The reluctant Mr Baker

Ginger Baker was, to put it mildly, unenthusiastic about being photographed when I arrived on his doorstep at the end of the first week in January. 

He explained that he was suffering from the remains of a cold and nursing an injury to his ribs which he sustained at a recent gig. How exactly he was injured was not something he felt like sharing, but he politely made it clear, with an enviable economy of language, that he was only consenting to the shoot under slight duress and that I shouldn't read too much into the fact that he was wearing a freshly ironed shirt.

We discussed locations in the house and he explained that there was only one way it was going to happen and that was if I was prepared to take his portrait while he sat down and had a cup of coffee in his favourite armchair. Which was fair enough. 

So I set-up, while he watched a David Attenborough documentary on television. 

My key-light, a medium Chimera soft-box, suddenly felt hugely intrusive in the modest space and I was struggling to get back sufficiently for minimum focus distance. 

As I checked the lights and fired a couple of test shots, Ginger completely ignored me. 

He continued to ignore me for the next several minutes as I tried to engage in a bit of light conversation while shooting pictures, asking him about the current band and talking about my son's passion for playing music. His replies, when they came at all, were brevity incarnate, spoken with eyes straight ahead, steadfastly fixed on the large, loud TV in the opposite corner. 

Finally he turned to look at the camera and I got this.

I should point out that while Ginger was broadly unresponsive to what I was saying, he wasn't rude or hostile about it. He was just a man who didn't really enjoy being photographed, who was patiently tolerating a process he felt was unnecessary and doing so at a time when he felt under the weather and in pain. 

When I eventually asked him to sit up a bit in the chair he did so for a while but it was immediately apparent that this was very uncomfortable on his ribs and it seemed churlish to request that he continue sitting that way.

I'm not one to ask people to smile if it's not in their nature, but I try to elicit one in conversation just to see if it makes a decent picture. Nothing I said delivered even so much as a twitch. Eventually I fell back on an old photographers cliche.

"Imagine something that would make you happy." I said...

Then after a few seconds I added, "Like me, spontaneously bursting into flames?"

A glimmer of a smile spread across his thin lips and he gave me a sideways look. I was done... and we both knew it. So I packed my bags and thanked him for his time.

- - -

** I've just yesterday heard that the above picture has been selected as part of this year's Portrait Salon exhibition after being passed over in the National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing contest earlier this year. I'm very proud to have a picture included in the Portrait Salon which is a prestigious "second chance" exhibition with a consistently high standard and a reputation for intriguing work. Many of my friends and the photographers I admire have had work shown there and I'm thrilled to be included this year.

Margate - avoiding "The Martin Parr thing."

Joe lives and breathes the re-invention of Margate. Affably radiating quiet purpose,  dressed in a knee-length brown shopkeepers coat and sporting a parted pudding-bowl haircut, he doesn't just sell vintage objects and retro clothes for a living, he utterly embraces the ethos. Rediscover, repair, reuse, - find the things from the recent past that elicit a feeling not just of nostalgia, but of individuality and the path less-traveled.

In this way he and his wife Kelly could be considered a perfect example of the changes going on in the town. Like their businesses, Margate has borrowed from past glories and is in the process of adapting the best of those things coupled with a growing artistic community to create new prosperity.

Stood together in the Margate Retro General Store, one of two shops they own and run, Joe was attempting to give me the inside track on his hometown, so hard to define or categorise, and explain why he and his family moved back.

"There are two things everyone knows about Margate," said Joe, "The first one is that  song by Chas and Dave, you know, Daaahhhn to Margate," he half sings, "And the other one is Only Fools and Horses where the coach blows up."

I blinked several times. Certainly, I knew the song, no matter how much I would like to pretend otherwise but Only Fools and Horses is a genuine gap in my TV viewing.

"But the thing is," he continued, "it was never that place, or should I say, never JUST that place. Margate has always been a much more complicated town."

This was something I could definitely grasp. After two solid days of shooting - documentary and portraits - it was hard to escape the feeling that I had barely scratched the surface. The photographs were to illustrate an article by Iain Aitch that spanned decades and his observations from growing up in this misunderstood, misrepresented British seaside institution at the far end of Kent. Reflecting the scope and sweep of the piece was not my only problem, there was also the inevitable spectre of Martin Parr. 

