On Assignment - Lindsay Parfitt

I went on assignment with my American buddy Chadd yesterday to take some pictures of Lindsay Parfitt for the Sur in English. Lindsay is the wife of Rick, rhythm guitarist and singer for Status Quo. We were lucky enough to get to meet Rick as well as Lindsay in their beautiful house in Alhaurin el Grande. Chadd is doing a story on Lindsay for a piece about having babies and living abroad (they have twins), but he spent most of his time talking to Rick about music. HA! Go chadd.

Anyway, when we arrived, Rick seemed a little weary of what were really there for, but once he found we were so chill and just wanted to go with the flow he soon opened up. We ended up doing the shoot in their cinema room in the basement with all (or most of anyway) of his gold records hanging on the wall. I shot a few of Lindsay in front of the records, a few of the two of them by the bar, then wrapped up with a quick one of Chadd for posterity.

I was going all out with the beauty dish and a bare strobe on the records for the portrait of Lindsay and showing them to her as I went. Then I did one no flash so she could see the difference and she says to me, "Oh, I actually like that one more!" So this is what we got, and I think she's right. Sometimes you have to just leave the strobes out and go with what works best, in this case the natural sunlight coming from a door camera left. The door really acted as a huge soft box and bounced off the gold from the records to make a warm picture.

Then we moved to the bar. Rick wanted a cool picture of himself and his wife in a relaxed setting. Here I did use the beauty dish, as the door was now about 15 feet further away from this setup. Beauty dish was camera left, up high and I had a strobe stashed under the bar shooting up and back towards the green plant. I dragged the shutter just enough to get the warm glow from the bar.

All in all it was a good session and I learned a few things, such as, don't be to petty to listen to your client. Lindsay called the good shot and it made me realize I just may have been "over lighting" the scene. Happy days.