Uncle Jimmy
A couple of years ago, I had some extremely expensive marketing materials produced to send to PR, and marketing firms in a bid to secure some meetings, and hopefully some more work. These trifold brochures cost in the region of £1 each – which is expensive in mass printing terms. Anyway, the cover image of one of the cards was a shot of my wife’s uncle Jimmy. This was taken back in 2009, when he & his wife met our daughter for the first time. It was a scorcher of a summer’s day, and I’d shot loads of images of their dog for some sideboard prints. I was lying on the ground, next to a white wall, when he came across with his ice-lolly and stood over me. The wall had bounced back light from the overhead sun – filling in the harsh shadows very nicely. I quickly pointed the camera upwards, and shot a few frames.
The resulting pictures looked brilliant. His craggy skin texture was highlighted by the directional light skimming across the surface of his face, and the tiny burst of flash had created a catchlight in his eyes. I gave this image a good poking in post-production, using a cross-process preset in Lightroom to get the basics in order, then some selective retouching and high-pass sharpening in Photoshop. For those young’uns who don’t know what cross-processing is – a long time ago, we used to have cameras that had doors on the back. If you opened the door, there was a chamber which held stuff called “film”. This stuff was light sensitive, and it allowed you to capture images on small rectangles of the “film”. This stuff had to be treated with a complex mix of chemicals called “developer” to make the image visible. Different types of “film” used different types of “developer”, and if you used the wrong type, it made your pictures look rubbish – usually with a green or purple cast, or lacking contrast etc. Some people loved the effect, and used it to their advantage to shoot entire corny fashion editorial campaigns. “Cross-Processing” was born. Nowadays, the technique is replicated digitally by men who spend hours a day on various internet forums, talking about the minutiae of manipulating digital files to death instead of working, meeting girls, or spending quality time with their children.
Anyway – the picture got some comments, but the expensive tri-folds resulted in zero work as usual. You need to know the people, not just contact the people…..but that’s another story.
