Neil Danton

…no not that type of playing the field. Get your mind out of the gutter.

This is more like playing ON the field. I was assigned the other day / week / can’t remember exactly, to get a few portraits of one of the Cork Gaelic footballers, or is it Cork Hurlers?

Actually it’s both, as he’s going to be playing both codes this season. That used to be not uncommon, but with the increase in training and match schedules, in the last few years nearly everyone has opted to declare for one or the other. Even the legend that is Seán Óg decided that Hurling would be it, rather than continue with both.

Bear in mind, for those not of the Irish persuasion, that Gaelic Games is an amateur sport. These guys aren’t professional athletes. They have to work full-time, in addition to all the training for their chosen sport.

So the time for the assignment was set, and the journo was due to interview him at around the same time, which (at this time of year) was fast approaching dusk. As usual, journo had a ready-made excuse as to why he needed to go first (sorry Michael, couldn’t resist ), so it meant I’d be shooting in near darkness outside by the time he’d finished the interrogation.

The location was a hotel, which, in common with most modern hotels, is a bit restrictive in terms of backgrounds. Still, no worries, it was going to be pitch fricking dark anyway for the outside shots. At least said hotel has a little bit of a garden that I could probably make use of.

Did a couple of shots inside, a half-length:

and then a close-up:

There were also a couple outside:

and the stand-out image for me:

All images were the old favourite – one-light. The half-length was using a 24mm lens, the close-up a 135mm and the 2 outside using what is increasingly becoming my favourite lens – a 50mm. All those years of going round and round in circles with different lenses, going from wide-angle to wider-angle, and I’m now back where I was donkeys years ago, shooting a full-frame camera with a 50mm lens. Technology, PAH.

So which one was published? None of those above. No, as usual they published the only one I didn’t really like which I haven’t shown. Typical.

Lady readers please stop drooling before you go to work.

TTFN

…again. Isn’t it funny (funny strange, not funny ha ha) how things go in cycles?

Having just recently shot a portrait of a boxer, I had an assignment to shoot a weigh-in for a boxing contest about 3 days later. No sight nor sound of boxers or boxing for about 4 years, and then 2 in a week.

This was the weigh-in for the vacant All-Ireland Middleweight Title between Gary (Spike) O’Sullivan from Cork and Ciaran Healy from Belfast that was due to take place the next day. Actually, if you know anything about boxing, that’s a fairly obvious statement. If memory serves me correctly, under boxing regulations the weigh-in HAS to take place between 36 & 24 hours before the bout.

So, shot the usual. The standing on the scales shots, and the standing with the fist-up shot (Spike left, Ciaran right):

Then, in the time honoured tradition of boringly repeating the same shot that’s been done a million times before boxing press conferences, shot the head-to-head where they both look very tough and stare at each other, except that for once this one was a bit different, because they both got a fit of the giggles:

I then wanted to get a quick portrait of Spike. Although I was on assignment for a national newspaper, national in newspaper terms doesn’t extend to Belfast, so given that I would probably only have time to get a shot of one of them, it was going to be Spike.

Having asked him if it would be OK to get a quick shot and almost getting it before getting “bumped” by the actual weigh-in, I’d had to wait until afterwards. I literally had about 10 seconds to get the shot, as Spike was already under strict instructions from his manager to get dressed again to keep warm. His manager and trainer is Paschal Collins, a former boxer himself (and brother to the legendary former world champion Steve Collins) and I certainly didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him!

I had a hand-held strobe with a grid ready, just guessed at the power, shot 3 frames, and due to my fantastic ability more by luck than judgement nailed a pretty good image:

You might think that someone who goes into a ring and pummels another person as hard as they possibly can, would be nasty and aggressive outside of it too. Not the case. He came across to me as helpful, mannerly and unassuming. Don’t think I’m going to volunteer to be his sparring partner anytime soon though.

Seeing as how this post won’t be going out for about a week or so, I can tell you that Spike won the fight on a points decision, and I was assigned to the bout as well.

I might save a couple of images of the fight-night for another post, or I guess I could do it now. What do you think? Pardon? What was that at the back? You want me to do it now?? OK then.

The lighting in the stadium was the worst, shittiest lighting I’ve come across in quite a while. From my ring-side position, the contestants were completely top-light, so most of the time it was a case of shooting up into the shadows. I set up two 1D MkII N’s, one with a 28-70mm f2.8 and hot-shoe mounted flash, and the other with a 50mm f1.2. I spent quite a while testing out both while the under-card bouts were being fought, and really couldn’t make my mind up which worked the best. Actually that should be which worked least worse. Met up with friend and fellow pro Cillian just before the main bout started, and he was having the same issue, so it wasn’t just me then!

In the end I went with the f1.2 lens, shooting at f1.4, which only gives a depth of field of a thin piece of paper, but I preferred it to the other combo, where the distance between the ring ropes is perfectly sized so that when you shoot through the ropes, the flash head is right in line with the top rope of the gap you are shooting through.

