All posts by Scott Rylander

London-based professional photographer with a particular emphasis on theatre, commercial and portraits work.

Musicals, Posters, Publicity stills, Theatre

Singing songs about the Southland

18/07/2014 Scott Rylander

There’s not much I can say about shooting the poster and advertising imagery for Dessa Rose, coming soon to Trafalgar Studios.

Stars Cynthia Erivo and Cassidy Janson worked every angle and every emotion like they’d been born for the camera.

Costume designer Pippa Batt delivered in spades on virtually no notice.

Associate director Jen Bakst not only kept us to the schedule like a Japanese train but managed to double as a rather good photographic assistant AND stop me falling over.

And executive producer Andrew Harmer got us from the studio to Richmond Park and back again as if chasing the sun via every traffic jam in London were his raison d’être.

All I had to do was turn up and click.

(PS I’ve included a behind the scenes shot courtesy of Mr Harmer that demonstrates perfectly why my career’s doomed the moment I need a hip replacement.)

Commercial, Fashion, Products

Masquerade

15/07/2014 Scott Rylander

It’s not often you get to do your thing and go as wild as you want (within reason) on a commercial shoot.

Cycling pollution mask makers, Respro, wanted to introduce their new Skins range with a beauty shot-type image to emphasise that, just because something’s useful, doesn’t mean it can’t be as individualistic as any other piece of clothing.

Using some hand-decorated masks, we started with the core beauty shot — deep reds, golden skin and all.

And then we got a bit nuttier…

Makeup: Siwan Hill

Hair and styling: Harry Cole

Model: Sydney

From the archives, Posters, Publicity stills, Theatre

Transfusion

01/07/2014 Scott Rylander

Some interesting challenges posed by advertising Passing By, Martin Sherman’s play about two men who fall in love which makes a virtue out of treating them as normal human beings rather than theatrical excuses for oh-my-god-they’re-gay-this-is-an-ISSUE angst.

First off, advertising for gay plays tends to be anything but charming. Traditionally, you stick as many topless buff young things as you can into the frame and make them strut. This may have no relevance to the plot but, well, it works.

But if you sold Passing By that way, you’d be cheapening the very thing that makes it different. That it’s not about guys shagging and being gay. It’s a love story between two fully-rounded individuals who live actual, you know, lives and happen to be gay.

Second, we wanted the imagery to conjure up a retro 70s feeling to match the 70s setting. But we absolutely didn’t want it to look like we’d just snapped a few shots on an iPhone and pumped it through a filter on instagram.

So the solution we came up with was to shoot outside and give as much of the retro feeling from the shooting technique itself as from jiggling it about in a computer, coupled with some spot-on costuming from Pippa Batt.

Then we came across a third problem. On the transfer from the Finborough Theatre to the Tristan Bates Theatre, the original cast of Alex Felton and Steven Webb were no longer free. Actors James Cartwright and Rik Makarem stepped in not, so much, to fill their shoes as to spin the play in an entirely different direction.

So we wanted the transfer advertising to reflect the vibe of the original, while making clear that it stood on its own two feet. The stills also needed to meet the requirements of shooting for bigger print formats and online advertising.

And how do you do that?

In the first shoot, oranges and reds were the dominant tones and the abiding rule was to trick the lens into behaving like a piece of plastic. For the transfer, everything was about the greens and shooting sharp as a razor. Different, but just enough of the same.

Assistant for lighting concept tests: Sara La Cuesta Calvo.

From the archives, Production photography, Theatre

From the archives: They never did THAT on the telly…

13/06/2014 Scott Rylander

Sometimes people do things so contradictory to what’s come before that you have to stop yourself a second to experience that little bit of weirdness wiggling inside.

Hannah Montana goes from cutesie teenie pop to licking chains in her birthday suit. Britney Spears goes from chaste pig-tailed schoolgirl to lingerie billboard to scourge of those who just won’t put in the hours. Madonna discovers clothing.

A long time ago (2011, to be precise), I stopped myself in the Ashcroft Theatre in Croydon to experience that little bit of weirdness wiggling inside that comes from seeing the hilarious Clare Buckfield and John Pickard, whom I grew up knowing as brother and sister on the hit sitcom 2point4 Children, playing occasional lovers in the brilliant Same Time, Next Year.

That their screen mother was playing a predatory lesbian television executive up in town was the icing on a very wriggly cake.

Production photography, Theatre

Retirement Planning

06/06/2014 Scott Rylander

Who knew? Shakespeare’s King Lear works rather better when Lear’s a queen than a king.

Production shots from Lear at the Union Theatre, with Ursula Mohan in the title role.

The show runs to 28 June and you can book tickets here.

Dancers, Musicals, Production photography, Theatre

Spend Spend Spend

09/05/2014 Scott Rylander

Bringing the London School of Musical Theatre’s 2014 stay at the Bridewell Theatre in the City to a close, Spend Spend Spend tells the story of Viv Nicholson.

Nicholson, notoriously, won big on the pools with her husband in the 60s and announced that she was going to “spend, spend, spend”.

Given that she has a whole (highly entertaining) musical dedicated to her travels from rags to riches and back again, it’ll come as no surprise to learn she was true to her word. And then some.

Production photography, Theatre

Lucifer Saved

02/05/2014 Scott Rylander

Production shots from the unsettling Lucifer Saved, now playing at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town, which asks provocative questions about the fallibility of memory and the fragility of innocent minds.

