Robert Lindsay

Recently I shot the publicity campaign for a TV show starring Robert Lindsay,. He asked me to take some portraits of him while we were there, for his own publicity use. He was a great subject to shot and i was pleased with the results.

Pictures From the (very recent) Archives: London Blitz I have been planning a project for a while now based on sports which are huge in their home country but are niche sports here in the UK. My wife plays rollerderby with the London Rollergirls which gave me the original idea, and i immediately started thinking about expanding it out into other sports. I became aware of the London Blitz Junior American Football team, and spoke to their coach about shooting some of the guys. This is part one, and in a couple of weeks i'll be shooting some action shots on the football field.

I shot the portraits in the team changing rooms, which had a great, grungy feel, even if it was a tight squeeze getting all the lights in place. Then at the end of the training session i had a couple of minutes or less with each player, which as they were all incredibly co operative, professional and friendly was plenty to get some good shots. Here's a selection of the shots, i'm looking forward to shooting part two...

Pic From The Archives: Andrew Lincoln. This portrait was shot for a show called Strike Back, shot in Johannesburg i South Africa. We shot loads and loads of material of the actors in the studio on white backgrounds, and loads of background plates out in the hills, and comped everything together to make dramatic, filmic publicity shots, but one extra thing i really wanted to do was a series of intimate portraits, darkly lit, so i persuaded the client to let me set it up and shot them alongside all the other material. They ended up loving it and produced huge prints which they mounted around the venue at the premiere screening in Leicester Square.

Pic from the Archives: Alan Shearer. A couple of years ago i photographed all the people who were covering the World Cup for the BBC, it was a busy day with 24 different footballers milling around, egging each other one an chatting as i tried to cover all the different groupings and singles that we needed. I really liked some of the single portraits so here is one of them...

Pic From the Archives: Enslaved. Enslaved are a Norwegian progressive black metal band, and and i was sent out to Bergen to shoot them while the Hole In The Sky metal festival was on. I love the Scandinavian landscape and so got the band to drive us out to a location by the coast where drummer Cato regularly went fishing (he is a keen fisherman who regularly writes articles about the sport and presents fishing TV shows). There the volcanic rock, pools of water and massive sky provided the perfect backdrop for the band. To give a more dramatic result I had lights with a battery pack with me, in my wheely case which weighs about 30kg, in addition to my 17kg rucksack. Having hauled this about 3/4 of a mile over rough gravel tracks, carried it down steep hillsides and over streams, and finally opened it when we arrived at the location, i found that the bulbs in my flash heads had broken, always a risk when putting cases in the hold of a plane but actually a very rare occurrence, and so i had to shoot with natural light after all. At least i got a good workout that day.

Pic from the Archives: Behemoth. This was shot in Wrocław, Poland, in an old WW2 era factory where the band were shooting a video. Working around an existing video or tv shooting schedule is always a challenge, and once i was set up and ready i had to wait for a couple of hours, periodically readjusting my lighting to match the rapidly dropping light levels as the sun went down. I finally got my time with band with just enough light left to balance against my flash, ad shot a series of group shots and portraits around the fantastic crumbling architecture of the factory complex. Despite looking pretty terrifying the guys are extremely nice and i like them a lot.

They also don't take themselves too seriously.

Pic From the Archives: Boris. Boris are a japanese experimental rock band, with heavy elements of psychedelia in their sound, so it made sense to me bring that element into my images of them. I called ace illustrator Stephen Collins to get him on board, and then photographed the band in 'swirly' body shapes, shooting with exaggerated perspective and getting them to imagine the undulating tentacles of an octopus, before picking the best poses, arranging them into a composition and sending the 3 shot off to Steve. He then did an incredible job turning my vague brief into a psychedelic mind trip, and the final stage was then to over-retouch their faces to make them fit into the smooth vector illustration world.

Pic from the archives: Marchlands. This TV show was set across 3 generations of people who lived in the same house, in the 60's, the 80's and the present day. The challenge was to represent this visually, so we did three shoots at different points in the filming, when the house ws dressed for the 3 different periods. Each time i had to set up the camera to shoot from the exact same position, and light it so that the different parts would blend together, then we would shoot the relevant cast in situ. Once i'd blended the 3 periods together, we had a cross generational portrait of the same room across three different time periods.

