Kind of Blue

Last week, I had a sore throat but by Friday night I could neither swallow nor speak so I checked into my local hospital A&E, was admitted and woke up the following morning in intensive care wired up to everything in sight. Apart from the other patients in the recovery ward who, like me are not a pretty sight, there’s not a lot to photograph from my bed, but this is the view… and I have plenty of time to listen to music………

Campania

I don’t spend much time shooting pictures when I’m away ‘off-duty’, as it would definitely qualify as a ‘busman’s holiday’, however sometimes I can’t resist and as the best camera (about which I’m often quizzed) is the one you have with you at the point you need one, I used my iPhone, having recently and reluctantly upgraded to a larger one which at least can deliver some decent quality images.

TOT Shirts

I have spent many days in many different places photographing people at work in factories, workshops and offices. The problems are often the same - factories can be messy, people in offices are mostly looking at screens and the lighting is usually terrible, so it was a pleasure to find myself in the brightly lit and colourful home of TOT Shirts in North London where they have been screen printing and embroidering everything from music t-shirts to school leavers sweaters since 1985. When I’m doing a reportage shoot I prefer not to direct people but simply to try and be a ‘fly on the wall’ and capture them doing their work so it’s a question of wandering around, keeping my eyes open and blending in to the background. There’s always the same the reaction when I arrive - everyone becomes self conscious and camera shy but I’ll usually have a chat with them and ask them to show me what they’re doing and five minutes later they’ve forgotten I’m there….

Deal

I’ve never been to the US State of Montana, often called ‘The Big Sky Country’ but spending a weekend in Deal on the Kent coast gave me an idea of how it might feel to look out of the window and just see land (or in this case, sea) and sky all the way to the horizon. There is something magical about the cloudy morning light on the east coast which I suspect no camera can really capture but it seemed churlish not to at least try. Deal Pier, the third on the site since 1838, is sadly not a thing of great beauty and probably best viewed from afar, although the café at the end is supposed to be very good.

Mushrooms

Growing up in Wiltshire, I frequently collected mushrooms in the Autumn so when I spied these in the field next door, I had to jump over the fence, knife in hand, only to find that the childhood excitement of discovering them was tempered by a more adult concern as to whether or not they were ‘safe’ to eat. The internet is now awash with websites for would be foragers but the mushrooms themselves always seem to be slightly different from the examples on the page. As far as I could tell they were, somewhat unsurprisingly, Agaricus Campestris or Field Mushrooms. They were delicious and I am still alive….

Ratan Tata

Indian businessman Ratan Tata died this week, aged 86. Sometime in 2008, I was dispatched to Gaydon, Warwickshire to photograph him for Jaguar Magazine following the purchase of JLR by his Tata Group. The feature was called “In the back seat with…” and a suitable Jaguar limousine had been provided and parked outside the office. I had initially thought of shooting from inside the car, perhaps using some clever lighting on him from outside although it was a tight squeeze and I couldn’t quite see how I was going to make it work. Fortuitously, the car was white, normally a very difficult colour to work with but when I started testing how it might work to shoot through the rear window instead, I realised that firstly the natural light on his face was really interesting and secondly, although a bit risky, I could probably just about hold enough detail in the car’s exterior for it to still ‘read’ on the Fujifilm Velvia I was using at the time. All that was left to do was to use a large white reflector on the far side, to hide a horrible area of green grass through the window, which had the added benefit of kicking back a little more light onto the far side of his face. Designer Tim Scott did a lovely job of laying it out over two pages and it remains one of my favourite magazine spreads

Amanda Stretton

Half listening to the news on Radio 4 this week, a piece about mandatory speed limiters on new cars caught my attention not least because the presenter called in some expert opinion from motoring journalist and driver Amanda Stretton who I photographed some years ago for Classic and Sportscars magazine. I remember turning up on a rather wet day and her suggesting that we go for a drive in her Frazer Nash whose skinny tires afforded little in the way of grip which simply allowed her to demonstrate her superb car control. Not having seat belts, the only way I could avoid sliding indecorously into her lap on left hand bends was to hook my arm over the side and hold on tight getting a rather wet elbow in the process. Excitement over, I then had to find something for her to sit on other than wet concrete and place a second light behind the car to reveal just enough of the Nash’s wire wheels….

Equity

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.

Coat

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.

20 Fenchurch Street

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…..

Rio Ferdinand

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…….

Briefs

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…

Edgware Road

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.

Shapes

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.

London Air Ambulance

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!

Down in the Hole

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.

Lincoln's Inn

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……

A graveyard of anchors

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.

A studio with a view

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, Austria

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….