Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
If you’ve poked around in my archive or on my portfolio site you’ll know that a large proportion of my work is on film and TV sets. Unit stills photography is both a personal passion and a career that’s very much in it’s infancy for me (you could argue that all photographers are constantly working on developing themselves, if you’ll pardon the pun!) and I take any opportunity I can to meet professionals in the field and learn from their own work process.
Despite 9 years working in the entertainment industry I’ve only got 3 years of experience shooting stills on set, and although in that time I’ve made in-roads with most of the major TV broadcasters and have buckets of experience on set, working on this career is, like any other, a long-term endeavour with lots of long days and terrible paycheques along the way. But I do love it, which is half the battle! Frustratingly it really is only half the battle at this stage, the other half being largely taken up with knowing the right people to show your book to and getting the right breaks.
With that in mind, two bits of absolutely excellent news: first of all, tomorrow I’ve been invited to meet and observe one of the industry’s leading unit stills photographers on location in Surrey on Neil Marshall’s new film, which I’m really looking forward to. I won’t be allowed to shoot anything myself, but just the chance to see how an established professional shoots and interacts with the crew and talent will be absolutely indispensable experience, so I’m really looking forward to that and am extremely grateful to all those who pulled the necessary strings to make it happen!
Secondly, today I came across the website of another of the leading unit stills photographers, Alex Bailey. To my surprise and delight, he not only maintains an active blog, but he’s also written a book about publicity photography, called Movie Photos and available for the princely sum of just £19.99. I didn’t even think twice about ordering it…