I spend a fair amount of my professional life trying to connect with people the other side of the camera and get them to relax and reveal that little bit of personality which makes the difference between a great portrait and a stiff, lifeless headshot. Some people are harder than others and, if I’m honest, sometimes it just doesn’t happen but it usually does and when it does…….it’s a lot of fun.
Taking a previously unknown footpath in the rain across a field in Somerset last week, I found myself being approached by a rather friendly miniature Shetland (I think) pony. I took a few photos of the lovely pattern of wet hair on its back and we went our separate ways.
I’m no great fan of most of the city’s office towers and The Walkie Talkie building is probably the ugliest of the current crop. Awarded Building Design's 2014 Carbuncle Cup, architectural critic Oliver Wainwright wrote “it stands at 20 Fenchurch Street...on a site never intended for a tall building. It looms thuggishly over its low-rise neighbours like a broad-shouldered banker in a cheap pinstriped suit. And it gets fatter as it rises, to make bigger floors at the more lucrative upper levels, forming a literal diagram of greed.” It’s a pig to work in too as its downward sloping windows reflect the the interior ceilings where any half decent photographer would be shining at least some of his light and on a clear day the sun reflects off the upward sloping windows of the Scalpel opposite and blasts the north facing rooms with dazzling light. However, on a cloudy day in November the view from Level 28, partially reflecting the skeleton of the next big tower, is really rather good…..
Watching Rio Ferdinand in the David Beckham documentary on Netflix over the weekend, I was reminded of my own meeting with a very young looking Rio back in 1999. Unusually, I was late arriving at West Ham’s training ground, somewhere off the A12 near Romford, as I’d got lost and when I got there the writer, Scott, had already started the interview. Ferdinand strode over towards me, and ignoring my outstretched hand, looked me straight in the eye and completely deadpan said ‘turn up on time next time, alright?’, waiting a beat before creasing up with mirth and introducing himself, shaking my hand and adding ‘I had you there, didn’t I?’ My other abiding memory is of the PR person from whatever boot company had sponsored him desperately trying to arrange the boot room wall so that none of the competitors logos were in the background - god knows how the players found their own boots again the next day…….
On the rare occasions that I am given an actual brief for a portrait shoot, it’s usually fairly vague, perhaps detailing lighting style, backgrounds, crop etc and is more of a wish list of things to try and do if the situation allows. When I photographed Dr Astrid Fontaine, at the time one of the board members at Bentley, there was no such vagueness and her request was typically precise, “I want pictures like the ones Mario Testino did of Diana”. In her office, at the Bentley works, in Crewe - no pressure there then. Fortunately for me, it was rather less difficult than it might have been with almost anyone else in that position and I think we both got away with it…
Waiting for the Eastbound train to King’s Cross, I was wondering, if asked, exactly how I might explain my interest to a London Underground official, particularly given the proximity to the top security Paddington Green police station, but then I remembered it had closed - I still only took two frames though.
Although technologically very clever on the inside, Fujifilm’s EM platesetter is about as interesting from the outside as a modern dishwasher. Not unusually it had also been installed in a very small area in a functional but unremarkable part of the building away from any noise and dirt in the print factory. Not for the first time my brief, a good image of production director Jamie Gilbert and the EM Setter, was looking challenging but I soon realised that with its lids open for maintenance it was a much more interesting proposition and with the careful addition of some light to reveal the shapes, the shot began to come together with the softer curves on the left blending into the harder shapes on the right. A little more space either side would have been nice but I’d have to have shot it on an even wider lens…….and I didn’t have one.
This rather amazing view of the City is from the helipad on the top of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, the home (at least during daylight hours) of the London Air Ambulance. Extraordinarily, the LAA, which can get to almost anywhere in London in less than eight minutes to provide paramedics and transport to hospital for the most serious trauma victims, is run and paid for entirely by charity. Every year they have to raise about £10M just to keep them (there are two) in the air so do please think about making a donation, if you can:
https://www.londonsairambulance.org.uk/up-against-time-appeal
Happy New Year!
Tasked with generating some new imagery for one of Britain’s largest construction materials companies, I spent two days last week, in full orange PPE, down at the bottom of couple of very large quarries. There was little time or possibility to plan or arrange anything so it was simply a question of “shooting from the hip” and capturing whatever looked interesting, while Paddy the quarry supervisor kept in touch with the drivers of the 30 tonne dumper trucks by radio and kept a watchful eye on me to make sure I didn’t come to any harm. Fortunately, on both days, the weather was on my side and once the morning light had cleared the rim of the quarry, it backlit all the dust and made for some quite striking, if technically challenging, images.
I have been photographing barristers and QCs for a week or so recently in Lincolns Inn, one of the four Inns of Court and one London’s hidden gems, 11 acres of mostly 17th Century buildings and gardens hidden away behind brick walls in Holborn. Adjacent and less hidden away, are some of the shops and suppliers who specialise in the books and uniforms required by those who would arguing the case for, or against you should you ever happen to end up in court, something I have managed to avoid so far……
These abandoned anchors near the town beach in Favagnana, Sicily would have been used to hold down the complex maze of nets known as a tonnara, used to trap the bluefin tuna shoals as they headed back into the Mediterranean every Spring. This industry, along with quarrying, sustained the island for about four hundred years until it finally finished in the 1980s.
