Neil Danton

..animals or children, unless you find a child who is a natural in front of a camera.

OK, so that’s not quite the famous expression created by WC Fields. I’m fairly sure it was “children or animals” but I re-arranged it to fit better into this post. I also added the bit “unless you find…”. Just because I can.

I had the pleasure of working with Sophie recently on a shoot to promote the Mitchelstown Artisan Food Festival and if only all the people I have to shoot took direction as easily!!:

We had chef Kevin Dundon on hand as well:

I certainly know who to call on if I should need a “model” to work with in the future. Thanks Sophie.

The festival takes place on Sunday 28th August.

TTFN

You’ve doubtless heard the expression “Bull in a china shop”, but what about a bull in a restaurant?

Shot recently for the official opening of the new Bull’s Head restaurant in beautiful Dingle, Co Kerry.

That bull may look like a reasonable chap from where you’re viewing, but he was pretty mean-looking close up!

Restaurant owner Gearoid getting approval for the menu:

That had to be one of the strangest PR photography shoots I’ve done in quite a while!

TTFN

…Hollywood Icon, Legend. So many descriptive words, but that’s enough about me.

What I’m really leading up to, is that I was privileged to photograph Hollywood icon Miss Maureen O’Hara recently:

Star of over 60 movies she is now 90 years young and was launching the Maureen O’Hara Classic Film Festival in Glengarriff, Co Cork where she now lives for most of the time.

Unsurprisingly no direction needed to get the result I wanted. She has that “screen presence” even when meeting her face-to-face.

Still a classy, feisty lady. An absolute pleasure for me to meet her

TTFN

…a man in a Tux. Apparently.

Always nice when people get the idea that boring ideas and images aren’t going to be noticed and that it’s going to take some effort to produce something that might catch the eye. Even a fairly simple concept can be jazzed up with a bit of effort:

So with Debs & Grads Balls in the offing, a nicely written press-release with an original story concept, and a quirky or fun image to go with it might work for a Mens Outfitters? How about, instead of a couple of people in Ball clothing, or looking at clothing, make them look like mannequins?

Of course sometimes you need to risk life & limb to create an image by standing in the middle of the road to make the shot:

Then again, less likely it was my safety and more having an “assistant” with nice legs behind me that held up the traffic

TTFN

…Imelda May!

Had a great laugh recently at a PR shoot for the Clarion Hotel in Cork. The hotel is closest to the venue for the Live at the Marquee concerts, which among many others will this year feature Elton John, Christy Moore and Imelda May, so what better than having the mad staff at the hotel dress up as the stars and check in:

“Imelda”, actually Kasia, was fairly sure I was joking when I asked her to lay on top of the piano. Oh how little you know me:

TTFN

I wandered down to beautiful West Cork recently to do a shoot for the home supplement of a Sunday newspaper. The story was centred around what B&Bs are doing to add value to the B&B experience. In this case it was providing different courses while enjoying a stay, and in particular this one was song-writing in the company of a musician. A guitar playing, piano playing, drummer in fact. The list of who he’s worked with is a bit like a who’s-who of the music world, but includes being tour drummer with Ronnie Wood.

I started off with a few general views of the interior & exterior of the property:

Then it was down to the more interesting but slightly difficult concept of how to convey music, peace & tranquility and anything else I could throw into the mix. A bit awkward when’s there’s no sound in a still image!

The location of the property was right on a cliff edge, and I mean right on the edge, so that was a natural place for an image:

The main room where the course will be run was another:

I was still missing something though, even if I wasn’t too sure what it was. I wanted something extra to add to an image. Then I remembered a “prop” I’d met earlier.

My musician’s daughter is Summer by name and summer by nature and after a quick check that it was OK to include her in an image, I asked her if she liked to dance and let her off to do her own thing while her father played:

It took about 3 frames to get the right shot with enough movement in the dress to show it’s not posed:

I just love that image.

TTFN

In the portion of my life where I still shoot as an Editorial Photographer, I’m often shooting business people, mostly for a couple of sunday newspapers.

It’s always a challenge to avoid the man-in-suit-with-laptop, or man-with-folded-arms type portraits, which need to be saved up for emergencies, as sometimes they really are just about the only thing it’s possible to do! However, I try my damnedest to avoid them.

So here’s a quick business portrait shoot where I managed to create a couple of images without using the “last resort”.

This CEO has a business, which although based in deepest, wildest West Cork is a global operation and there are clocks on the wall showing the various time-zones with some of the countries where they operate, so the first image I wanted to create was going to include those.

This was the starting point light-wise at the aperture, ISO & shutter speed combo I wanted to shoot at:

First thing to fix is the light on the background. Nothing too directional, just a 580EX flash firing into a white shoot-through umbrella, camera right (probably around 1/4 to 1/2 power, sorry, I’m a bit like a chef that cooks “by taste”, there’s not too many rules!).

That takes the background from this:

To this:

Next is to light the subject. This would be a 60cm (2ft) Ezybox soft-box, again with a 580EX fired through it, camera left:

In order to get the right perspective I used an 85mm lens, which meant I was pretty much jammed up against a wall, on my knees, but using any wider-angle lens would have “lost” the clocks.

Here’s a very approximate lighting diagram:

Still trying to avoid the “last resort” we managed to find another location for a 2nd image. Just the soft-box for this one. Get it back far enough and it’s going to light plenty of the general area as well:

Nice and relaxed. Nothing worse than business portraits that are too stuffy, or where the subject looks wooden (usually because they’re scared stiff of having their portrait taken!).

