Portraits

He was at Bond Street Underground station a couple of weeks ago, playing slide guitar. I recognised Ry Cooder’s Paris Texas theme as I came down the escalator. There must be a lot of ways to play it wrong but George played very well and I stopped to listen.

He’s a big personality and seen and done a lot of things and somehow in all that, coming through was this man that I liked.

I took his photograph, and didn’t look at the settings – a mistake I make too often. So the shots weren’t sharp.

So today he was there, just packing up. He asked me how I was getting on and I checked the settings on my camera and had another go.

When I looked at the photo after I took it, I could see he looked serious. And what else – maybe this, maybe that.

I remember a study by Kyoto University about six years ago that found that young people had a different ability to detect subtleties of expression compared to older people.

George wanted to see the photo and when I showed it to him in the LCD, he said he looked tired. I said we’d bump into one another again and I could show him how the photo looked on the page.

I can give him a print if he likes it on seeing it again.

Fuji X100F

I was invited to photograph Filthy Talk for Troubled Times in 2015 at the venue in Edinburgh during rehearsals for The Festival Fringe. Matthew Lillard, whom I recognised from the Scream movie, directed. Holly Williams (see below) mentioned TV actresses Zibby Allen and Erin Pineda in the cast.

One of the photographs I took was in The Times, and I remember thinking – Oh, that’s what it takes to get a photo in The Times. I thought it was well-nigh impossible unless you were X, with skillset Y.

I googled the play just now and this first thing that came up was a review by Holly Williams, and she wasn’t too positive about it.

Why revive Neil LaBute’s 1990 debut play? It’s a short, unpleasant, rarely-performed piece set in a strip club, where dumb, cruel men and a couple of waitresses banter, each breaking out to address the audience with tales supposed to be out-there in their honesty. Maybe they had bite 25 years ago; now they reek of cliché.

For me, I was surprised that the shots came out as they did, given that we were in a dark theatre and I had a fixed lens Fuji X100s shooting at ISO 800 and no additional lighting.

Awards ceremony for Off The West End nominees and winners held at Central Hall, Westminster. I shot about a hundred frames, most with people standing alone and some with couples and groups. it was speed, speed, speed and still some people didn’t get a chance to be photographed before the management shut down the room because of health and safety, so many were crowding in. For me it was a great experience making contact with people and establishing a mood immediately. Buzzing, rather than exhausted at the end of it.