Parr's vision of UK seaside towns will never be equalled in my opinion. Their humour, observation and photographic aesthetic are so brilliantly combined that they still cast a long shadow over any British seaside-related photojournalism. Those that criticise him for ridiculing or demeaning his subjects are missing an essential point. His work reflects an intimacy with and affection for the traditional coastal destinations and the families who choose them for their holidays.

So it left me with a quandary - On one hand, I cannot pretend that his work hasn't made me scrutinise and evaluate my own photography and techniques. On the other, the last thing I want to produce is a pale imitation of someone I admire. Most troubling in this equation is the use of flash. I don't know how Martin Parr started to use strong flash in his pictures but I suspect it was in response to a simple technical problem. If you don't want deep shadows on a sunny day then you have to fill them in somehow, either with reflected light or flash. It is something I have occasionally done, using a radio-triggered Q-flash, held off-camera to give a very directional, contra-lit image. It's purposefully different from the ring-flash approach he used but I still worried that it might end up looking too similar.

However, with very little time to get all the pictures completed and a budget that meant I had to limit myself to a couple of days shooting, my hands were somewhat tied. 

I attempted to blend two very different looks into one story. The weather was very variable on both days. The first day I limited myself to strictly working with available light, either diffuse, reflected or just shooting with the sun when it was at it's strongest. On the second day (a Saturday as it turned out) I persuaded my wife Jane to step into the gaping budgetary hole that I would otherwise have spent on an assistant. Armed with the Q-flash, she patiently followed me as I tried to get a number of lit portraits that might thicken-out the edit.

Having already posted the tear sheet, I thought it might be interesting to also make a short gallery, including those that made it into the piece and a few that I liked but weren't chosen for the layout.

The original brief had called for a small number of final images to suggest the changes that Margate had undergone. The culture clash caused by the arrival of the Turner Contemporary and the cultures of an artistic community in a traditional seaside resort. 

What became apparent very quickly from talking to locals, visitors and shopkeepers was that far from a clash there had been a cross-pollination. In the sunny weather, the beach is the great magnet but on overcast days, the cafes and shops of old-town still draw-in visitors looking for authentic vintage and non-label fashions that are concentrated in the small accessible area. 

The designers at the New Review came up with a minimalist take on the idea of postcards which worked well in the final layout but the last word should go to Iain Aitch's writing.

"It has always had the feel of a frontier town - Always about to mutate." He wrote.

Iain made reference to a how the real renaissance began one Saturday night in 2007 when a huge Anthony Gormley sculpture was burned as part of a film and artistic performance. This, he said, was the spark that gave Margate the arts momentum which is now being continued by the Turner Contemporary and planned revival of the famous, but now defunct, Dreamland.

As luck would have it, I was there that night and had taken photographs - on assignment for The Independent's news section. Here is my favourite, taken just before it was set ablaze showing the giant art-work made of furniture, already glowing orange in the setting sun.

Tearsheet - The New Review, 25 Aug 2013: Welcome to Margate

Four pages in The New Review, Independent on Sunday. My pictures accompanied a brilliant, personal and enlightening piece by Iain Aitch. 

I recommend you read it here (article).

Double Header - Jessica Swale

After talking this week with long time friend and colleague David Howells I've been spurred on to start a new series of posts on Cover featuring some of my personal favourite portraits from the last few years. In each case, presenting two pictures combined into a single frame with a short explanation. As the series progresses it will give me the excuse to dip into a wide variety of editorial and commercial portraits and how they came to be.

First up, Jessica Swale, who after becoming one of the UK's most successful young theatre directors decided to write 'Blue Stockings' her first full-length play. Naturally, being a first time playwright the venue for it's inaugural staging was that tiny, little-known, back-street flea-pit... Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. This kind of talent goes beyond amazing and into the very slightly intimidating realm.

To couch it in Zoolander terms, the phrase "Jessica is so hot right now!" does not even begin to cover it.

The original idea (or 'concept' as they like to imagine it should be called) was to do a portrait of Jessica with the auditorium of the Globe theatre in the background. Still not quite sure who's idea this was - I suspect it might have been the section editor.

Literary types think literally, and if the office had their druthers I would have been doing a picture of Jessica Swale, dressed in blue stockings, in the Globe Theatre auditorium, carrying a sign that read "I'm Jessica Swale and my play 'Blue Stockings' is on at the Globe theatre." Of course, that would still be a bit subtle by their standards but they could have underlined the point by stating the whole thing again in the caption.

