Most jobs I am booked for give me some thinking time. I plan the shoot and pre-visualise each shot. Sometimes, though, it is exciting to be called to an urgent job, dropped in at the deep end, and to have to think on the spot.
That is exactly what happened on this occasion. I received a call one afternoon to go immediately to a club in the centre of Cardiff called 10 Feet Tall. All I knew was that I was needed to take photographs of some body painting. The photographer who had been booked was in an unusual dilemma – he had locked himself in his own house.
I seized my equipment and left, trying to prepare myself for what I might be about to walk into. The scant twenty minutes of time which I had to prepare myself, though, was not enough to imagine the job I was about to begin.
Picture my surprise when I walked into the club to see a woman being painted. Completely naked.
It turned out that Pretty Intricate (owned by brother and sister team, artists Liam and Sadie) had hired 10 Feet Tall for the day in order to produce visual materials for their website to showcase their skills. They offer body painting of an amazing standard, going as far afield as Ibiza during the summer season to work inside various clubs.
I quickly identified features of the club which would serve well as background to my shots – a wall here, a staircase there – and solved the problem of missing studio lights, which were meant to have been delivered but hadn’t been, by using one of my flashguns as balanced fill-in flash to light the models.
The shoot became a race against time – the club, of course, was due to open to the public in the evening. I had to fit in photography of several adults, including an interesting session with the well-known dreadlocked Cardiff character, Ninja. While photographing the naked female model, beautifully painted all over, I remarked to her, “You’re comfortable with being naked in front of the camera.” It turned out that she was a professional Nude Life Model for artists. She told me, “If I could walk around naked all the time, I would.”
At a different time from the adults, I also took many shots of the art Liam and Sadie had created on the faces of some children chaperoned by their mother.
Around three hours into the shoot, the photographer who had originally been hired, having managed to extricate himself from his house, came along and watched me work for a while. Once he had seen that everything was going well, he gave me a tap on the shoulder, told me, “Well done, mate,” and shook my hand. Then he left again.
I am pleased to have built up a relationship of trust with Liam and Sadie of Pretty Intricate. It’s fantastic to work with artists who express themselves through another medium.
