Available light, close in, usually a 35mm lens.
I photograph people: portrait sessions, and the rooms where people perform: drag brunches, dance studios, a festival on a desert plain.
No flash in the room. What I work with is whatever is already there: a bank of studio windows, a red stage curtain, one table lamp after midnight, hard sun coming off dust at four in the afternoon.
Black and white when a room's colour is fighting the frame, colour when it is not. Some personal work still goes through a film camera and comes back shifted. Those frames are kept exactly as they returned.
How a sitting works
First
A short call
Who is being photographed, what the frames are for, and where the light will be good at that hour. Fifteen minutes is usually enough.
Then
The sitting
On location, or somewhere with a decent window. No crew unless the brief needs one. Bring more than one shirt.
After
Selects
A gallery of edited frames to choose from. Turnaround and licensing get agreed up front, per job.
What I shoot on
- Body
- Canon EOS RP.
- Lens
- RF 35mm F1.8 Macro, on for almost everything here. Wide enough for a room, close enough for a face, fast enough for a dark venue.
- Light
- Windows, doorways, stage light, one table lamp, open shade. No flash.
- Film
- 35mm for personal work. Scanned and left uncorrected, colour shifts and light leaks included.