Another of the (few and probably temporary) benefits of the disruption of the last two years has been that some of my clients find themselves with or adjacent to, thousands of square feet of empty office space which, 32 floors up, provides a wonderful view for the few minutes of the day when I’m not looking through the viewfinder. Fortunately it was a cloudy day otherwise I’d have had to pull all the blinds down….
Bad Gastein is an old spa town and ski resort in the Alps south of Salzburg, full of Belle Epoque hotels and thermal spas that have, for the most part, seen better days although there is currently a palpable sense of post pandemic rejuvenation with a lot of building and renovation work under way. Conveniently it is also on a main railway line with a station right on the main street and an impeccably punctual train service. Platform 3C however seems to be virtually unused, even the clock had stopped….
More and more often in recent months I’ve been shooting executive portraits with just one light. This is partly due to a desire to try and take the simplest and leanest approach to the job as well as minimising the amount of kit I have to transport but also a recent preference for the natural daylight feel of the results that I’m getting. Sometimes however, there is just no alternative to a car load of lights. Trying to combine a human figure with Fuji’s massive Onset printer is always a challenge and next time I’ll have to come up with yet another solution but this one worked well and apart from all the heads, stands, brollies, soft boxes and grids, the only thing I needed was a 100’ extension cable - you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find a plug socket in some of these places……..
Happy Christmas!
Following his untimely death a couple of weeks ago on Alderney, I was searching through the archive for a photo of the legendary Ray Parkin to give to his son and I rediscovered this series of portraits that I did in 2006 for a mini exhibition on the island. The idea was to spend one day, with the help of island native Carl Flewitt, shooting as many of the interesting characters as we could find and persuade to get involved. As befitting a man born in a showman’s caravan in his family’s circus nearly 75 years earlier, Ray was happy to pose but not everyone we approached agreed so readily. Another well known figure, Colin, who spent most of the summer days in nothing more than an old pair of red shorts and was rumoured to live in a shipping container, declined on the grounds that as he had been a model in his youth, he would require significant payment! With each of those who said yes, I had a short space of time to come up with an idea wherever they were and shoot it, with the consequence that I was only really happy with about two thirds of the results, with the others not making the cut. Looking back on them, I wouldn’t do them this way now, but I’m happy that I did, then.
The quote above, often attributed to the Duke of Wellington but also to General Rommell in World War II, has probably been around since time immemorial*. Whoever said it first, it has always served me well when shooting on location, so when a financial magazine asked me to shoot the co-founders of a specialist fund management company in the West End I made a point of arriving an hour earlier than required in order to recce the area. One of the things I’ve always loved about London is how you can discover new places even after thirty five years of living here and I must have walked past the entrance to this tiny alleyway in Covent Garden a hundred times and never noticed it. Of the two or three locations I’d found in the vicinity, this one got the immediate approval of John the art director when he arrived - a single portable softbox provided the light, as well making it almost impossible for anyone else to pass and with a few variations on the theme, the job was over in fifteen minutes.
Fact of the Day: Time immemorial actually means any time before the accession of Richard the First in 1189
Looking round a crumbling house in Somerset, this blind in the roof of the semi derelict indoor pool extension caught my eye - sadly it will almost certainly not survive the restoration…..
One of the (few) benefits of the pandemic has been the relative absence of people from parts of London that are normally teeming with humanity. Unlike plenty of other photographers, I have not been out documenting the empty streets - it just doesn’t interest me but when design agency LGS asked me to shoot some portraits of one of their clients, I was pleased to get out and find that I could shoot without having to wait too long for other pedestrians to clear frame. Strangely enough on the day I was shooting last week, it looked as if half the other people out and about were either professional photographers or well heeled amateurs….
Even today the term ‘car photographer’ implies some sort of specialist, now most likely to be a highly skilled digital creative working with a 3D wire frame but twenty years ago it meant someone who could work in a large infinity coved studio, manipulating multiple lights and a huge floating reflector to create seductive glossy images. I never considered myself to be one of them at all, but on a few occasions I did attempt it there was always some trepidation about renting a car studio, not least because the electricity bill for the tungsten lights was additional to the studio rental and could end up being almost as much. In 2003 I was despatched by Motorsport to shoot this rather lovely Vanwall, at the Donington Collection which sadly no longer exists. It had been pushed from its usual spot into a conference hall at the end of the building with no windows and a low ceiling and that was to be my ‘studio’. The single biggest problem in photographing cars is reflections, a car body being effectively a collection of highly reflective and curved surfaces so I decided to black out the back wall, using a lot of drape (left over from a Gary Numan album shoot!) concentrate on highlighting the car’s rather beautiful and instantly recognisable outline and keep it all a bit mysterious. If you look carefully you can see the ceiling tiles reflected in the bonnet but in the circumstances I was pretty happy with the result. There is a rumour about, that the Vanwall name may be returning to the world of motorsport - I do hope it’s true……
The public enquiry into the future of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry started last week, as the Secretary of State prepares to intervene in the dispute between the developers who bought the site after it closed in 2017, and those who want to see a six hundred year old tradition of bell casting preserved in the East End. I visited it in 2003 to shoot this portrait of Polly Arnold, the managing director of a publishing company, in her couture wedding dress for a magazine feature. Casting molten metal is a dirty business and almost everything in the foundry was caked in layer of grime but the wedding dress had cost about the same as a small car and I was under strict instructions that it should not be soiled so we had to carefully conceal plastic sheeting underneath it which kept it clear of the floor…….more or less.