Fortunately fate intervened, and a freak delay during my journey to London meant that by the time we came to do pictures, the auditorium was full of theatregoers and we had to make do with what we could find outside. After spending ages trying to fulfil the brief of Playwright + Theatre in the same frame I decided that we should do a photograph which concentrated on Jessica herself rather than the building.

Here are my two favourites and I'm pleased to say that while the Independent didn't use either of these actual frames, they did at least ditch the original brief in favour of one of the shots from this second phase of the session. The article which was headlined 'Woman on fire' can be read here.

Mr Middleton - The last best hope for professional photography

Question: How many photographers does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Just one, but I’m not sure I would have done it that way myself…

Professional photographers can be famously sceptical of other people’s pictures. Often the criticisms can seem petty and peevish but the news that the first “official photographs” of Prince George were taken by his grandfather, Michael Middleton, elicited immediate reactions from photographers everywhere.

Those reactions were howls of protest and gales of laughter in about equal measures.

In case you haven’t seen them, either because you’ve been locked in a bunker for the last day or you are the partner of a Guardian journalist currently transiting through Heathrow, I’ll describe them for you.

“Meh...”

They are not spectacularly bad. Not so awful that we might be tempted to think they’re good in a in a post-modern ironic sense and certainly not so mind-bendingly pointless that we could expect to see them as finalists in the Deutsche Borse prize next year!

No, they are bad in an ordinary, approachable way. You do not need to be a connoisseur to know these are crappy pictures, absolutely anyone can see that they are grindingly mediocre.

Taken in what we assume is the garden of the family home, they convey two essential messages to the outside world.

Firstly, that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are normal, down-to-earth people who enjoy relaxing in the summer sunshine with their son just like any other parents.

Secondly, that they, in common with so many families throughout the world, have relatives with a really nice camera and no clue how to use it!

Let’s leave trifles like technique and camera-handling aside. After all, Mr Middleton certainly did. Instead we’ll concentrate on some of the more baffling features of the first picture.

It’s supposed to be a photograph of the Prince and his adoring parents right? So why are the family dogs more prominent than the future heir?

“Congratulation your royal highness you are the proud parents of a retriever! No, my mistake, there is a baby in the picture - just fading into the lawn. Hang-on, that’s a dog too! Where’s the baby? Oh I see it, masquerading as Kate’s massively developed right bicep!”

Did nobody spot this before the pictures were sent round the world’s media? Who looked at that and thought it was OK? What has happened to the famous concern for the royal image we have seen in recent years?

Better yet, where was the quality control from the papers themselves? Certainly someone on the picture desks of the various international publications and news-outlets should have called up the palace and said those time honoured words,

“Errr, do you have anything else?”

As if to answer this un-asked question there is another, similarly dreadful shot. No longer seated this time but still in the shade of a tree.

In this photo they appear to be standing on the banks of a huge yellow river that turns out to be the lawn - over-exposed by eight stops or so. The dogs are gone - mercifully – but it still has the same clumsy, depressing, second-rate atmosphere as the first picture.

Is this some misguided attempt at man-of-the-people accessibility? Is it a demonstration of extreme contempt for the very idea of aesthetic standards?

We are living in a time of austerity and cut-backs so I would be the last person to advocate that Mario Testino needs to be deployed to the Middleton household on a round-the-clock basis to record the infant Prince’s every move. That would be profligate and wrong.

Nor do I think that merely because the Royal family are publicly funded that automatically means William, Kate and George have to become public property. But really, basic self-respect should have kicked in here. A suitable professional photographer could and should have been found for this first official record.

On the bright side, this may be good news for professional photographers. A few years ago we were treated to some beef-witted, waste of blood and organs on Radio 4’s Today Programme, telling us that photographers were a thing of the past because modern cameras and software meant anybody could take a decent picture.

Finally we have a comprehensive irrefutable rebuttal to this assertion.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Michael Middleton!

* this is an edited version of the piece I wrote for Pixelrights Blog earlier today.

Diary Picture - 10 Aug 2013

Years ago I lived in Bristol and worked on the press agency South West News Service. Whilst there, I was assigned to photograph the Bristol Balloon Fiesta which was a lot of fun. But in the intervening years I've never had the chance until the weekend just passed. 

The Fiesta is much bigger now and very professionally organised but the smooth sensation of hot-air ballooning hasn't changed a bit.

The press team introduced me to Colin, one of the pilots from Cameron Balloons who had kindly offered a to take me on a flight so I could get shots for the Independent on Sunday.

