What did 2019 mean to me? It meant I photographed 246 people.

I’ve been a photographer for a decade and my main clients have been foreign editorial titles and UK PR firms. While I’ve been fortunate to photo numerous CEOs and personalities, the downside is such work is time constrained. Resultantly I was conditioned to work quickly and learned to maximise light having decided to eschew lighting. I took the decision to focus solely on portraiture in 2019; while my jack of all trades experience has meant I’ve photographed multiple industries, I was never a go to photographer, in my opinion, as I wasn’t well known in any of them. To say that 2019 was a learning curve would be an understatement.

Since 2009 I have photographed, amongst others, the chair of the British Fashion Council, CEOs of fashion houses Gucci, Zegna and Kiton, of watchmaker Hublot, Michelin Star chefs, artists, master distillers and master tailors. What they have in common is that the locations, be they offices, workshops, restaurants etc, are photogenic often with leading lines that aid with composition. The downside is such people are time poor. There is rarely time to prep a location, build a rapport with the subject and take a meaningful portrait. Indeed taking a portrait under such circumstances is a skill in itself. I also had the additional challenge of frequently working abroad and was strict with equipment, limiting myself to plane carry on, which meant essential gear only and no flash or lighting. I forced myself to use available light and pushed my equipment to reasonable limits. The end results, while passable, are unfortunately affected by various amounts of digital noise which is escapable when shooting in this manner.

My main aims for 2019 were to focus on portraiture and to shoot at settings producing the best quality results. This meant improving my technical skills through using lighting, something I had neither been comfortable with nor proficient in. I decided I would shoot indoors, using a plain backdrop as a background. What is obvious now is that a plain backdrop has no depth, no leading lines and nothing apart to help with composition. Faced purely with what was in front of me, namely a subject’s face, their hair and the clothes they were wearing, I unexpectedly found myself relearning composition. Without a background, I was now filling the frame with a subject’s face, something I had never done before. Previously I had always incorporated background elements to help give context to a portrait. And now I was shooting better quality images, an additional unexpected consequence was the imperfections in the images were more noticeable. The combination of higher quality images zoomed close in on a persons face meant there was far more detail on offer and no background to distract or divert attention to. Thus I found myself spending more time editing each image, be it a piece of fluff on a jacket, a stray hair across a subject’s face. I now spend a minimum of 20- 30mins on each final shot. 

Once I was comfortable with the technical, I moved onto refining my direction to my subjects. However this wasn’t a conscious or deliberate path. I did not realise I had shifted my focus from lighting to relationship building for some months, however when I had my ‘eureka’ moment it seemed an obvious progression. How do you get the most out of someone? What makes a person tick? And how can I capture ‘that’ moment or feeling? It’s unreasonable to believe that a subject will offer genuine emotional honesty in front of a camera within minutes of meeting me, often for the first time. Despite the ubiquity of camera phones and the prevalence of selfies, most people remain nervous of being in front of a camera and their guard can go up. Unintentionally I found myself starting every session with a cup of coffee or tea; even when the subject did not want one, I would have one myself in order to build rapport through conversation. This also gave me time to study their faces which gave me a baseline to gauge their emotions and expressions. Did they have a better side to their face? Were they having a bad skin day? Did they wear glasses? All of these characteristics, and more, then guided the lighting.

What was apparent was that whatever was happening in a person’s life that day would directly impact on their face. An argument with the bank, the death of a friend, annual reports to complete; the accompanying expressions would make themselves apparent unless the subject was directed to consider something else. And even then, a subject’s thoughts would quickly return to the day’s events.

I used to pride myself on being able to walk into a photo session with just a camera and walk out shortly there after having taken something I was satisfied with. Another take away from this year is how far I’ve moved from that; I have deliberately slowed my work flow down. I’m keen to be as precise and methodical as possible, in order to take the fewest amount of frames that I can. I believe it is pointless putting the camera into burst and plugging away hoping that something will work. The result will be hundreds of images, all much of a muchness, which require time spent to view and select the one or two best images. Rather I prefer to give direction, take a few frames, review the images and then fine tune anything that needs to be amended. I don’t want to take a snap shot that lasts 10 seconds on the internet, which is how I used to work. I want to spend time to take a meaningful image that last a year, two years, three years. Hopefully more.