Oh, I didn’t leave the CEO sitting there all the time while I set up lights. The first image wasn’t actually shot first. It was a misfire from the Pocket Wizard on-camera when I started shooting for real.

*That’s because you hadn’t switched it on Neil*

Sshhhh

TTFN

I was asked to come up with a creative idea to promote the Irish Wheelchair Association’s Angel-pin day. This is a flag-day where lapel pins are sold to the public to raise funds for a charity.

Sometimes with charities they think some kind of personality and a brochure or flyer and that’s more than enough for newspapers to be falling over themselves to publish the image. There’s too much of the same old shite year after year promoting the same event, and picture editors get sick of looking at it. Not just them, me too. I prefer to push myself with ideas, and fortunately my client appreciates that:

It’s the second year I’ve been asked to dream up something for this worthy cause. Last year I decided on a very dark background:

This year I thought I might go with white-seamless instead. Then (as I tend to do unless dragged back to reality) I started to go overboard and decided that EVERYTHING should be white. Should be simple enough to light, white people wearing white clothes against a white background. *Why do I do this to myself*

Fortunately in this case I’m lucky enough to work with a client who appreciates and supports me. I dream this shit up, and leave him to sort out everything apart from the photography side of things.

Here’s another from the shoot:

My male model, for those not into sport or perhaps not from Cork is dual (hurling & gaelic football) player Eoin Cadogan. My female model is 6 year old wheelchair user Laoise.

**For people who aren’t familiar with Irish names, rough pronunciations are Owen & Leesha**

Last one for now and possibly my favourite because of Laoise’s impish smile:

Finally a shout-out to everyone that made it possible:

Obviously Eoin Cadogan for being brave enough to risk the ribbing he’ll get. He’ll probably never speak to me again.
Laoise and her family.
Thos O’Leary of the IWA for doing all the organising and logistics.
Stacy Corkery of Bare Minerals located in Brown Thomas for doing the make-up.
Norina O’Callaghan at the Silver Springs Moran Hotel for her assistance (not forgetting the staff too).

There will be a behind the scenes slideshow coming next, and also a post regarding white seamless (you’ve been warned. Go on holiday, emigrate, disconnect the interwebthingy). Wow, 3 posts from one shoot. I wish I could do that every time.

TTFN

As it’s Cork International Jazz Festival time, I’ll throw this post out today

Had a great fun shoot last week for the launch of the line-up for the Clarion Hotel here in Cork. As well as other acts, the hotel is featuring a couple of jive bands, The Jive Aces and the Slammers Maximum Jive Band so what else would you shoot but some swing-dancers for the launch?

The shoot was timed for early evening and now that the nights are drawing in fast I was thinking it would have to be an inside shoot. Luckily though on that day the weather had been great, and I changed my mind and decided that we might just get away with an outside shot before I lost all remnants of ambient light (even though the light-level was dropping by the second!). No need to panic though, I was forgetting how powerful a Ranger Quadra is. One test shot on 3/4 power and I blew the whole side of the hotel to a complete white-out. Think I m-a-y need to turn the power down a little. In the end I needed less than 1/4 power:

We then moved inside for a few more shots and the dancers really got into the groove. You were fabulous lads!:

Seeing as things were going so well I thought we could push the boat out a bit and finish with a last image that might be good for a laugh and so we roped-in the the unsuspecting client-contact at the shoot:

She’ll never be the same! Thanks and well done to Zuzana from the Sales & Marketing team at the hotel.

One take for that. 2 frames and that was the first and best.

While I’d like to take the credit for everything, ‘cos that’s just the way it is , I can’t but not mention all the hard work that was done by Christine Duggan, PR consultant at DMPR who did all the arranging & organising and worked with me on ideas for the shots. Wouldn’t have all come-together without her efforts. It’s nice to work with a PR contact where the creative process is a collaborative effort.

TTFN

I’ve photographed some famous people, some unknown people, some Very Important People, both those who really are VIP and a few who are only legends in their own minds. I’ve photographed royalty, presidents, Taoisigh (Prime Ministers of Ireland) and lots and lots of common-or-garden people just like me.

Recently was the first time I can ever remember that I was nervous about photographing my subject.

It didn’t help that I only had half an hour notice as he just happened to be in Cork City at a meeting regarding his up-coming exhibition and I had to squeeze in this shoot before the other two I had that day. Then the classic three drops of rain and the traffic comes to a standstill in the city factor, meant I was 20 minutes late for the appointment before I even started, and I’m NEVER late usually.

Whether he was actually in the slightest bit bothered I’ll never know, but he certainly didn’t seem at all concerned and after an all too short chat (about 4 hours too short as far as I was concerned) I knocked-out a couple of quick portraits in the (very short) time I had available.

My subject was music photographer Fin Costello.

You might not know the name, but I’m sure you’d know some of his images. He’s been a photographer since the late 60s and shot The Stones, Kiss, Pete Townsend, Cat Stevens, Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Phil Lynott and many others. His portfolio is like a who’s who of the music industry.

The shoot was for a magazine supplement in a Sunday newspaper but it was much too early to have his exhibition images at the shoot, so much as I’d have liked him with some of his work, it wasn’t to be:

A brilliant photographer but just as importantly (maybe more so), a true gentleman.

His Pictures in Rock exhibition will be at the Cork Vision Centre from 2nd June – 28th July. I haven’t seen the exhibits but it’s highly recommended anyway!

TTFN