We rose steadily into crisp morning air, floating over the city that used to be my home. 

Colin seemed rather underwhelmed as I pointed out the landmarks of my former life. The offices on Hotwells where I learned my trade. A few of my favourite haunts - even the hill where I was thrown in front of a moving car by the co-designer of a famous middle-eastern weapon of mass destruction after I had tried to photograph him as part of a Sunday Times investigation. 

Ah, the carefree days of youth!

As we passed the south-western suburbs of the city our intended landing area was lit by a shaft of light breaking through the clouds. 

Gliding silently but for the occasional roar of the heater, I felt completely 'meshed-in'...

The perils of trying too hard...

It may sound strange but sometimes we, as photographers, try just a little too hard to be creative and can end up producing pictures that say more about ourselves than our subjects.

I may have been slightly guilty of this when I recently photographed the multi-talented Frédéric Beigbeder, french author, critic and celebrity (amongst a dozen other acheivements) for Radar magazine.

I had this idea that I wanted to portray his fizzing energy and somehow retain the reflectiveness that I strive for in my portraits. So I purposefully shook the camera on a long exposure to make wild shapes with the ambient light while holding my subject motionless with flash.

Here are a couple of the results.

From a colour perspective I really like the mixture of strobe lighting mixed with the very warm tungsten on the extended exposure. The Camera movements were intentional but slightly random and hard to predict where the light was going to wash into Frédéric himself.

Maybe this one is has more stillness to the pose and more reflectiveness but it wouldn't hold a page and Radar went with the frame above...

Frédéric himself was very patient through this slightly unpredictable process although he did think I was having some kind of medical episode when I first started shaking the camera around! He was very cool about the whole session and much funnier in real life than he appears in the pictures.

PS. I would appreciate any comments and opinions as to whether these shots work or if they are just a bit too contrived...

Diary Picture - 13 Jan 2012

The Olympic village and athlete's accommodation in the final stages of preparation for the London Games, taken from the roof of Westfield during a break in a leasing brochure shoot.

Diary Picture - 1 Feb 2013

Night just next to St Martins in the Field, discarded chewing-gum and the bare branches of winter illuminated by street-lamps. Fuji X100

Impossible Project PX680 - 07 Nov 2012, Paris

Pont des Arts, renowned the world over for the thousands of 'Love Locks' attached to the fence and railings by couples making a public declaration to one another. 

Amongst them the enigmatic message, "I was waiting for you". 

Were they the plaintive words of someone broken-hearted, written for the lover who never appeared for a rendez-vous? Or were they an affirmation of romance, finally discovered after a lifetime of searching? 

You decide.

Impossible Project PX680 - 05 Nov 2012, Home

Choosing a subject for a first shot with the new film was more difficult than one might expect. There was the fact that I was ridiculously keen to try it out, balanced with not wanting to waste a limited and precious resource. I settled on this rather traditional still-life mostly because I loved the colours and was curious how they would be rendered.

The subtle orange hue to the skin of the pear was a little lost perhaps but the ageing lime and the dried pomegranate came out exactly as I had hoped they would.

PX680 Colour Protection - First impressions

My much loved but under-employed Polaroid SLR680 SE has finally had a bit more use in the last few months with five packs of Impossible Project PX680 Colour protection to enjoy but there were a few surprises in the process. The results are a lot of fun and for the next week or so I'll be posting one Impossible Project picture per day to show them in a little more detail.

The transition from old Polaroid 600 film to PX680 Colour Protection is trickier than I thought for three principle reasons. 

The first surprise was the biggest, but least daunting in the the long-run - PX680 CP is not as "instant" as I had expected. For the first few minutes I thought I had done something wrong or that the camera had ceased to function in the intervening years since its last use. The pictures dutifully ejected as usual but, despite following IP's instructions to place out of direct light, there didn't seem even the faintest ghost of an image when I looked at it a few minutes later. I shot another test frame, turning the exposure compensation up to max in case there was an ISO mis-match. Again, a plain blue image after several minutes. With a heavy heart I put the camera down and resigned myself to the fact that the long hibernation had damaged it in some way. 

A few hours later, hardly daring to look, I opened the little Moleskin concertina file I used for storing instant film while shooting... and there they were; two pictures, one massively over-exposed!

After a while I came to realise that the image seems to develop within half an hour or so, sometimes slightly quicker. However, this doesn't really bother me. Quite the reverse in fact - the discipline of locking the picture away for a while only increases the enjoyment of eventually checking it. A bit like taking a film to the mini-lab and waiting for the prints.

