This was one of the most ambitious perosnal projects I have done. I wanted to create a series of images of people running in urban environments, and to make the city a real character in the shots. I wanted to give the feel that the city is just as specatacular and varied place to run through as the countryside.

 

To make the city look as good as possible I wanted to shoot the images at either dusk or dawn for the great light, and to shoot in a wide variety of far flung locations, and so to avoid having to take a crew of people out to different places at 5:30am I shot all the backgrounds first, using myself or an assistant as a stand in for lighting reference, and then shot all the runners separately in the studio.

For the studio shoot I hired a treadmill, which meant I could not only light the exact spot that they would be running on to perfectly match the background image, but I could take hundreds of shots of each runner, rather than getting them to run through the shot, take one photo, and have to reset.