017: The Shot That Got Away
And how I finally got it right
Hello and happy Friday!
Thanks so much to anyone who’s back and welcome to anyone here for the first time.
This is my slow-down from social media, where I go a little deeper, share honestly and openly about how and why I do the work that I do, with some thoughts on life as a creative freelancer thrown in.
If you’re also on the west of Scotland, I hope you’re staying safe and warm in the midst of this wild storm. We’ve battened down the hatches and lined up a load of movies to get us through. Take care of yourself!
A photographer’s paradox
In photography, as in any creative pursuit, there's a delicate balance between commercial work and personal artistic vision.
A regularly repeated 'rule' in the photography world is to show what you want to shoot. My happy place in my work world is in the studio, where I do what I consider my best work.
When I first shot in the studio, I was struck by its contradictory nature - its simultaneous simplicity and complexity.
On one hand, there's a white wall, a subject and a camera. What could be more simple?
Flip that perspective and it's the writer's blank page. Every time I unlock the door and step inside, there's nothing there. Just a white wall, a subject and a camera.
How can I make something interesting out of that?
Within the limitations of the four walls, there are possibilities for days.
When I’m working on a client brief, there are goals and objectives, shot lists and concepts that are all a product of the team that pulls them together. It’s a fun and collaborative way to work, but it inevitably becomes an amalgamation of all those people. It’s creativity by democracy. While it always results in great work that the client loves, it’s often not the imagery that excites me when I reflect back on my work each year.
For me, the challenge of being creatively fulfilled while working as a photographer comes down to self-initiated projects and sessions.
One of my favourite recent projects was titled ‘Le Sans Pareil’, a series of portraits of performers at a fictional jazz club. Some other single images like these have been among my favourites and also received public recognition in the Scottish Portrait Awards for the past couple of years.
Finding Mark
Last year, as the pressures of work and life accumulated and overwhelmed me, I fell away from making a lot of this personal work. There are many reasons for making this work, but one I hadn’t fully considered until looking back at last year was how important it was for my mental health and happiness to feel like I was creating work to be proud of. This year I’m making plans to do more and better personal work both in the studio and on location.
I’m continuing my series of musicians in their spaces. I’m shooting a late addition to Le Sans Pareil with my front-woman of choice who’s back in the country and plenty of single sessions in the studio.
Mark Weir was the first of the year. The inspiration for this was a shot I almost got years ago. As a musician I’d never met came into the studio for a shoot, his look immediately inspired in me a final image that I never quite delivered on. We made nice images, but THE ONE that lived in my head escaped me that day. So I went in search of a subject, meeting Mark online and inviting him to the studio.
He looks incredible and is just as lovely. Here you can see the mood board I pulled together for Mark to give him an idea of what I wanted to achieve. This portrait will always be a standout, added here only a few days before we lost David Lynch.
It was a beautiful morning in Glasgow and the light in the studio was so perfect that we were halfway through the session before I turned on a light. This was a great example of the flexibility that comes from creating our own work rather than working strictly to brief, where I would have had to contend with the light rather than embrace it.
The Tech Bit
This full session was shot on the Fujifilm GFX100s medium format camera. I initially used a very old adapted Olympus 50mm lens and later the Fuji 110 f2 (the best lens I’ve ever used). The first 2 setups were all natural light, with various blinds used as flags, a big old sheet of diffusion, and a silver reflector to lift the shadows.
When I turned the strobes on, I wanted to mimic the gorgeous soft light we enjoyed earlier, which had become a strong feature of this series. I turned to a trick I learned from the great Art Streiber, placing a small beauty dish (a pretty hard light) right in the centre of a huge diffused umbrella (a very soft light). This does a great job of mimicking sunlight with a hard spot and a lovely wraparound quality. It was all still a little too hard for my liking, so that big sheet of diffusion from earlier came back into play and we were there. Mark did all the hard work from there with his effortlessly cool demeanour and brilliant attention to detail with every request I made of him.
I'm delighted with how these images came out. They represent exactly what I love about personal projects: the freedom to follow creative instincts, to embrace happy accidents like perfect natural light, and to take the time to get things exactly right. Starting the year with work that truly reflects my vision as a photographer reminds me why I stepped into that simple-yet-complex studio in the first place. There's plenty more to come, and I can't wait to share it.
A Share
Do you have a friend who would like getting some photo chat every now and then? I’d love if you shared this with them.
Until next time…