The second observation was that nearly all the pictures had a little divot in the centre of the upper edge. Again, my first thoughts were that the camera had suffered some kind of malfunction but after thinking about the fact that PX680 CP is physically thicker than the old 600 it seemed logical that some kind of pinching was occurring. A quick check on the internet explained that the SLR680 had a different roller mechanism to the older SX70 and that this could cause the compression mark. The cleaning suggested has had no effect in my case but was worth trying. The marks themselves vary in size, and while there seem to be many factors, I have yet to establish any predictable pattern. On some of the pictures, they lend a certain analogue authenticity but after a while it can become distracting.

The final difference is the colour. Impossible Project have done an amazing job in resurrecting the technology after all the machines in the original Polaroid factory were put beyond use, but the PX680 CP has a compressed colour gamut in comparison with the 600 and a particularly distinctive yellowing of the whites and highlights. This means that after a while I found myself avoiding certain colours and lighting conditions, fearing the compressed tonality and slightly "urine yellow" results I was getting.

But there are some positive aspects of this very different colour palette and after a period of adjustment I started to find subject matter that would better suit the slightly dream-like qualities of the new film. This process of experimentation has been massively enjoyable and it has been years since I have taken pictures with such a sense of open-minded discovery. Relinquishing control in this way is so liberating compared with much of my everyday work where I am constantly striving for consistency.

Naturally, it is possible to correct some of these casts once the pictures have been scanned or copied digitally, but that sort of defeats the point. Instant film photography is an adventure, a whimsical exploration, a shot of uncertainty in an increasingly predictable world. 

As long as you can enjoy it on those terms, it's hugely rewarding.

A box full of (im) possibilities.

Several years ago I did a byline picture of one of my colleagues, and after she decided that she rather liked it, we agreed to do a trade. 

My ransom for the rights to use the picture on her web-site and PR company profile was fairly simple, a few packs of Polaroid 600 film. At the time, the film had just been withdrawn but it was still reasonably easy to find on internet auction sites.

Now we all know how life gets in the way of these slightly fiddly tasks and despite an occasional friendly hint, it looked as though I was likely to go un-remunerated. But with a special occasion coming up, I decided to give it one final try, and sent off a little gentle reminder that the swap was still not completed.

The response I got could not have been nicer. A short note apologising for delay accompanied by a UPS tracking number. A few days later, a cardboard cube bound with tape bearing the legend "impossible" was sat on the kitchen table, greeting my return from a long and tiring day.

My much loved Polaroid SLR 680 has lain dormant and somewhat neglected since the demise of 600 packs. And despite the inspiration of reading Greg Funnell's post about early Impossible offerings, I had been reticent about the shading process. 

It basically meant that you had to get the film immediately into shade to stop fogging of the developing image. Most people who had experimented with it described a kind of "mason's handshake" technique involving holding the film box over the exit chute of the camera with your left hand whilst supporting the underside and pressing the shutter with your right.

Now though, the new PX680 looks to be a might less cack-handed to use. You simply have to get the developing shot into shade promptly rather than immediately.

I have not had time to try this yet but it's hard to properly express the childish joy and anticipation with which I am looking forward to popping the seal and firing up the my beloved 680.

Details! Details! - part two

Following on from my hurried post at lunchtime... the story so far; a friend ask me for some DSLR raw files so he can run a test with them on upcoming software. He can't tell me any more than that and would prefer some shots from a variety of cameras, preferably pictures that are challenging in some respect.

Fast forward to this morning when Drew Gardner posted several examples of pictures, some of which I took, processed with Adobe's Lightroom 4 and also the newly launched Capture One 7. It was an "out of the box" test which aimed to garner an impression of the differences between the two software offerings rather than a serious exploration of the full capabilities of each.

He has since sent me a couple of the processed frames so that I might make my own observations on them. Firstly we have these two shots from an ambush in Afghanistan in 2006. The light was fading fast and I was crashing upwards through the iso of my 5D mkI as we fought for our lives in a total encirclement whilst on patrol with the soldiers of 16 Air Assault (3rd Parachute regiment and Royal Irish).

Here is Lightroom's version, with no changes or adjustments.

