Red carpet blues
When I started out in London, I used to return to Sheffield at the weekend and when I caught up with friends, one of the first questions was always “who’ve you been shooting recently?” After a while, I realised that often the smaller stories proved to be the most rewarding but all people want to hear about is those goddam celebrity types.
While it’s easy to say that you shot Johnny Depp or Victoria Beckham the other day, the truth is that to get that one picture, it involved turning up three hours earlier with your stepladders to begin the long wait. About 45 minutes before the Sleb de Jour turns up, all of the press cards are thrown into a bag and are drawn out to decide who actually gets to enter the penned area first. At this point, the full-time entertainment photographers start to gnash their teeth as the only way for those guys to get money is to be front row, centre. That way, they can get their full-length, half-length and headshots of the j-listers for next day’s Daily Star while using their special laptop clamps on the metal barriers. For people like myself who don’t need the eyeline right down the barrel of the lens in order to get my rent paid, it always makes life easier to go towards the back and play around with other people’s flashfire, ambient light and wideshots.
Anyway, the point being, by the time famous person X turns up, you get maybe 20 seconds as the assembled entertainment guys scream for a second of eye contact, PR people do their best to get in the way and the subject of all the attention looks around, bored.
Basically, the “cool” jobs often suck. My personal faves are the jobs where you either get unique access to a private location or you get to spend time with somebody that you actually find interesting. Unfortunately, telling someone that you shot a family of Kosovan refugees who may be deported in their home in East London isn’t QUITE the same conversational trigger that a mention of Pete Doherty can be..
Okay, I’ve obviously been away too long. Who is it in the red bin bag?
I think (as a regular viewer of your flickr account) that actually your work speaks for itself. Just hand people the URL and have done with it.
Zero; that’s the Celebrity Big Brother winner, Shilpa Shetty. She’s a Bollywood film star that won, despite the other twunts that were in there having a right go at her in all manner of racist ways..
Liz; is that your way of asking me to stop?
I’m actually slowing down my usage of flickr and hope to just use this site in future when it’s redesigned very shortly!
Don’t be too down on your friends. They are proud of you because you do something that you dig, because you went out and you made it happen and because you’re bloody good at it. I know for a fact that some of your friends miss you pretty bad. Its the same for me (except without celebrities) – nobody wants to hear how Cameron really digged my Big Bang demo today or that Emily really worked hard to pull her C up to a D. They only seem to listen when Nick picked up all the chairs and threw them round my room or when Adam told me to get *******. Chin up you marngy sod!
Noo!! I hope that didn’t read that I was criticising my mates! Far from it. It’s just that when you catch up with someone for the first time in months and have an hour or so with them and they ask what you’ve been up to, it’s far easier and more condusive with having a good natter to say “shooting Brad Pitt” than to start going into long-term projects. My laziness, I guess.. You asked for it now; next time we meet, I’ll bore your arse off…
Please don’t stop using Flickr! I love the immediacy of it, and the fact that it’s open to everyone…so one moment I get someone’s shite photo of their gerbil, and then I get professional photos which I see on the front pages.
And I love to be able to comment.
No! Don’t stop with the flickr!
The current redesign will enable photo comments on this site and, at the moment, I’m paying to have my site online but using flickr more! I’d rather get my money’s worth..
It looks like it won’t be set until August though so there’s a while yet!