DIARY 038

What I've was up to last week; buying new gear, getting minimal sleep, and doing one of, if not the best shoot of my career so far.

MONDAY

On Saturday my husband and I had our joint 40th birthday party. 62 of our best friends and family dancing until 5am in two marquees set up in our garden. It was one of the best days of my life and we spent yesterday debriefing at the pub with our families, wishing we could do it all over again. In the back of my mind yesterday though, was the fact that I had to be up at 5.45am this morning to head straight to a shoot. Savage. The great thing about having had the time of your life though is that you sort of float on air for a few days afterwards so I ping out of bed feeling slightly cross-eyed but not too bad and head down to London.

The shoot is for a US brand I shot for once before a couple of years ago, and I’m capturing the founder in the locality ahead of them opening a Marylebone store over here. The first location is The Wallace Collection, an exceptionally grand art gallery with coloured silk wallpaper, 10 foot high old masters in 4-inch thick gilt frames, reflective surfaces in every angle and a security guard following us everywhere, even the loo. We had one hour to set up, shoot two looks in several different rooms, navigating the bright jewel-coloured walls by bouncing a couple of B10 flashes into the white side of two pop-up reflectors instead of bouncing them off the ceilings or walls which you’d be able to do if there was a more neutral canvas. Luckily the founder is lovely, decisive and incredibly photogenic so it’s all fairly straightforward and we spend the rest of the morning bouncing between locations around the local streets.

Last week I took delivery of a Canon R5ii body, which I finally bought after my the tethering port on my 5Div totally broke down on a shoot a couple of weeks ago and I had to end the day shooting to card (not ideal, but thankfully with a client I had worked with before and with whom I shared a mutual trust!). It was the final nudge I needed to stop dragging my heels and whilst I’m still getting used to the sensor, and keep bouncing between shooting through the viewfinder and the screen like some kind of OAP, I think it’s going to really raise the quality of my commercial work to a level I simply couldn’t achieve with the old body. Times have moved on, people expect huge files to play around with and the additional information you get on a mirrorless really is incomparable. And this is only an R5 - the GFX is a whole level above. I still want one, but have reasoned that this just isn’t the time. The past two weeks I’ve invested a huge amount in my kit, and this is where I’m at right now. The Fuji can wait, and until then i’ll just rent it.

The founder decides we’ve got enough options that she loves, and calls it a day at midday. Heaven. I’m back on the train home by 1pm, back up the work to my G-Raid in the studio, pick up the kids from school and head home to start clearing up the mountain of shit you’re left with after a party.

TUESDAY

Ok today it all hits me and i’m really, really tired but I have several thousand little jobs to do to catch up from taking most of a week off work last week. I’m heading to Nice on Friday for a job over the weekend so spend the day running through the email chains about kit, running order, my flights etc. which I’ve slightly been leaving on the back-burner in the run up to the party. I decide to add another R5 camera body to the kit list, so there’s plenty of back up if mine for some reason fails or falls into the sea and, as we’re shooting product as well as a model, a Canon EF 100mm Macro lens for some beautiful detail, and some back up tether cables. I think in the end we have about four between my digi-tech and the kit list but on a job like this you can’t be too careful. We’re going to be shooting on a boat with a connecting ‘chaser’ boat, in and around a pool, and moving around constantly so there’s plenty of scope for someone accidentally getting snarled up in a wire and killing off a cable. Best to be safe and the budget is there, so i’m giving myself a good safety net.

Work over the last few months has been incredibly busy, and as I’m not as quick at video-editing as I am at stills post-production, I hired a video editor to take over one of the video jobs I shot in May. I check in on the progress between him and the client, make a few adjustments and suggestions, and outline a game plan for the final notes as we’re in danger of running way over the original scope of the project. Good video editors are expensive, and I wasn’t paid a huge rate for this project so there’s a balance to be struck between getting someone else to do the work, and saving yourself the time, but them not then having to spend so much time on the project that you then are actually making a loss or a profit so tiny it renders the whole job a bit of a waste of time. I am learning this all the hard way of course, and suddenly realise I have to rein everyone in as we’re getting into territory the budget won’t cover, like video retouching and specialised VFX etc.

Max is away in Paris and I spend the evening finalising the third round of videos for a different project I shot back in April which has dragged on for a loong time. The brand is a big Italian outfit, and feedback has to go through so many different people that there are weeks in between edit rounds. This marks the end of the whole shindig and I’m so relieved to get it signed off at last. Video is proving such a different beast to stills and i’m still weighing up how I feel about it. One idea i’ve had is to create a ‘Director’s Cut’ of both of these projects to show what I can do if given real freedom and taking more of a Director role. DOP’ing is such a specific skill and I’m not sure if I have the bandwidth to learn it beyond a certain level… We’ll see.

Listen more about my journey into video here

WEDNESDAY

Spend the morning sifting through the low res from Monday. When shooting a ‘real’ person like this, I do tend to put a more specific grade on the imagery before sending low res over for selection so they can visualise how the final images will look once they’re all polished up. This particular ‘real’ person is gorgeous, photogenic and has a very creative eye so I’m sure she knows what a difference there will be between a ‘raw’ image and a final but I want clients to feel beautiful when they see images of themselves. I try to listen to what they say on set about their insecurities or worries (say someone doesn’t like their legs, or thinks one side of their face is better than the other etc. - people all have something they don’t like about themselves which is sad but just the reality) and make sure I bare those in mind when whittling down the images or make minor tweaks to the areas they aren’t sure about before I even send them. It makes the process a bit more long-winded but if it gives them a great first impression it means I’m more likely to be hired again, or at least thought of in a positive light.