The 28-70mm and flash combo came in handy straight after the end though, for the decision announcement:

I left that image as shot and didn’t crop in, as for me the image is made by the MC on the left. He was one of the “Layyyydeeees annnn Gennulmen” traditional MC’s and just added a nice touch to the image.

I think there must be a training school somewhere that you go to in order to become a boxing MC. It teaches you how to extend a single vowel or consonant to about 10 seconds.

TTFN

…stands a boxer, and a fighter by his trade, and he carries the reminders….. lah lah lah lah lah. With apologies to Simon & Garfunkel.

Look, just think yourself lucky you can’t actually hear me singing it. I’ve heard that burst eardrums are particularly painful.

So.. I was commissioned to shoot images of some up-and-coming young sports people, as part of a college bursary scheme. Strange word bursary. I’m more familiar with scholarship, but there you go.

Fortunately we had use of a Jimminyasium (someone once said it to me like that), as on the day of the shoot it was the weather from hell. Horizontal sheets of rain.

So once in the Gymnasium and having cleared up the pools of water that poured off me, I got to work.

For me the stand-out images of the shoot were of a boxer, and first up, just lit with a softbox:

Believe me, that’s a big fist when it’s up that close.

I then decided I’d kill-off the ambient. Regular readers of my drivel excellent weblog will know it’s one of my fave ways of focussing the viewers eyes onto the subject, and me being able to control the light instead of the other way around.

Lit with a gridded mini-beauty dish. Gridded? Can’t be a real word surely?

TTFN

…appreciate the things you take for granted, when suddenly you have to do without one of them.

Few people even think about the “normal” things that are always “just there” like electricity, running-water, cable or satellite TV and nowadays of course internet access. I recently had to struggle along for a week without broadband, as the average life expectancy for a Netopia modem that Eircom supply seems to be about six months (I’m now on my third).

The latest “doing without” is running water, as a result of the pumping station that supplies half of Cork City being under several metres of water. Why it was located in a place that to my certain knowledge floods on average once a year I don’t know. OK, so it’s never flooded that much before, but in a country where it rains so much, it comes as a surprise to me that it comes as a surprise to others that sometimes … it rains a lot.

The waffling excuses valid explanations being uttered so far, such as “unprecedented” and “once in a lifetime occurrence” aren’t bringing much comfort to the 100,000 people that are struggling along at the moment. Of course there are lots of politicians, public authorities and utilities helping to put things right by scoring points off each other in the media as to whose fault it all is, but right now they’d be appreciated a lot more if they offered someone the use of their showers.

The fact that the government has now got involved and set-up a “task-force” fills me with lots of confidence of course, and so I now expect things should be resolved by 2025 (and I don’t mean almost half-past eight).

So anyway, last week I needed to get an image of a chef with an “alternative Christmas lunch” and the dish was salmon, which I thought was appropriate. Salmon – fish – water – get it? Oh c’mon, I know it’s a pretty tenuous link but I’m doing my best under difficult circumstances. I’ve had to reduce my coffee intake by 50% due to lack of water.

This was going to be a real quick image. Chefs are always busy, so I only had a few minutes with Paul, the head-chef at Actons Hotel in Kinsale. Easiest thing was to kill-off the ambient light and distracting background by under-exposing the scene by around 4EV, and lighting him solely with lighting I have control over.

I always keep one flash in my bag that is set to slave mode and manual power which works nicely with an ST-E2 transmitter. It’s a struggle sometimes if used outdoors, as the infra-red transmitter doesn’t always fire the flash, but indoors I’ve never had a problem. Used a mini-softbox on the flash, 3 test shots to get the exposure correct, half a dozen shots of different angles and poses and job done:

I then took a different dish with a different subject (thanks Tania), and then one of the two of them together and all done. 15 minutes, start to finish.

If only the engineers could get the water supply back on that quickly.

TTFN

…tough in the Editorial world, and publications are trying to keep an eye on expenses, but reducing travel fees by assigning me to shoot an editorial portrait of someone that lives in the SAME STREET as me is surely as far as it can go!

So anyway, that was the 2nd portrait I was assigned to shoot that day, and maybe a story for another time, but first up I had an assignment for one of the “Sundays”.

My subject was a doctor, and we were to meet at the University. The story related to medicines, or pills, or drugs or something (must pay more attention to what picture editors say) and we had a handily located display cabinet of old medicine paraphernalia nearby, so went with that as a prop for one image.

There was also a plain white wall, well it was the underside of a staircase actually, and I felt I wanted to get an image of some kind there as well. Problem was, when I say plain white, I mean it was very plain, and very boring, but something was drawing me there to make an image.

So I went to the local hardware store and bought some paint, and painted some shapes onto the white wall for effect:

OK then, I didn’t paint the wall at all in truth. Put a strobe on the floor and fired through the handily located foliage to create the shadow pattern.

TTFN