Category Archives: Portraits

But I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean in the end

So it’s taken me a little over two years to update my blog.

Which is a little over twice as long as it took me the last time I did this.

Well, what better way to return than with something that little bit eccentric, subtly to suggest that I spend my hiatuses reclining in an institution and therefore have some semblance of an excuse?

You see, every so often someone comes along who lets you do everything you wouldn’t dream of trying out in a normal shoot because it’s just too wacko.  Like sticking them next to an industrial fan while wearing loose clothing, shooting them through an inch of polythene, getting them to shake their head so hard their retinas could detach, and trying to take pictures of them in the dark without bumping into them.  Step forward Sophie, you’re a genius.

Oh, and another thing… I’m now on Twitter.  If you’d like to follow me, I’m scottrylander.

 

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Rat Race

It started with lighting tests.  

I was doing a lot of lighting tests, and I was doing them on myself.  Hundreds of them; possibly thousands.  So many lighting tests, in fact, that they were becoming the closest equivalent I now have to conference calls.

Conference calls are a bit of an art: the trick is to keep all spikey stationery out of reach so that you survive six hours of hot air, people taking their telephone to the toilet and the man who precedes every word with “er” without gouging your eyes out.  

Well, it turns out that lighting tests are a bit of an art, too: the trick, here, is to avoid burning your eyes out with repeated bursts of 3,000 watts of energy per second.  

So I started covering my eyes.  And I ended up with a lot of lighting tests in which I looked asleep, and a lot of lighting tests which looked like I was fleeing the pap-pack.
And then I started wondering whether it was possible to communicate anything at all of myself without showing my face.  Turns out, it was.  

And then I wondered what it was that I wanted to communicate.  And I remembered all the times I’d sat before the speakerphone on conference calls, decked out in my suit, my tie, my expensive cufflinks and my painful shoes, carefully composed on the surface and — inside — just screaming to be allowed, just for one second, to be me.
And then other people became involved.  And it went from little lighting tests to a full-blown series that’ll run as long as it wants to run.

If you want to sit for it, and join the Rat Race crowd, drop me a line.

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And now for something quite different

If you’ve ever spent any length of time with Americans (or, indeed, if you happen to be an American), you’ll know that, every once in a while, something doesn’t just get lost in the translation, it gets turned backwards in it.

There are certain words, see, that get all screwed up when they cross the Atlantic. 

Like “solicitor”.  To us, a solicitor is someone who annoys people from his glass-fronted office in return for one million pounds.  To our American cousins, he’s someone who annoys people in a car park for pennies.

Or “esquire”.  Which, to us, is fairly self-explanatory: it’s a bloke.  A man.  A male.  We even have a bloke’s magazine named after it.  How much less female can you get?  Except that, over the pond, “esquire” is also what you’d call a female lawyer.*

And then there’s “quite”.  “Quite”, to us, is a bit more than a bit.  A fair bit but only “fair” in that it’s a just bit.  Not just a bit.  Not hugely but not not enough. Not deficient but not without deficiencies.  “Quite” is just about OK.

But “quite”, to the Americans, isn’t quite the same.  Because “quite” to the Americans, is just the bee’s knees.  “Quite”, to the Americans, means “very”.

Why am I telling you this?

So that I can talk about a project that was quite long in the making, quite challenging, and quite inspiring without using so many superlatives that’ll you’ll think I’m a teenaged girl from SoCal.

Because, a while ago, I was offered a quite exciting commission on the Emerald Isle.

The task?  To produce a suite of photos for the Irish Human Rights Commission touching on as many of the different human rights issues that affect Ireland as possible.  The catch?  The images couldn’t look too campaigny, we needed to have real people in their natural work or home environments, they couldn’t be obvious, and, wherever possible, they needed to be in natural light.  And there was a quite tight budget.

I’ll say nothing of the quite tricky planning needed to set up a quite large number of shoots over a quite short period of time – many of them involving people facing extreme hardship or in extremely vulnerable positions – not only because most of that side of things fell on more-qualified shoulders, but also because this blog isn’t the place.

But I will say this.  Shooting in natural light in a country that gets almost as much sunshine as we do was quite difficult.  Sauntering through some of the roughest parts of Dublin with a jumbo-sized camera round my neck and trying to look like I shouldn’t be robbed was quite educational.  Galway’s car parks showed my driving skills to be quite limited.  And being able to connect with so many people from so many walks of life, hear their stories and try to capture some little smidgen of them was quite the most rewarding piece of work I’ve ever done.

A very small selection from what we shot below.

*Whom we’d then call a solicitor, they’d then think was a hooker, we’d then think played rugby, they’d then throw a football at, etc, etc…

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Get out that Irene Cara CD

So it’s 2 degrees (not now, obviously).  It’s about to p*ss it down with rain.  It’s windy, it’s slippery, and really, really bleak.

What better conditions, then, to head out for some location movement shooting with very talented (and even more tenacious) dancer, Charlotte Tooth?  She looked lovely.  I got ‘flu.

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