me vs Guatemala trip, 0-0

So the plan to spend a week photographing premiership footballers slipped through my fingers like a last minute penalty which knocked me out of the league. One day it was all systems go and Chanel 5 were on board then the next they pulled the plug and the opportunity swirled away. Dianne Wright was perhaps even more disappointed than me, I had hoped to get some good photos and perhaps some football gossip but the serious subject of raising the profile of Sean Wright Phillips' supported charity were snatched away at the same time.
I must admit I am slightly confused as to why 5 premiership footballers can't see their way to pay for the trip themselves as it was apparently only going to cost around £15k and as it was the last minute we could have tried to get it in to some magazine or online website to raise the charity profile. But hey, that didn't happen and so I am staying here in Blighty for the foreseeable...

premiership and charity

A couple of days ago I received a last minute call on a Sunday evening to do a PR job the following day. I'm happy to do PR and it was a fairly standard press junket with a premiership footballer who was doing some marketing for a new Disney computer game. So I arrived at the boutique hotel in central London and walked into the suit that had been hired to find Sean Wright Phillips sat on a sofa staring intently at a large flat screen TV on which he was playing a racing game called Split Second Reality. As a professional footballer Sean is obviously very competitive and as the various journalists came through for their 30 minute interview which followed pretty much a similar format, Sean took on all challengers and took great pleasure in beating all of them.

It was quite a long session for Sean and having already notched up several hours over the weekend mastering the beta version of the new game he played it fairly constantly for 5 hours through all the interviews, filming and photography.

Overseeing all of this was his manager and Aunty, Dionne Wright. Toward the end of the session she asked me if I was freelance because they were organizing a trip to Guatemala to visit a charity that SWP supports called Education for the Children. I joked that I had a passport and would almost certainly be available not realizing that she was actually enquiring exactly that. So after sending the photographs to the client I sent an email to Dionne outlining my experience with NGO's and editorial as well as sending a link to some pics I did with Oxfam. A phone call last night from Dionne confirmed that the email had gone down well and that they had been impressed with how I worked on the job, relaxed yet professional. She said that they think I will be perfect for the job and they are just waiting to hear if channel 5 are going to come as well to make a doco in which case there will be more money to play with. But even if they don't then apparently that doesn't necessarily mean I won't go. So I am awaiting the call to confirm details and the dreaded conversation about money, the one I always hate and the main reason I sometimes feel I could do with an agent. I have a figure in mind based on what other NGO's pay and how the pictures are licensed after wards but we'll see what their requirements and expectations are first.

Action Aid campaign shoot

A couple of days ago I did a days shoot for the NGO Action Aid. The campaign is to raise awareness on world poverty and so they are creating a piece of campaign literature using a play on the word poverty. I thought we had two days to shoot this and hired a couple of lights to give the pictures a commercial feel as requested, however due to the dreaded budget cuts we had to try and get 8 shots in several locations in one day. Definitely not ideal and I diplomatically suggested that the shot list was very ambitious but faced with the challenge there was nothing to do but to crack on and do as much as was possible. By the end of the day, having squeezed one last shot as the light faded we had ticked of 6 shots but were very happy with the results which will be designed in a grid so that the tee-shirts read the campaign message. however we unfortunately only were able to use the lights on the first shot of the yoga as dragging them to the park would have taken far too long so I went with a flash and a reflector, shoot and run...

Ox-Tales and Sir Kingsly

This evening I was shooting an auction in aid of Oxfam at the Saatchi gallery and had the surprizing pleasure of photographing Sir Ben Kingsly. I wanted to try and get a portrait of him out of the context of the auction but the best I could muster was a head shot while he introduced the charity event.
Another candid shot of the even that I liked and shot available light was this one. I thought there was something of the John and Yoko going on...

Master of photography

Last week was quite busy for me photographically, on Weds I took the family up to Shoreditch to look at the private view of my MA work. So I guess this makes me a master of photography but of course you never stop learning and after working as a professional for over 12 years and finishing this level of education I still feel there is so much more ahead of me than behind me.
It was a pretty good turn out but we did invite around 1500 people and I guess at it's peek maybe 400-500 were crammed into The Printspace enjoying a Heineken and looking at the fruits of our collective labour. It's funny but because this was the culmination of a two year online Masters the final show was actually the first time I had met some of my fellow students. There was a good atmosphere after a couple of weeks were the pressure of delivering a show at all seemed to test some peoples diplomacy and patience. But we got there in the end and after reconsidering my display I went with a wallpaper square on the wall rather than a column which was the original idea. I think it looked pretty good and I got some very positive feedback from picture editors, photographers and the gallery owner who told me they considered it best in show.
I think the project worked best in a book and perhaps if I exhibit the work again I will add a few more pictures and a few bigger prints.