This extraordinary painting entitled 'Speaking in Tongues' by Paul Benney was hanging in the South Transept of Chichester Cathedral where I was asked by an art PR company to shoot it before it moved on to to its next venue. Depicting the story of the Pentecost, where the apostles suddenly have a direct personal experience of God as 'tongues like of fire' descend and sit upon each of them, the work features the apostles beautifully rendered as characters who are all known to the artist. The problem was that, apart from the flames themselves, the whole painting is covered in a highly reflective lacquer with the idea that the viewer can see themselves reflected in it which meant that in all the photographs that had previously been taken, there were terrible reflections of the cathedral, the lighting and even the photographer. Add to that the very low light levels inside and you have a significant technical challenge. Having realised that my first idea of controlling the reflections with black drape was going to need about ten times more drape than I had with me, the solution was to light the work from both sides from just outside the reflected area without spilling any light back towards us and then to drop that in to a background mostly shot with the ambient light and a little extra fill on the back wall which, just to make life difficult, was also quite reflective. Having solved the technical problems we did several different versions and finally wrapped after about three hours just before the evensong deadline. For much of that time the soundtrack to our labours was the cathedral choir rehearsing in the Nave, which was very pleasant and I'm quite sure contributed to us all remaining calm under pressure and avoiding any unfortunate instances of stress induced profanity to which I am occasionally prone and which would have been more than usually inappropriate given the surroundings........