Actually, this is Eileen and she is from Jamaica but she went to Nigeria and bought this outfit and wanted to wear it in the studio. It may look like an outdoor shot but the background was black and I replaced it with a small slice of the left-hand side of the image and applied a generous amount of blur to it.
My wife found Jean working in a Cambridge store while looking for bathroom cabinets. Jean is quite a character and very much young at heart. She had these amazingly long nails and I really wondered how she managed to use the computer and credit card machine where she worked. I wanted a soft romantic look for Jean but had to include those hard-edged nails!
This character was part of a travelling circus that visited Calais for the centenary celebration of Blériot crossing the channel in 1909. He adopted various poses for me and I chose a circus caravan as a backdrop.
This isn’t a real Vogue cover. The model was a Turkish girl called Burcu and she lacked a little confidence. I said that she looked good enough to be on a magazine cover but she didn’t believe. I created this and gave it to her – she was impressed.
Continue Reading →
Bicycles are everywhere in Cambridge. It’s convenient and cheap and the only permitted form of self-owned transport that students can used in the centre of Cambridge.
I liked the colours and patterns of the houses stacked up on the slopes at Villefranche in the south of France. I used BuzzPro to take some detail out of the buildings (simplify) and a mild pen-and-ink effect to create this painterly impression.
Near the Gare du Nord, these restaurants seemed ablaze with colour and typify the buzz of Paris with eating on the street at almost any time of the year.
I was in Toronto for a conference in late September one year and hoped to catch some trees showing autumnal colour. I took a trip to Niagara Falls and on the way back we stopped at Niagara-on-the-Lake. I had prepared myself by taking a medium format Yashicamat 124G camera with me loaded with Fuji Velvia film. I saw this house and was struck by the colour of the leaves. I returned a few years later and gave a copy of the picture to the house owner – he was very pleased.
Trying to capture a bird in flight is not easy. I caught this young gull from a headland in northern France but the backdrop was a plain sea. The backdrop here is actually another cliff-top shot but taken in Pembrokeshire. I simply combined the two to make it a little more interesting.