Sometimes jobs come up that throw you in the deep-end, and this was no exception! I was commissioned by the Independent On Sunday Review Magazine, (or as it's now called the New Review) to photograph Tim Wheeler from the band Ash, and Emmy the Great for an article they were doing on Christmas albums. I had very little details to go on other than it would be a portrait of the two of them with a subtle Christmas theme. I was told about this commission on a Thursday, when I was traveling back from a job in Malta, and we had to shoot on the Friday so I had no time at all to prep!
On Friday morning I still had no idea where the location was, and was only told a few hours before the shoot. As it turned out we did the photographs in Tim's brothers house, in his lounge to be exact! I had an inkling that house was going to have a fairly small lounge due to it's location in the main student area of Belfast (his brother is an Architect just finishing his studies) and was very concerned wether we could actually set up lights etc. We moved the dining table into the back yard and shoved everything else at other end of the room or in the hallway.
I had a rummage around my attic for some Christmas stuff and brought along various things that I thought would be good props. Most of my ideas were based on wrapping lights around the subjects, and I brought along a black cloth backdrop so I could make it look like a studio shoot, and not the terrible squeeze it was.
I wanted to use spotlights on the 2 subjects with a bit of back lighting and a slow shutter speed to allow the ambient light from the tree lights to come through. The main problem was the amount of light coming through the lounge windows from a sunny day out side, so we asked if they had any material we could put over them. A few duvet covers were produced and I had some extra material and we managed with a few pins and some gaffa tape to block most of the light.
Tim and Emma were brilliant, they were so friendly and down to earth, and willing to try out my ideas, as we experimented with what worked best. We took a few shots and I decided that the dark jumper that Tim was wearing was no good, so he had a quick look in his brothers bedroom and grabbed this top which works so much better to separate him from the background.
All in all I was very happy with the shoot, as were the magazine who decided to lead with my photograph instead of the previous one they had lined up. I had my first ever payed commission after leaving college from the Indy Review way back in 1993, and haven't worked for them for a few years since I left London, so it was nice to be reacquainted with them!
