Two Maestri

Despite their packed schedules, I managed to persuade two of the IMS maestri, Hariolf Schlichtig and Andràs Keller, to stand still long enough for a quick informal portrait session with their instruments. I hadn't quite worked out how I was going to get the piano into the shot with Tom Adès, but in the end he didn't have time so now I've got a few months to think about it...........

IMS

Every year in the Spring, some of the most promising young classical players from all over the world gather at a remote estate on the Cornish coast for a three week series of classes and coaching sessions with four or five of the acknowledged masters of their instruments. Despite the intense competition for a place, there is an extraordinarily friendly and special atmosphere and students and visitors are allowed to walk in and out of all the sessions at will. Photographically it is a real challenge. If the weather is bad, the light level in the rooms is both low and a difficult mixture of weak daylight from outside and low level tungsten light inside with the occasional energy saving bulb thrown in for good measure. If the weather is good, the rooms are flooded with brilliant sunlight.....from behind. The backgrounds are full of the clutter of a domestic interior and additionally of course, these are masterclasses with musicians of the highest calibre and the machine gun clatter of a Nikon shutter would be both immensely distracting and completely unacceptable. With all that in mind I decided to try out a Fuji XT-1 with its electronic, and therefore totally silent, shutter and put it through its paces - the results were exceptional. Mostly shot at 6400 ISO and given a black and white treatment to avoid the colour temperature issues, these images give a small insight into a unique environment that I was privileged to be allowed into for a couple of very memorable days.

Rain

The beginning of a shower of rain on Porlock beach in Somerset

Driving

Last week's drive around Germany, France, Belgium and Holland shooting some billboards for Fujifilm reminded me, after 3000Km and about 50 hours of driving, of the importance of a comfortable car and of two other long journeys I did in the very luxurious Lexus LS 400 - one to the Arctic Circle in Norway with James May (one of my favourite road trips ever) and another around the UK for this magazine feature. When I arrived to do this shoot at the bauxite plant, at Burntisland in Scotland, there was a gale force wind blowing in from the sea that meant it would have been impossible to keep the 5"x 4" plate camera I was using at the time still even on a heavy tripod, so I was forced to shoot from inside the doorway of a large shed on site and as the longest lens I had was equivalent to about a 70mm on an SLR, to make a much wider shot than I'd originally intended, resulting in a significantly stronger image than would otherwise have been the case. It was very well received by the client and I was quite happy to take the credit for an inspired choice of viewpoint.......

A Good Day at the Office

When one of London's top recruitment agencies wanted their key people photographed for a new website, they took my advice and asked my regular collaborator Anna Durston to do their hair and makeup - the results speak for themselves. All I had to do was add a little charm, point and shoot..........

The Utility of Shadows

I have visited hundreds of factories over the years and most of the successful ones end up bursting at the seams as they try and cope with increasing productivity in a fixed space. Good for business but usually bad for photography. Graphics Works in Milton Keynes was no exception, but Fujifilm wanted a double page image for their magazine, featuring MD Peter Barham with as many of the four large format Acuity printers that he'd bought from them, as possible. After a few minutes of trying various angles, it was obvious that only one was going to work and that I would have to settle for three out of four but as the initial test shot shows, it was still a mess and although some local tidying up was possible, none of the hardware was movable. So this was a perfect job for a technique I've used many times where essentially, I light what I want to see and let everything else disappear into the shadows. I started with my first light on Peter and from there it was just a question of positioning the other lights, hiding them wherever possible, controlling the quality, amount and direction of each one and building the image up, step by step.......plus a little polishing in Photoshop.

The Kew Brewery

There are apparently now over 1500 craft breweries in the UK and about 75 of these are in London, but as far as I know there is only one on the South Circular Rd in Sheen which was where I recently had the pleasure of meeting David Scott, who had given up a safe job in academia in order to start, along with his wife Rachel, the Kew Brewery. The problem was that the brewery wasn't even nearly finished, the builders were working on site, there was brewing kit, builders supplies and packaging everywhere and there was simply no possibility of shooting anything inside. Fortunately, it wasn't raining, so we retreated to the garage turned brewhouse at the rear of the site, set up the gear in the middle of the road and in keeping with the chaotic spirit of the shoot, left it all in frame. 