And here is the version from Capture One - 7

The first thing to note is that they both look way better than the in-camera JPEG that I used at the time (I always shoot RAW +JPEG although often, on deadline, it's the in-camera JPEG that I have to send to publications due to time constraints). Lightroom has produced a more saturated, slightly yellow/cyan shift which whilst not faithful to the original, does look good. At first, the area to the lower right of the picture, where an Afghan National Army soldier was crouching, appears more clearly. But on closer inspection it has markedly less detail than the C1 interpretation although it does a better job of holding the green colour in the undergrowth.

The default noise reduction in LR4 seems just a bit too aggressive and it seemed to be glossing over details in favour of smoothness. But the foreground figure of the running soldier has lost all detail n his left arm in the LR4 version and consequently much of the urgency of the picture is gone.

On Drew's blog there are several examples that I have not yet got from him. So this one-shot comparison is not altogether conclusive. But his piece makes the very valid point that details do seem to be getting lost in LR4 and the balance between sharpness and smoothness seems to be out of kilter.

Whilst it is almost impossible to do a like for like comparison I would point out a few strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches.

LR4 has very good highlight detail retention, markedly better than the samples from CO7 so if you habitually over expose your pictures and need to recover, that is something worth bearing in mind. Colour faithfulness and overall crispness cuts the other way; with CO7 the clear winner in Drew's test by such a huge margin as to be a little disturbing.

However, there is the NIK question. Many photographers I know have come to rely on the NIK plug-ins for many of the fine colour adjustments, sharpening, noise reduction and localised retouching that would otherwise be done in photoshop. These tools are a godsend and reduce further work in photoshop and overall post processing time. Capture One has never been compatible with these plug-ins (which are available for Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop) and while they are not cheap, the fact that  CO7 cannot use these tool in pre-acquire is likely to be a factor for many who are looking for a one-stop solution.

Still, I'll say it again, the amazing level of detail and colour accuracy means that all my high-end output will be routed through Capture One 7 for the foreseeable future.

Details! Details!

Digital photography presents as many difficulties as advantages sometimes. Chief amongst them if you have dedicated yourself to a good raw-file work flow is how to process the raw images.

At various times over the last few years I have used many or maybe most of the available options including Bridge, DXO, Capture One (in various incarnations) and more recently, the all-conquering Lightroom.

The advantages of Lightroom are obvious; a powerful feature set allied to nimble processing speed, excellent support for new camera file formats and the knock-out punch of a seemingly unbelievable price-point. Combine that with the Nik software plug-ins for pre-acquire and it made it a mighty tool for photographers to get the best from their files.

However, various versions of Capture One had always delivered the best colour of all of them (I confess never to have seriously used Aperture) and for all serious high-end output projects I have tackled over the past decade or so, it has been my favourite software.

A few days ago and somewhat cryptically, my friend and colleague Drew Gardner asked me if I had any examples of Raw files from a few different cameras that I could give him in readiness for a new C1 launch at an unspecified future date. He explained that he could say no more than that and asked my understanding. His idea was to try  a real world test on a broad range of subjects and light-levels, over different cameras. He wanted to have these ready for release day so that he could get the first results out onto the net.

Naturally I said yes and waited for some kind of announcement from him. But just to make his job as tricky as possible I sent him some low-light shots from a Canon 5D mkI and a 1D mkI, both of which had presented me with problems due to noise at high ISO shooting, as well as a few pictures from a recent sailing event I shot in the summer where the sails, water and spray all provide lots of fiddly details to be rendered.

This morning, as I started setting up for a shoot, he called briefly and said that I should check his latest post on "the Dark Art" and that I would most likely be surprised by the results.

Now, I haven't had enough time to fully digest these and I'll write a detailed post later today but the initial results are not just surprising, they are nigh-on unbelievable.

I suggest you read Drew's comprehensive post (here) and then check back in a few hours time for another take on this issue.

Although, it must be said that both he and I are very taken-aback at the sheer chasm between the two in terms of fidelity and colour accuracy.

It means that the new C1 version 7 will be an absolute must-have for all my high-output assignments. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of it.

Maybe not everything - but definitely not nothing.

Ever since I returned to Britain from the US in 1999 I have submitted pictures to the National Portrait Gallery's annual Photographic Portrait prize in the hope of making it through to the exhibition. 

The yearly ritual of delivering prints (showering in public - Aug 2010) and then, sadly retrieving them after they have not been chosen (collecting the children from detention - Sept 2010) has provided a certain amount of humour for me and is something I have enjoyed describing. 