Fashion, Portraits, Publicity stills

Even Lindsay Lohan got fired, you know.

29/04/2014 Scott Rylander

What do you do when you’ve got a photoshoot that’s taken a month to organise and the model is so unprofessional she neither turns up nor tells you she’s not turning up?

Avail yourself of the kindness of your makeup artist and use her instead.

What do you do when you’ve got a photoshoot that’s taken a month to organise and the assistant (who’s never actually assisted on a photoshoot before and begged to do it, just so you know…) turns round the day before and demands more money than the rest of you combined are getting because “that’s what my friend got when he did a Gucci shoot”?

Avail yourself of the kindness of a friend who makes himself available at an evening’s notice.

What do you do when the model rings up six hours later and tells you she’s ready for you now?

Press “end call”.

So, the people who stopped all this falling apart:

Stylist: Claire Wacey

Makeup artist: Siwan Hill

Model-on-the-day: Siwan Hill

Assistant-on-the-day: Jaap Jong

Dancers, Musicals, Production photography, Theatre

God is not a plastic surgeon

22/04/2014 Scott Rylander

I seem to have been shooting a lot of musicals lately.

This is good for me because shooting a musical is a bit like going to the gym. This is less good for my shoes because shooting a musical is a bit like going to the gym in inappropriate footwear.

Shots from the London School of Musical Theatre’s first show of its two-show 2014 season at the Bridewell Theatre, Violet. If you want to see it (and you should; it’s very good), the run ends tomorrow night.

Violet tells the tale of a disfigured girl who takes a bus ride to meet a faith healer whom she hopes will heal her scars, and who learns that other things are rather more important on the way.

Odds and ends, Personal work, Writing

Why I’ve (sort of) quit street photography

11/04/2014 Scott Rylander 2 Comments

The Guardian ran a piece this week on the absolutely delightful Tumblr site Women Who Eat on Tubes.

As the name suggests, it’s a site full of pictures of women eating on the Tube.

Given that there are blogs out there that carry highlights from spycams hidden in men and women’s public toilets, that a US court ruled last month that it was fine to take photos without consent up women’s skirts and publish them, and that there’s a new word (“creepshots”) to describe the phenomenon, Women Who Eat on Tubes is pretty tame.

But it did remind me why I’ve more or less abandoned taking photos of people in the street without their consent.

It took three things to do it.

First off, I took the photo above. And I thought it was really cool.

Look, she’s swearing at me ‘coz she doesn’t want her picture taken. Hur-hur. That’s, like, so EDGY and ANGRY and it makes her look, like, really UNFRIENDLY. Hur-hur. That’s, like, literally so AWESOME.

It took me a couple of months to think about it and decide that, no, it wasn’t, like, edgy and angry and, like, literally so awesome. She didn’t want her photo taken and made that clear. Indeed, the only thing that’s interesting about the picture is that she clearly doesn’t want her photo taken. But I took it anyway, did it up and went and showed it to all my friends.

Why the hell did I do that?

Second, I papped a woman crossing Waterloo Bridge.

She got really angry and demanded that I delete the file because she didn’t want her picture taken.

I lied to her and told her that I hadn’t taken her picture. Then, when she didn’t believe me, I got really angry back and told her I had every right to take it and she couldn’t stop me doing whatever I liked in a public place.

Again, it only occurred to me quite a while later.

Why the hell did I do that?

But what really did it for me was walking along, minding my own business and trying to get on with my life on the streets of London, only to have people not only taking pictures of me from afar at random, but taking pictures right up in my face. As people get into Instagram, Tumblr, and documenting every second of their lives via their camera phones, it’s been getting worse. And, more and more, when people do it to me I think two things.

Why the hell did you do that? and Get out of my face, you f*cking creep.

We can’t really avoid living our lives in public to some degree, particularly in big cities. And I, for one, don’t take very kindly to having my every private moment at risk of being captured with a sepia filter and uploaded to Tumblr. More often than not, I don’t have my stylists in tow, my hair’s not salon-fresh, and I’m due a manicure. I’d really rather not be published.

Do I think taking pictures without consent should be illegal, as is now the case in Hungary? Certainly not.

There are people who do this for a living and make impressive art from it.

Art photographer Arne Svenson has taken a whole series of stills of whatever he can see his neighbours getting up to through their windows.

Would I like it done to me? Really, no. But that’s a world away from making it illegal.

Bruce Gilden has made a whole career out of surprising people at close range with a camera and flash.

Again, I’d be pretty annoyed. But I wouldn’t want it to be illegal.

There are countless others — from street photographers to photojournalists — who take pictures without the knowledge of their subjects. The world would likely be a bit poorer without their work.

But as for me, street photography isn’t something I do for the art. It’s something I do for kicks.

So, from now on, I’m only going to do it if the subject’s OK with it.

If something truly artistic is going on, maybe — just maybe — I’ll take a picture of it without the person’s knowledge. If my career radically changes direction, then I’ll give it some more thought.

But if all I’m doing is taking pictures of people for the hell of it because they look absolutely miserable in the middle of the street, because it’s really interesting to invade someone’s morning paper read or because I just want to see how far I can get a camera in someone’s face before they deck me then, no, I’m not being cool or awesome or edgy or anything like that. I’m papping someone to get myself off.

I’d rather not be a f*cking creep. So I’m giving up the creepshots.