Pic From The Archives: Sam Carter, Architects. This Shot of Sam, the singer of UK metal band Architects, was sadly never used, being deemed 'too scary' by the magazine it was shot for, but i love it. Glowing hot coals in a fire were shot and the cracks and texture built up on top of Sam's face to give the feel that he was actually glowing from a fire inside. Shots of flames were then built up to make the hair. The biggest challenge was getting the balance between his real face, and him being recognisable, and the firey nature of the image, but i think it worked out pretty well.

Pic from the archives: London Rollergirls - Smack To The Future. I've done a lot of posters for the London Rollergirls over the years, this bout had the typically puntastic name Smack To the Future, and so it was clear that i had to do a rollerskating version of the classic film poster, complete with flaming wheels. One thing i did realise though, was that the original poster makes NO SENSE anatomically. The flames, the car, Marty's leg, there's no correlation between them at all!

Pic from the archives: Angela Gossow from Arch Enemy. I had to fly into Copenhagen airport (in Denmark) and then get a train to Halmsted (in Sweden) for the shoot. I didn't really look at all the flight details that closely beforehand and have a slightly shaky grasp of European geography, so i spent the entire trip not knowing for sure which country i was in, only what city. The band were great and Angela was lovely, she used to work in advertising and marketing so she totally gets the image side of the music business, and the whole band all liked the final images.

Pic from the archives: Daleks. Here's another one for the Whovians, a bunch of Daleks. I shot the Daleks at the TV studio, then created the whole background in post, using smoke elements that I'd shot previously and some textures from a big rock that I'd shot on holiday, to give the impression that light was streaming down into a smokey cave.

Pic from the archives: Gel Face. I wanted to make it look like i had a person made from glass, with all the contours of the human form but a translucent, shiny surface quality. We achieved this with corn syrup and some food colouring and i was pretty happy with the end result, though poor Ryo had a pretty sticky journey home, even after washing off as much of the sticky syrup as she could.

Pic from the archives: Brian Helmkamp Another simple portrait, of ace metalworker and skateboarder Brian, taken when we were doing a shoot to make a record of all his tattoos for posterity.

Pic from the archives: Anneliese. This was a little test shoot i did with a makeup artist, no big concept, no props or great location, but Anneliese looks great and the pictures came out really nicely. And no, she's not naked, or even topless, just a very low slung vest top.

Pic from the archives: Whitechapel series 2. This was a big comp job, with the three actors and the table shot individually in a studio and the pub and it's scary clientele shot separately on location. At the last minute the client decided that it would be good to have drinks on the table for each character, so I shot the drinks and their reflections on black in the studio and added them in.

Pic from the archives: I've just finished post production on a promo video for London Rollergirls , starring the lovely skater Lucy 'Vagablonde' Hoare, so it seemed like a good opportunity to dig this shot out of the archives, a simple portrait i did a while back with the idea of conveying the tough athleticism of these women. I have plans this year to shoot a load more sports based portraiture so stay tuned...

Pic from the archives: personal project portrait with Sohui, who was awesome to shoot, very professional, and even did her own excellent makeup.

Pic from the archives: Captain Jack (John Barrowman), Torchwood: Miracle Day. Backgrounds were shot on a rainy, windswept welsh beach while they filmed a helicopter attacking a cottage, then we shot the cast in a school hall a week later. John's always good to shoot, he loves posing with big machine guns.

Pic from the Archives: Seminal Norwegian black metal band Immortal. Shot in the hills near Abbath's house in Norway. Abbath and Demonaz were really friendly and hospitable (although Demonaz lectured me at great length on why the selections for Terrorizer's top 100 black metal bands were all wrong), i hung out in Abbath's living room with a glass of wine while they got their makeup on for the shoot. He is a massive Kiss and Motorhead fan and the room was a shrine to the two bands.

Pic from the archives: Mission 2110 for CBBC. The robots were guys in suits, standing 8ft tall and clanking around looking awesome. The series was filmed on some massive container ships moored off the coast of Scotland and was more of a pain to get to than a lot of American shoots I've done.

Pic from the archives: James Nesbitt as brain surgeon Monro, for ITV. Shot this in the operating theater set with genuine super bright brain surgery lights behind him.

pic from the archives: avenged sevenfold on a NYC rooftop. i had to jump in a taxi from the airport straight to the shoot and set up my lights having only been in the country for an hour. The guys were lovely and took me to the shake shack afterwards.

First up: pic from the archives - Matt and Karen from Doctor Who, and a whole load of digitally composited flowers.