Currently sponsored by Taylor Wessing, it is one of those prizes that often sharply divides opinion amongst my fellow photographers. Some, like me, see it as the most consistently challenging, interesting and provocative collection of portraits that the UK produces. Others regard it as slightly aloof and perhaps unrepresentative of the everyday majority.

Either way it is well supported with more than two-thousand photographers entering this year and more than five-thousand pictures submitted in total. Even with the seemingly insurmountable odds of getting into the final edit, the momentary sting of disappointment that accompanies the polite rejection message is something that never gets any easier.

Rejection or acceptance does not instantly make anyone a lesser or greater photographer. On the other hand, photography is a language, a form of communication and photographers who profess no interest in having the chance to connect with new and different audiences make me sad and slightly suspicious. 

This year I entered three prints, but one of them, a portrait of PC David Rathband, the policeman shot by Raoul Moat, had special significance for me. Meeting PC Rathband was one of those experiences that had really made me examine my life and how lucky I was. The terrible nightmares he talked of, the physical pain and mental anguish of having his sight taken from him in such a violent manner, the feeling of loneliness and isolation and the dignity with which he tried to bear it. 

His story had a profound effect on  me and it showed in the picture.

So it was especially uplifting to receive the news yesterday that this one photograph, of the three I submitted, had been selected to join the sixty or so pictures that would be included in the exhibition and book this year.

I found myself running a rather unexpected gamut of emotions. What I felt most instantly was relief. Maybe I had been wanting this particular picture to be chosen a little too much. It was replaced with a kind of elated disbelief as I read and re-read the email just to make sure I hadn't imagined it. This I understand is fairly normal behaviour for unexpected good news. 

Then finally, and most strangely, as my friends started to post messages on Facebook and text, expressing their disappointment at not being selected, I felt guilt.

The fulfilment (at the eleventh attempt!) of a modest but sincere ambition to see my picture exhibited amongst that selection of inspiring works made me feel momentarily as though I had been ushered into a nightclub when my friends had been left behind the red rope.

A day later I finally feel as I am probably supposed to in such circumstances, fortunate and happy. But this could never have happened without the people involved in the process and I would like to acknowledge the tremendous contribution they have made.

Firstly and most importantly, PC David Rathband, who was so open and honest in the way he sat for the portrait. His tragic death earlier this year was such terribly sad news.

Secondly, Sophie Batterbury, Picture Editor of the Independent on Sunday who commissioned me to shoot the photo and whose guidance in my work has been so important over the years.

Also thanks to Martin Berry at Tapestry who was endlessly patient and did a beautiful job of printing the pictures.

Obviously I could never have done anything worthwhile without the support of Jane and my friends but I haven't won a bloody Oscar so a sense of proportion might be best!

It's just a picture in an exhibition, a picture I feel strongly about in an exhibition I have always admired.

As they would say in New York, "That's not nothing!"

Gore Vidal

I was sad to hear on the radio news this morning of Gore Vidal's death at his Hollywood home on Tuesday.

Back in 1998 I had the slightly intimidating privilege of photographing Gore Vidal for the Daily Telegraph (London) in a Miami Hotel. At the time he was going through a phase of not giving regular interviews so the paper had considered the opportunity something of a coup.

I was warned that he could be quite sharp with photographers, that he had a well deserved reputation of not suffering fools lightly, and that consequently I was to keep my mouth shut as much as I could manage.

The oppressive heat of July in Miami just picked me up and sucked the energy right out of me, even on the short trip from the cab to the hotel lobby. Then the aircon nearly froze me like a popsicle (ice-lolly) as I walked through the swishing doors of the hotel and spa.

Arriving pretty much bang-on the allotted time, I was ushered immediately up to the tiny room where the interview had been held.

Earlier that day, feeling slightly lacking in fresh portrait glass, I had dashed round to Adorama before setting off for the airport and impulsively splashed-out on a Canon 135mm lens specifically for the job.

Now finding myself in the rather 'bijou' room with the light flooding through white wooden shutters, it was plain that the 135 was massively too long! I could just about get far enough away for minimum focus length if I jammed my head awkwardly sideways against the far wall and imitated a gecko.

So it was that I photographed a man who "never suffered fools lightly" while contorting myself into the most unbelievably foolish and precarious pose.

But, as is so often the case, those with the fiercest reputations are generally the easiest and most charming people in person. He seemed slightly amused at the ridiculous figure I cut.

