I'm a freelance photographer, normally based in London but living in Aix en Provence for the month. A friend had suggested I get in touch with Café du Cycliste whilst I was down there so I sent Remi an email asking if he'd be interested in doing a shoot somewhere around Nice. As luck would have it...

The morning of the shoot the weather was perfect; sunshine and not a cloud in the sky. It may be winter everywhere else in Europe but the Cote d’Azur is holding out for a little longer. The original plan was to follow two riders for the shoot, Catherine & Julia, but sadly on the way out of Nice Julia received a phone call from the school that her daughter had run into a wall and needed to go home (she was fine, just a massive bump on her forehead poor thing!)

Remi knew this little side road with some great switchbacks so we parked at the bottom, got the bike out and off Catherine went. That’s what I enjoyed so much about this shoot - we didn’t set anything up, we just let Catherine ride and Remi and I would drive either along side her (if the road was wide enough, which it rarely was) or just in front. I would tell Remi to speed up or slow down depending how close to Catherine I wanted to be and I just snapped away as she made her way up the climbs.

Because we were deep in the mountains the light was all over the place. One part of the road would be in bright sunlight but a few metres further on would be in the shade. Technically this made it quite challenging, constantly changing exposures from one extreme to the other, but it was also hard to find views which worked with this contrast. We would be driving along in front of Catherine, and Remi would shout back to me “The sun is coming!” as I desperately fiddled with camera settings to get ready for a brief bit of light on the road.

At the top of the switchbacks there was an amazing view down the valley we’d just climbed and the light pockets on the road made for some interesting pictures.Driving further into the gorge we found a great section of road surrounded by red rock and icicles. We couldn’t have been luckier as this was the only section in sunlight we found the whole way up.

Words & photographs: Harry Engels