El Mariachi

This is a portrait of mexican wrestling fan and film maker Rob Mcdaid, which I shot for my exhibition last year. Rob wears a mariachi uniform that was given to him as a gift by a group of his film students. 

He is currently editing his first music video which he shot over two days in London with another good friend of ours Johnny Griffith. 

With an image like this the costume obviously plays a large part, but I think what sells it is the pose. It has a gunslinger quality to it and a confidence that is hard to fake. I always love working with people who like to play around in front of the camera, as there's only so much you can do to set something up. At the end of the day it boils down to the person you are photographing and how they can project their character into the lens.

Happy new year everyone!

Matt De Tisi

A couple of new portraits that I shot of the legendary Matt De Tisi a few weeks back.
Matt worked as the best boy on zombie resurrection. For those of you who don't know what a best boy is, they are responsible for the day to day handling of the lighting equipment on a film set and work under The Gaffer.

Shout It Out Loud

As of Wednesday it will be three weeks until the opening night of my exhibition, so I thought I would upload one of the new shots that will be included in the show.
This is a portrait of my friend and model Yasmin, shot on a Mamiya C330 using natural light at her home. Also in the show will be one of the polaroids we shot during this session.
The show will run for two weeks beginning the 2nd of August with a private view on the 1st.
Lord Lav will be DJing, so come down, see the work and meet some great people.

Mr Jim Sweeney

During the last week of filming we would sit for up to two hours a day waiting for the torrential rain to stop. So whilst drinking tea and eating my way through a mountain of baguettes I took some shots of the cast and crew enjoying the down time.

All images in this post were taken using a Bronica ETRSI medium format camera.

Jim delivering some of his characters lines

Mac with fresh zombie spine

Pull apart

One of my polaroids shot on the Automatic 100. Shot on Fuji fp100b film.
Nice!

Five by Four

For those of you kind enough to follow my blog I apologise for not updating as regularly as I should.
Here are a few new pieces I have been working on.
All shot on a Tachihara Wista copy with a 135mm lens, shot on ilford HP5 and developed in LC 29 Developer.

                                Justin - Just Light Reflected

                                
                          

                                
                                  Tom - The Uplifter

Get back

Until recently I have been really pushing the digital aspect of my work to the point where I was losing sight of why I got into photography in the first place. Then the other day I heard an interview with Brian Smith on fstoppers.com talking about getting back to basics and getting back to a way of shooting where you actually had fun!
It was getting to a point where on a shoot I would take a DSLR, two Medium Formats, Large Format a Half Frame plus studio lights and portable flash.
By the time i'd switched cameras six times i'd missed out on any spontaneous shots.

So I took my Bronica ETRS and a back up body, a reflector and my Large Format and went to the beach with my friend Justin. I asked Justin to bring his windsurfing board and we waded into the sea, I don't think either of us were prepared for how cold it was going to be.

About 100 yards out I raised the camera to my eye, focused and pressed the shutter button, the camera made a pathetic noise and the mirror stopped half way. So I waded back to shore and swapped over to my back up body and went back out.

Even after about 200 yards due to a sand bank we were still only up to just over our knees in the water and the shot I had in mind involved the water being up to chest height, so to fake it Justin sat down.

Here is a taster of one of the contact sheets, and if you would like to here and see more behind the scenes of my work leave a comment in the field below .

Thanks for reading

Rob

Shoot For Your Life

The great team over at shootforyourlife.com have featured my portrait of film director Mike Leigh on their site. It will be up on the front page for 24 hours and then become part of their archive, when it is replaced by another photographers work tomorrow morning.

I have spent almost entire days going through this website and looking at each photographers work, so it is a great honor to become part of their archive.

Enjoy!

The Readerswives Collective

For those of you who have perused the links at the side of this blog, you may have come across The Readerswives Collective. For those of you who haven't, here goes....

The RWC are an art collective founded in Guernsey by Andrew Smith, AKA-Rost, DJ 76 and many others. Their mission is to make art accessible to everyone and encourage new, upcoming and also established artists to network and work together.
Boasting an impressive roster of underground artists across Europe the RWC are growing in number by the day.
Check your pie before you eat it, as they've probably got their fingers in it!

I shot the above portraits of RWC founder Andrew Smith during two separate visits to Guernsey, both shot on a Mamiya C330. Top is on Ilford XP2 and bottom on Portra 160 VC.

Wayne Hemingway

Back in June I had the pleasure of meeting and photographing Red or Dead co-founder Wayne Hemingway. As usual in any situation involving a well known personality time is very limited, so it always pays to have a game plan. I walked around the building looking for a good spot and found a canteen which had floor to ceiling windows all down one side, I took my meter readings and set the camera all before hand so I was ready. I knew I wanted the background to bleed out to white behind him, so I metered accordingly. In total I shot 5 frames of which this was the best.  

All images were shot using a Bronica ETRSI with a 75mm lens.  

New Project - Five by Four.

I have just begun working on a new project titled Five by Four. 

For the next three months I will be travelling around photographing as many people as I can using a large format camera and only shooting in available light. All images will be hand printed to the same size as the original negative and exhibited at an unconfirmed venue.

If you would like to be included in this project please feel free to send me an email via my website: www.welcometothedarkslide.co.uk

George Mallory

Shot on my old Bronica ETRS, the one on the left was on Kodak E100VS Slide and the black and white on Ilford XP2. These images formed part of an exhibition and were based around the story of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine who disappeared whilst attempting to summit Mount Everest. I managed to pick up the goggles from an old army navy store for £5 and the jacket from a charity shop. We walked for miles to find a spot suitably in the middle of nowhere along the sea front and it was even colder than it looks in the pictures!

Yasmin

A couple of months back I decided to get back in to taking portraits just for fun. Everything has been getting so serious lately that I began to lose site of why I started doing photography in the first place. 

So I called up a few friends and have been making regular shoots with them just for the hell of it.

The above shots of Yasmin were all taken on the same day, all except the last one are a mix of ring flash and daylight.