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.