We exchanged pleasantries about America and Britain over the short time of the shoot and at the end he looked me square in the eye and spoke.

"If you wish to succeed in America, all you need to do is tell everyone you meet that you are a Person of Integrity," he proclaimed in deep, mellifluous tones, stressing the last part in that slightly theatrical manner that was perhaps his trademark.

"It matters not a bit whether you actually are," he added, "Just so long as you keep telling everyone."

Tearsheet - Independent on Sunday Centrepiece 1st July 2012.

Always a good feeling to get a big display picture in the centre-spread of the paper. Doubly sweet when it's from an idea you generated with your own contacts...

Wider edit of pictures and full write up to be posted here in the next few days.

Barry Fantoni

Every so often you get a period in which there seem to be 25 hours in each day and all of them are spent working.

Last week was like that for me. The highlight of this slightly mad schedule was an evening spent doing portrait photographs of the multi-talented british author Barry Fantoni in his french home.

Barry was a leading light in the group of artists, writers, musicians and opinion-makers that made Britain cool in the sixties. It will go down as one of the most exciting and creative periods in our history and many of the things that drove this societal change; arts, music, political satire, were very much his strengths.

It almost goes without saying that lots of people can claim to have been on that particular bus, but Barry was one of the drivers. His role amongst the very first contributors to Private Eye may have been the starting point but from there his influence rapidly spread into television and popular culture. 

Despite this, he is perhaps not the household name one might expect. For those not acquainted with his extraordinary back-catalogue, don't bother looking at his ridiculously short entry on Wikipedia. I did, while checking that I had the correct spelling of his name for my captions, and the lack of information is derisory. Barry is evidently too cool for Wikipedia! 

The door to his house in Calais was dark and unprepossessing. But on the other side was a home fairly aching with quiet style. Nothing flashy, nothing trendy, nothing unnecessary, just a simple understated taste in eclectic objects and furniture. Emanating from it all was the enveloping and relaxed atmosphere of a life well lived. 

I could have spent an entire day and taken pictures from every angle without ever running out of amazing corners and settings for portraits. In fact the biggest challenge was what to do with so much choice in the limited time available. This was exactly the opposite from my morning assignment in a London office where I was left shaking my head in dismay at how hideous all the offered locations were.

Barry disappeared briefly while I decided where to start setting-up. I had asked if he could change the yellow t-shirt he had been wearing because it looked somehow wrong for the kind of author portraits that I had in mind. When he re-appeared minutes later, it was in a shirt that had been made for Picasso. Yes, the Picasso....  Definitely too cool for wikipedia!

Mostly due to the kind of piece I was shooting for, I confined myself to working upstairs in the office/studio he shares with his long-time partner Katie.  My favourite pictures from the take were all in the area around this desk. It was a kind of boiled down essence of the creative things he liked to do on a daily basis. Writing, drawing, music, all interspersed with family objects of touching hidden significance.

Often I prefer to shoot horizontal portraits in a wide, slightly environmental way like the one at the bottom -and used by the Independent on Sunday in their interview piece. But it was the more traditional vertical framing with the water stain on the wall behind, that best summed-up the evening's work for me. I made a conscious decision to to frame up with the turntable, desk and painting all leading out of the picture in different directions. The extended intersecting lines of these things, all significant parts of Barry's life, are intended to draw the viewer away from and then and back to his face. And although Barry spent much of the time laughing and joking, I quite liked the slightly contemplative look.

On the wall near his desk were three replica handguns which seemed like the only slightly odd choice or decor in the room. Barry explained that while writing the novels about his creation Harry Lipkin (the world's oldest private detective) he had wanted to get a proper sense of how heavy a handgun would be and how the ageing central character could have realistically carried such a thing. 

A we chatted in the course of taking photos, he talked about Depechism, his new art movement and showed me a few examples. As the name suggests, it is all about quick, simple compositions and he disciplines himself to make one every day. 

He is the sole member of the Depechist movement at present, but if Barry has decided that's the way to go, you'd be a fool to bet against it being the next big thing.

Diary PIcture - 6 June 2010

Backstage at the Bizarre Ball 2010. Picture editor Tom Broadbent had given me a much coveted AAA pass and an open brief..... I had expected it to be debauched, full of hardcore, alternative-lifestyle devotees and bohemians. What I found was a group of very nice people with very sensible jobs like town planners and accountants who just liked dressing-up and having a good time - "freakenders" ..... and why the hell not?