To fund some new equipment, I’ve sold the Fuji XT5 I bought in February back to MPB. It would have been really nice to keep it as a little travel camera but when I weighed this up, I realised I always shoot film when I’m travelling and, now that i have an R5ii which can handle video as well as stills, that I could get something smaller and more compact, like a G7Xii or a Ricoh if I really feel like I want to plug that gap in the future.

THURSDAY

Down to London for the day as it’s finally the day I pick up a Contax 645 of my own. My strategy for camera swapping hasn’t entirely worked out as the guys who were fixing the Mamiya 645 AFDii have basically given up after having the camera for 6 months. It’s incredibly disappointing and frustrating that they have had my camera for that long, been terrible at communicating that entire time, said they had the parts, and then that they didn’t. Then said they are sending it back exactly the same as they received it. I sort of don’t really know how to deal with the situation to be honest but I’m getting it back from them, and going to send to another guy i’ve been recommended who specialised in Mamiyas as he used to work in-house for the company. If he can’t fix it, then i’ll just have to write it off; sometimes that’s all you can do with these old cameras. At some point, they will just fail.

The whole thing has made me quite fearful of investing in something as expensive as the Contax but it’s the best in the business for the work I do at the moment so I’m taking a leap of faith and have bought the body and two lenses from a highly experienced photographer who has five of them - yes FIVE Contax 645s… Going down to his studio was such a fascinating experience, he was selling two different bodies and watching him switch all the different components around so I could test which I liked the feeling of better was quite eye-opening. So un-precious. He was jumbling film backs, prism finders, rolls of film all over the place, putting lenses on his GFX (with a Contax lens adapter) so I could test the focus and swapping things around to make sure that the kit I took home was one I was totally happy with. He even had a spare body that was just for parts, in case one of his other bodies failed. It made me want to get to grips with the way these cameras are made and work in a more practical hands-on way, rather than feeling so afraid of them all the time. This, along with the seeming impossibility of finding competent and communicative camera-menders in UK has made me yearn to do an apprenticeship so I can start to manage my equipment myself. But that’s for another life time I think - or at least when I lose the love for being on set.

I come away carrying a Contax 645 body, an AE prism finder, a film back and insert, an 80mm and a 55mm: and £5750 less in my back pocket. It’s my dream kit and I can’t wait to use it. Get home, pack for Nice.

FRIDAY

This morning my digi-tech and lighting assistant are flying to Nice ahead of me to do the recce for a job i’m shooting tomorrow for VBB. It’s a dream shoot, dream location, dream situation that I would usually love to on site for as early as possible… but today is also my kid’s Sports Day at school. It’s such a classic ‘working parent’ moment where you have to really consider your priorities and work out if you can make both of your lives work in tandem with one another. Short answer, there’s always a compromise. Would I love to be on the recce? Yes. Would I feel more prepared for the shoot if I had a day to get the lay of the land, watch the light, hang out with the team? Absolutely. Would I regret miss my youngest daughter’s first ever Sports Day? 100% - this last question is the one that really matters.

When they asked me to do the shoot on these particular dates I had that moment of thinking that I just had to do whatever was asked, as it’s a great shoot, great client, great relationship etc; that I had to be pliant with whatever was asked of me so as not to seem difficult or uninterested. But then I thought, why not just ask. Just ask if I can send a trusted assistant in my place to recce on my behalf and arrive the evening before the shoot instead. Just see what they say. Their immediate answer was ‘yes of course - whatever works for you’. And more often than not, if its the right job for you, and if they really want to work with you, people will be pretty amazing and making things work. When you’re feeling unconfident and unsure of yourself, it’s very easy to slip into the feeling that you have to be easy, pliant, bendable to other people’s will all the time. But a lot of the time, it’s not necessary - you can stand your ground, ask for what you want in a friendly and polite way, and everyone is still just as happy.

I spend the morning packing and getting my kit together, checking and rechecking I have everything, put my bags in the car and head to Sports Day. Afterwards, we have a drink in the pub as a family and I head down to Heathrow to catch an 8.45pm flight that will get me in at midnight. As I get to the airport the call sheet comes through for tomorrow, now that the recce has finished, and i’ll need to be up at 6.30am to be ready in time. Flight is delayed and I end up in bed at 1.30am after a taxi from the airport, checking in, making sure all four camera batteries are charged up, and I’ve laid out my clothes / bags / suncream / everything for the next day.

SATURDAY

Up at 6.30am. Shower, recheck my kit and head down to the ‘glam suite’ to meet the model, and say hi to the team. I’ve worked with most of them before, but not all, so there’s intro’s over coffee, running through the shot list which I missed yesterday, and most importantly a quick chat and hang out with the model, Iman (who is jaw-droppingly beautiful). For me, it’s so important to make that connection early in the day and we have a laugh and a chat in the car on the way to the Marina where we are going to be picking up our boat, a 33- foot Riva which was commissioned and once owned by Sir Elton John; needless to say it is utterly beautiful and I can’t quite believe I get to shoot on this thing. We have another boat, a chaser, which we can shoot from, carry extra EQ and crew in, and Tommy, the digi-tech sets up on there with the client team as myself and Viva (on lighting) scramble between the two boats in the 35degreeC temps. It’s wild and hectic and literally my dream job.

From there we go to an amazing hotel, and shoot various locations around it from the pool, to a suite, back to the pool for golden hour, and a few places in between. It’s nearly 40 degrees the whole day and production deliver iced towels for our necks every hour to keep us all from flaking out. It’s probably the longest shoot day I’ve ever done, but we did it and I loved it. Everyone is super-happy and we have a long supper finishing up at midnight before crashing back to the hotel. It’s been a very long, exhausting and totally fulfilling week starting with a party, and ending with this incredible shoot. If this is what turning 40 looks like, I’m all for it.

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