Rachel & David Scott-32.jpg

Bank Vault

There are easier ways into a safety deposit box vault than spending Easter weekend drilling through the wall like the Hatton Garden Gang, for example, you could go for a drink in the Revolution Bar in Leadenhall where they have one in the basement - sadly there are no valuables left in this one and all the boxes are empty but it's still protected by a mightily impressive door. The man in the frame is Rhydian Lewis, a former Lazards banker who co-founded the peer to peer lenders Ratesetter and wants you to get your money, should you have any to spare, out of your bank and give it to him in return for a much better interest rate. As usual there was a very limited time window, in this case two hours, to get in, light, shoot all the different options required and get out, but having recced the place the week before I had a good idea of how I was going to do it and fortunately, things went more or less to plan, with the added bonus of being able to go upstairs for a celebratory beer at the end........

Richard Cartwright, Wheelchair Rugby Player

Richard Cartwright is a founder member of the Solent Sharks Wheelchair Rugby Team and also a lecturer in Accountancy at Southampton University. I managed to get him into a side room at the Stoke Mandeville Stadium one Saturday in between games for just about long enough to make a decent portrait for Economia Magazine before he headed back out onto the courts to rejoin the fray. The sport combines elements of Rugby, Handball and Basketball and is played with a degree of physical commitment that completely surprised me, with rapid bursts of acceleration, pirouette turns, some amazingly deft manoeuvring at speed, and head-on collisions in defence frequently leading to overturned wheelchairs. Richard is actually a lot more friendly than he looks.......

The Living and the Dead

I spent a day recently on the set of the forthcoming BBC supernatural drama The Living and the Dead and was asked to shoot a quick portrait of actress Fiona O'Shaughnessy for use as a prop later in the series. Searching around upstairs in Horton Court in Gloucestershire, a cold, creepy and mysterious National Trust property where much of the filming was taking place, and the crew have experienced several strange and inexplicable occurrences, I found a stretch of unfinished plaster wall for a backdrop and using a builder's site lamp for illumination, was testing the shot when I heard the assistant director call for silence downstairs on set.  I stood still and waited for them to complete and to my surprise heard an old fashioned phone ring midway through the take. I assumed it was a sound effect and part of the story but afterwards I found out that it had been the remote bell for the house phone which had rung for no apparent reason - according to the guardians on site, the phone line had been disconnected over a decade ago.......

Paris

Anyone who has ever waited for the lift at Russell Square tube station will probably have contemplated climbing the two hundred or so stairs to ground level instead but it's not for the faint hearted. No such dilemma in Paris this week where, with an hour to kill before heading to the airport and having walked the short distance from the client's office to the Arc de Triomphe, I found the lift out of action and the only way to join the tourists for a view of Paris at dusk was to climb the two hundred and eighty four steps to the top from where the Eiffel Tower looked as magnificent as ever.

Cornwall

From a walk through the magnificent ancient woods of the Trelowarren Estate in Cornwall at the end of the summer

Steve Curtis, Powerboat Racer

Sometimes I think I have a rather unusual job......until I meet someone like Steve Curtis, current and eight times Class 1 Offshore Powerboat Champion whose job as one of the worlds best throttlemen, is to control the speed of a five tonne boat worth half a million pounds, skimming the surface of the sea at 160mph. In 1993 he survived a catastrophic accident in the Mediterranean and managed to swim to the shore while the rescue teams, finding no body at the crash site, presumed him dead. When he casually mentioned that eight of his friends had been killed in the sport, not being a very good swimmer I decided to stick with photography for the time being....

Cider Makers of East Anglia

Robbie Crone, Charles Roberts and Tony Hobbs sampling Charles' Pickled Pig cider in Cambridgeshire. I abstained until later on at home, remembering that I had once tried some 'gas and air' pain relief on a shoot in a maternity unit in Glasgow and got halfway back to London before I realised that I'd left my tripod behind.........

Alderney Tourism

Having battled indifferent weather and a strong, cold easterly wind for two days, shooting some lifestyle and tourism images on the Channel Island of Alderney, we ended up on the beach near Fort Clonque for a sunset shoot with local businessman Paul and his fiancée Claudette. Paul's son had come along for the ride and as we packed up they both wandered off to try and climb on to a rock that was still surrounded by the high tide, finally catching a break between the waves to clamber on. Mission accomplished they just stood there for a minute or two watching the sunset and talking as I rushed back to grab a few frames before they jumped off. Sometimes the best moments are completely unplanned.....

Excavator Buckets, St Sampson, Guernsey

Piled up in the corner of  a yard at one of Guernsey Electricity's generator plants, the rusting steel in the warm afternoon light caught my eye as I wandered about killing time, waiting to shoot a portrait of the manager for an engineering firm's ad campaign..........