Tough Mudders

A good friend of ours hired me to photograph her sons birthday bash. No probs I said.

This was a brilliant and fun photo shoot. Although I hadn’t quite anticipated just how difficult a shoot it was going to be until I got there. This delightful muddy course is the Fitness Success Obstacle Gym, Wakefield Road, Oulton, Leeds, West Yorkshire. Their motto is ‘Think Outside The Gym’. Well, we were well and truly outside the gym, that’s for certain and for sure.

My task was to follow over 30 lads around the course and get some decent shots of the action. That was the remit. Simple right? Nope!
I didn’t have time to recce the site before turning up for the event, so getting into the optimum positions to get the prime shots was difficult at best and a veritable nightmare for the rest of the time, certainly when you consider the ground conditions. It’s not that I was particularly concerned about getting muddied up either, that much was a foregone conclusion. I was, however, much more concerned about my kit. If I had dropped my camera in the kind of mud that I was surrounded by for most of the duration of the shoot, it would have been the end of camera and lens. So slipping and falling in was not an option at all. To further compound the issue I was wearing trainers; an old pair, as I don’t currently own a pair of wellies, and for much of the course it very much felt like I was walking on an ice rink made of wet dough.

That said, I did manage to survive relatively unscathed with all my kit in tact, even though there were some hairy moments, and also managed to get some cracking shots of the event. It was a lot of fun to photograph to say the very least. In fact, a fun time was very much had by all.

Success Obstacle Gym’s Website: fitnesssuccess-obstaclegym.co.uk