making friends before heading off in the bus. Upon finally arriving at the village (a driver even in China without a sat-nav is useless) we headed for the hills with enthusiasm ready to stretch the legs and get some fresh rural air in our lungs.

The CCC guide Michael was the friendly coordinator from last weeks trip so he lead from the front and we followed, not knowing he had only done this walk once before last year in the summer-time following someone else. Soon we were shoulder deep in thorny brittle branches climbing into the rocky hills. Our faith was intact and spirits high as we ambled onwards towards the blue sky, the scenery was very good and the Leica and Pen were working hard. Before long it became apparent that we were not on the right “path” and could well be on the wrong side of a very large steep hillside with no sign of the Pagoda Forrest destination. Mobile phones from the CCC guides began ringing and a few of the hikers were getting nervous, it had only taken an hour to get up to where we were and wouldn’t take long to get down. Midday had only just passed when we decided to head down and get the bus to the Pagoda Forrest where the CCC would pay for our entrance fees. Whilst waiting for the bus we got to know the locals and their donkeys, ate local produce and drank coffee. These trips are a great way to meet fellow travelers and we got chatting to Dave and Chris from the UK and Jen from California, lovely people!

The Pagoda Forest loomed from the bus window and we proceeded to have a look around the site. The guide gave us 30 minutes to have a walk around, but this was clearly not long enough and feeling like naughty school children cheated by our previous adventure we headed into the hills to get to the top vantage point. It was worth all the steps to get there as the views were great. The eight renegades made it to the bus 30 minutes late but all was fine and we had a group photograph with everyone on the trip. The CCC offered us 100RMB each refund for the trip so that eased the pain of a tour that failed to match the Great Wall visit.

Helen’s friend Lizzie in the UK has a sister working in Beijing; Jess, who we organised to meet with later that evening, so after a quick freshen up we headed over to meet her at The Bookwork followed by a lovely meal at a nearby Yunnan food restaurant. It was lovely catching up and chatting away.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)