#willbremridge

13 seconds with Adam Lambert at this year’s Isle of Wight Festival, shortly before going on stage to headline with Queen

Here’s Jake Bugg photographed at the Bush Tearooms in West London. We shot while the restaurant was open to the public and worked around wherever the customers were positioned so as not to cause any fuss. Published in the September issue of Q Magazine. 

I’ve been shooting quite a lot of work for Q Magazine over the last few months. Here’s French DJ pair Justice shot for the magazine’s record collection feature. We shot at the Sonos studios in East London. When I arrived i saw this huge golden coloured curtain and couldn’t resit using it for the shoot. This was actually a last minute token shot that ended up being used by the magazine. 

Who’s excited for the new JK Rowling movie? i had the pleasure of photographing Ronan Raftery, a cast member on Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them. We shot a variety of portraits in my studio in South-East London for press/PR use. Ronan turned out to be a a huge photography enthusiast and got really excited when I showed him my old Mamiya R76. I decided to shoot some portraits of him playing with it. 

Well it’s been a long time since I’ve been back here on Tumblr. Its been a busy summer/autumn and I’ve got tons of work to add to the blog. I’ve been shooting a lot of actors here in London for press and PR use. I’ve started shooting for Shortlist Magazine since July which has been a bit of an editorial career milestone for me. They’re a magazine I’ve wanted to work with for years. I’ve also been shooting plenty of personal work. I’ll be posting a few more Start-To-Finish blog posts soon too. 

Here’s British actor Arinze Kene photographed in Claridges Hotel, Mayfair. We managed to get an incredible suite to work in and were given about 2 hours to do what we wanted. Some variations of these shots will be in Atittude Magazine in December. 

Behind The Scenes Video here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ZsScs-Ers

Back in October 2015 I decided to take a trip to New York for 2 weeks mainly just to hang out. I’d never been before and had a handful of contacts for crashing on couches across the city. I pitched the idea to my videographer friend Titus who is always down to go on an adventure and off we went. 

We spent the first 5 days being proper tourists, riding rent-a-bikes around Manhattan (trying to do rad stunts obviously) and gradually getting a mental map of the place and where all its famous landmarks are. I also had an idea for a personal project to shoot portraits of New York’s iconic hot dog vendors and all our cycling around was great for figuring out where the highest concentration of these characters could be found. The answer was midtown area. Times Square, Madison Sq Gardens, southern end of Central Park were all great. 

My friend Titus was there to shoot a BTS video of the portrait series and I still needed to find an assistant to carry my lighting gear around on a boom all day. A solid morning of Facebook updates and hassling of American contacts and I eventually found a very helpful friend of a friend to give me a hand.

THE CONCEPT

Fairly simple plan for this one. Wander around midtown all day introducing myself to street food vendors and convincing them to let me shoot some portraits of them. I wanted to accentuate the glowing lights of the hot dog stands along with New York’s incredible natural light. There’s something about the colour tone of the buildings that makes the light down the non-sunny horizontal streets incredibly photogenic especially when combined with the sunlight cascading down onto vertical streets in the background. When in Manhattan you constantly feel like you’re at the bottom of a canyon and the resulting light effects are unparalleled.

PUTTING THE PLAN INTO ACTION

We started off outside the Langham hotel on 36th & 5th and started walking in the direction of Madison Sq Gardens. Before long we could see hot dog stands on every street corner and I quickly thought about my approach. My main aim is to make it as easy and least time consuming as possible for my subjects in all of my shoots and this particular situation required me to be extremely fast and efficient. I failed four times at the start of the day. Everything in New York is busy and fast-moving just like in London and these guys were skeptical about where the photos were going and about missing customers. The hot dog vendors tended to know only basic English and were also worried about their area managers seeing them slacking.

One other thing worth mentioning is that people nowadays have a totally irrational fear of what will happen if a stranger takes their photo. Ordinarily it will involve that photo going online to a pretty tiny audience of people who will give the photo about 6 seconds of their attention before moving onto something else. However, it seems what some people are afraid of is that you’ll take their photo, post it online and their entire life will rapidly be destroyed by a mix of their government, robots with lasers and possibly North Korea. So these days you have to allow for a good 15 seconds of explaining to people that you’re not going have them sent to a gulag in Siberia. 

Luckily we soon had a spree of guys who were perfectly happy with being photographed and the project started to get under way. I had my assistant carrying a 600w Einstein strobe on the end of a telescopic boom, firing into a 46″ Photek Softlighter umbrella. We didn’t bother to dismantle the gear between each shoot and simply walked around all day with it ready to be used. 

EXPOSURE & LIGHTING

I aimed to under-expose on the camera by a little bit and fill in with the Photek. Not too aggressively but enough to give my subjects a little extra pop. I had my assistant booming the light to roughly 45 degrees left/right of my subjects and also aimed to shoot fairly wide so that I was documenting New York to a decent degree. After all, why bother flying thousands of miles and not show the scenery?

Here’s a shot straight out of the camera.....

Camera: Canon 5ds Lens: 24-70L Aperture: 2.8 Shutter: 1/200 ISO: 125

POST PRODUCTION

I had three main aims here: warm skin tones, blue/cyan shadows and accentuated glow from bulbs/lamps......

Warm skin tones: In this particular situation I simply raised the colour temperature a little bit. Super simple. In other situations I might use the Curves layer in PS and add more yellow to the highlights, or perhaps the same technique in Colour Balance however I got what I wanted this time just by pumping up the temperature. 

Blue/cyan shadows: I am such a huge fan of Norman Jean Roy’s use of cyan toning in the showy areas of his photos especially in shots featuring a lot of grey urban landscape. I’ve been heavily influenced by his work since I started out and there’s a little bit of that influence here. On this occasion I opened a curves adjustment layer, switched to ‘blue’ channel and added a little blue to the shadows. Then switched to ‘red’ channel and dragged the shadows into the cyan region (opposite of Red on the RGB colour spectrum). This gave me just enough of the effect I wanted. 

Glowing bulbs/lamps: New layer in PS switched to ‘soft light’, make little radial gradients where there are bright light bulbs using a colour sample of whatever colour that light emits. You can see the added glow from the light bulbs on the hot dog stand and from the cars in the background. 

LESSON LEARNED

I got an email world renowned portrait photographer Art Streiber praising me for this portrait series. It was one of the best emails I’ve ever received as I’m a huge fan of Art’s work. He wanted to help me get this series printed in New York magazine and I jumped for joy around my studio. He then asked if I had got the contact details for each subject and a little mini interview to go with each of them. I didn’t have either of these things. Due to my excessively polite Englishness I didn’t want to waste another minute of their time and didn’t bother to have release forms signed or get any story to go with each person. 

The mini interviews would have made my project carry so much more weight when it comes to having it published and without the clearance from each subject I stood no chance. It could have been done so easily using an ipad with a release form app and something to record audio. 

Art Streiber rightfully gave me a schooling for this. I felt like I’d let down one of my heroes and it’s taught me a valuable lesson to slow down, be more thorough and make sure when doing solo projects that I am entirely my own producer and journalist. 

So off I go in a few months to re-shoot the street food vendors and attempt to get this project printed in the US national press!

Behind The Scenes Video here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ZsScs-Ers

British actress Jing Lusi photographed in my studio in south London. Jing is currently starring in Stan Lee’s Lucky Man on Sky 1.