2026
Merida
Into Dust
There is a fortnight most summers when the Forest of Dean stops being loam and starts being dust. Trails that hold water for ten months of the year turn to powder, and every corner throws up a cloud that hangs in the trees long after the rider has gone. That is a difficult two weeks to book and an easy two weeks to waste, so when it arrived we went out with Jeremy Bigg and shot until the light went. This was a creative project for Merida rather than a commercial engagement.
This is a stills set, not video stills. Every frame here was made on a camera set up for photography — fast glass, high shutter, flash where the canopy killed the ambient — because a still image asks something different of a shoot than a film does. It has to hold up frozen, on its own, at whatever size a brand chooses to run it.
- Photography
- Forest of Dean
Shooting action that has to work as a photograph
Action sports photography lives or dies on anticipation. The rider gets one clean run at a feature before the berm blows out and the dust settles wrong, so the frame has to be decided before it happens: where the wheel breaks traction, where the dust will sit, where the sun will flare through the trunks. We shoot the trail on foot first, pick three or four positions, and give the rider a plan so nobody wastes a run.
Next it using texture. this was the whole gameplan for this shoot, dust this thick is rare in the UK (it normally rains too much) but this summer of '26 it build up like sand dunes. This was the mechanism we used here to convey movement, motion and power. Everything the bike is selling you on.
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