This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 141
An unexpected start
I come from the ski industry, that was my beginning in photography. I was working in the United States in the Jackson Hole area for seven years and was solely a ski photographer. Three years ago, I got into cycling and started doing some smaller ultra-races on my own. In 2023, I went and rode the Silk Road Mountain Race and the transition from that into shooting it came as a bit of luck: I’d signed up to race it again in 2024 and Nelson Trees, the organiser, called me four days before I was supposed to fly and asked, on a whim, if I would like to shoot it rather than ride it this year. I sprung out of bed. I was so excited reading that message on my phone. I wanted to race it but creatively, shooting it was one of the most exciting experiences to come my way. It’s a tight group of people who get to do that kind of stuff and it’s such a fun thing to shoot that most people want to stay with it if they have a place on the media team for these events. It went well so Nelson brought me on for the whole series and I’ll be going back next year too.
Riding an event before shooting it gives you a really intimate understanding of what it feels like. For me, I really enjoy these types of jobs where you’re more of an observational photographer. There are different moments that I’m looking for. It’s hard for someone from the outside to fully conceptualise what doing something this feels like for a lot of people. Every single day is the hardest day the riders have ever had on a bike, and then you have to do that ten times in a row. It’s amazing to be able to share a little bit of what that chaos is like and give justice to the incredibly culturally vibrant and stunningly beautiful place you’re in – it’s one of the best landscapes in the world. Nelson has made such a masterpiece of the route, he doesn’t just put things in there for the sake of making it hard. If it’s there it’s because it is something he really thinks you should see in your experience. Sharing that through photography feels really special.
Battling the elements
In terms of the logistics of planning how to shoot the event, there is a lot of car time. The motors end up covering far more than the 2,000km route because we double back so often. There are three control cars positioned throughout the race: lead of men’s race, lead of women’s race and mid-pack – the last one probably being the most difficult as it gets spaced out by days apart. If you get at the front then the story writes itself. I have the locations that ideally I would like to see the riders in and in this edition we got lucky because we lined up with where the leaders of the race were.
I was in control car two, mid-pack, but I felt lucky because we ended up shooting the front of the race in the most beautiful section with amazing light, because the front cars went to scout a hike-a-bike section to see what the conditions were like and if it was safe to pass. I got to hang out there at this camp at 13,000 feet. It’s a crazy place. There are sections you can’t access with a car because there are broken roads which were once passes for Soviet-era Kyrgyzstan. Sometimes we drive as far as we can and then we hike. This year there was a 30-kilometre hike-a-bike section that no car could go through, so some photographers ended up going there, camping for two days and shooting.
The conditions can be brutal: there was a lot of snow this year so I was fired up because I come from a ski photography background – I was in my element. Managing equipment is harder but I was familiar with that process because I know winter sports. You want to show those conditions though, because those are the rawest moments and the most challenging. The black and white photo of the man pushing his bike in the snow looks hectic – he was going up to the Arabel Plateau, where they returned to the summit three times in this year’s edition. Some people got snow every single one of those times.
I remember that moment so well – being there, and being freezing. It was the rawest I saw people, coming out of this huge valley that is one of the most remote sections of the route and they’d probably been in that valley for eight hours. For that to be the finale of that section felt crazy to me and I think it perfectly embodied the energy of the Silk Road Mountain Race. When people sign up for it, they are going to feel some variation of that.
A historical landscape
Kyrgyzstan has the most epic scenery you’ve ever seen. I’ve travelled a good bit now and nothing compares to it. When you pair it with this incredibly gracious culture that is, for the most part, really kind to visitors, that feels so unique. There are rules that you can’t ask for support from anyone during the race, but this old woman brought everybody into her house at the top of that Plateau and offered tea and bread, so all these cyclists were sitting in there. Another interesting thing to me photographically is seeing the old Soviet influence. You see that throughout and it sometimes feels like stepping back in time, especially when you’re in a very remote place and there’s maybe nothing around you that indicates where you are or what era you’re in. It feels like it could be 1980.
The kit list
I shoot on a Canon R5 system and I have two of them. It’s really important for me to have two bodies when shooting an event, as you’re often acting really quickly. I usually have one mounted with a tighter telephoto lens, and then one mounted with more of a standard or wide angle lens so that I can be shooting the riders from afar, and then once they’re near, switch to the upper body. I also bring a low light 50 millimetre – it’s more of a nice, people portrait lens and is also good to use in darker conditions. I carry a flash which I mostly use in daytime as I think it’s a bit too intrusive at night, but during the day it adds something if the light is going in the afternoon.
You need to be very prepared as none of your cameras will be repaired there if they break. You need plenty of battery packs as you’re having to deliver stuff in real time, editing on-the-fly, which means having power is really important. I also make sure to have a heap of storage and batteries, whatever I can charge when we are inside. It’s a super long day – sometimes we joke it is an ultra for the media too…
I try to go through all of the photos in the car and cull them as I always shoot a lot. I have to get them down from the thousands I shot that day and boil it down to my 20 selections for social media and sponsors, versus trying to work through a bigger set. I like to edit every single one by hand and don’t use a preset. That is hard, but it is good practice as a photographer, because on commercial jobs it’s easier to come back to things a million times and change them. At a race like this, you have to accept it and say ‘it’s good enough’ and trust your gut. We want to get it out of the door and tell the story people want to see.
