Friday's shoot

So the shoot on Friday was really interesting. It wasn't the exciting sort of photoshoot that I'm sure you're thinking of. Michael Woods was just photographing Gyles Brandreth for his new books as well as for some publicity shots. There was no crew.. no fancy lighting.. and no big fancy digital camera. Michael just brought his old twin lens Mamia, his little SLR digital and two sheets of gold poster board to create a mirror effect (Michael also does a lot of photo collaging and was going to use the area with the gold to weave in photos of Paris). Gyles was meeting us in Barnes at 2:30 so we arrived at around 12 to scope out a good location. Michael seemed to basically know what he wanted... a bench with good lighting and some sort of trees in the background. Well, he decided on a location and a later in the day when Gyles met us Michael got straight to work. He knew the Mamia camera very well and of course didn't have to fidget with it very much to get what he wanted. Made me think about how Stephen and Frank say how important it is to know how your camera works so when a photo is there you can take it quickly without too much effort. I held the gold poster board as Michael made his shots. It's so inspiring that some people actually still use black and white film for commissioned commercial shoots. In all it was a really inspiring day because I got to watch and hear all of Michael's thought process about how and why he decided on location and ideas for the shoot.