WILL BREMRIDGE

A BRITISH PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER

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Adam Lambert  - Isle of Wight Festival

13 seconds with Adam Lambert at this year’s Isle of Wight Festival, shortly before going on stage to headline with Queen

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Jake Bugg - Q Magazine

Here’s Jake Bugg photographed at the Bush Tearooms in West London. We shot while the restaurant was open to the public and worked around wherever the customers were positioned so as not to cause any fuss. Published in the September issue of Q Magazine. 

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Justice -Q Magazine

I’ve been shooting quite a lot of work for Q Magazine over the last few months. Here’s French DJ pair Justice shot for the magazine’s record collection feature. We shot at the Sonos studios in East London. When I arrived i saw this huge golden coloured curtain and couldn’t resit using it for the shoot. This was actually a last minute token shot that ended up being used by the magazine. 

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Ronan Raftery - Actor Portraits

Who’s excited for the new JK Rowling movie? i had the pleasure of photographing Ronan Raftery, a cast member on Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them. We shot a variety of portraits in my studio in South-East London for press/PR use. Ronan turned out to be a a huge photography enthusiast and got really excited when I showed him my old Mamiya R76. I decided to shoot some portraits of him playing with it. 

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Arinze Kene - Actor Portraits

Well it’s been a long time since I’ve been back here on Tumblr. Its been a busy summer/autumn and I’ve got tons of work to add to the blog. I’ve been shooting a lot of actors here in London for press and PR use. I’ve started shooting for Shortlist Magazine since July which has been a bit of an editorial career milestone for me. They’re a magazine I’ve wanted to work with for years. I’ve also been shooting plenty of personal work. I’ll be posting a few more Start-To-Finish blog posts soon too. 

Here’s British actor Arinze Kene photographed in Claridges Hotel, Mayfair. We managed to get an incredible suite to work in and were given about 2 hours to do what we wanted. Some variations of these shots will be in Atittude Magazine in December. 

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IWAN RHEON - START TO FINISH

Back in April I shot portraits of Game of Thrones cast member Iwan Rheon for the cover of Status Magazine. We shot in Studio 141 in West London, an amazing old art studio owned by my friend James Vaulkhard. Stepping into this place is like going back 60 years. There’s barely anything in there thats modern and some of the artist equipment is easily over 80 years old. 

The magazine required around 6-8 different set ups and I’m going to break down the two of them (shown above) and give you an idea of the lighting set ups along with the retouching.

Firstly here’s an idea of the man power behind this shoot. 

1 x Photographer

1x Photo assistant

1x Clothing Stylist

1x Hair/grooming stylist

1x Actors Agent

1x Someone’s intern but no idea who’s.

SHOT ONE

I knew this portrait wouldn’t get published by the magazine but I shot it anyway for my own enjoyment and for syndication purposes. STATUSmag wanted to aim away from Iwan’s incredibly dark and twisted G.o.T character (Ramsay Bolton) which I totally agreed with, however, he accidentally adopted this sinister pose that which I couldn’t resist shooting. Provided it’s not causing any one more work, why not get a little of bit of what you want as a photographer along with what the client wants? After all you can still hand it in and see if they like it.

Here’s the shot straight out of camera...

Camera: Canon 5dmk3 Lens: 50mm Shutterspeed: 1/60 Aperture: F/8 ISO: 200

SET UP & LIGHTING

1x Home made canvas backdrop in dark grey.

1x  5′7 successful TV actor

1x wooden desk

Key Light:One 600w Einstein into a 46″ Photek Softlighter to camera right. About 4ft from Iwan and feathered across the front of him rather than directly at him. I also flagged off the softlighter so that the light wouldn’t fall so much onto the right side of the backdrop. 

Fill light: One 600w Einstein into a medium deep Elinchrom Rotalux slightly to camera left

RETOUCHING

Warming of skin tones by adding a little more yellow to the highlights using the Blue channel in Photoshop Curves. 

Raising and lowering of highlights and shadows for added pop using a new layer set to Softlight and painting either black or white with a very soft brush. One of my prefered dodge&burn techiques. 

Cooling down of shadows by adding a little more blue and cyan into darker areas using curves Blue channel and curves Red channel respectively. 

After getting the colour tone I wanted, I darkened the table and took some of the orange tone out of the wood as it was too bright and saturated before. 

Lastly I sharpened Iwan’s eyes slightly using High-Pass and then added a layer of subtle grain to take that excessively digital edge off the shot. 

SHOT TWO

This was the first set up we shot that day and my favourite set up from the series that was published. 

Here’s the shot straight out of camera...

Camera: Canon 5dmk3 Lens: 50mm Shutterspeed: 1/80 Aperture: f/3.2 ISO: 125

LIGHTING

One of my favourite ways to add some extra colour and vibrance to a scene is to use a gelled light to ad some extra glow from lamps. You’re essentially creating atmospheric light where the scene previously lacked it. In this case we used a tight beam from a strobe with an orange gel. 

Key Light: 1x 600w Einstein into a 46″ Photek Softlighter boomed to camera left and slightly to the left of Iwan too (see nose shadow).

Rim Light: 1x 600w Einstein into a 7″ gridded reflector with a 1/2 CTO gel on it. Aimed mostly at the back wall but spilling slightly onto the left side of Iwan. 

RETOUCHING

Slight darkening of the whole image. 

More blue and cyan into the shadows by using Colour Balance.

My Smart-Vignetting technique to make Iwan pop slightly more from his surroundings. This is done by pulling the exposure down slightly in curves and adding a layer mask. Then make a loose selection around your subject and invert the layer mask again to bring that selection back to its former state. Gaussian blur the hell out of it. 

I then darkened the floor behind Iwan a bit more by using a black radial gradient on a softlight layer. Adjust opacity to suit. 

A little sharpening on Iwan’s eyes and that was a wrap.

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NEW YORK STREET FOOD VENDORS - START TO FINISH

Behind The Scenes Video here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ZsScs-Ers

Back in October 2015 I decided to take a trip to New York for 2 weeks mainly just to hang out. I’d never been before and had a handful of contacts for crashing on couches across the city. I pitched the idea to my videographer friend Titus who is always down to go on an adventure and off we went. 

We spent the first 5 days being proper tourists, riding rent-a-bikes around Manhattan (trying to do rad stunts obviously) and gradually getting a mental map of the place and where all its famous landmarks are. I also had an idea for a personal project to shoot portraits of New York’s iconic hot dog vendors and all our cycling around was great for figuring out where the highest concentration of these characters could be found. The answer was midtown area. Times Square, Madison Sq Gardens, southern end of Central Park were all great. 

My friend Titus was there to shoot a BTS video of the portrait series and I still needed to find an assistant to carry my lighting gear around on a boom all day. A solid morning of Facebook updates and hassling of American contacts and I eventually found a very helpful friend of a friend to give me a hand.

THE CONCEPT

Fairly simple plan for this one. Wander around midtown all day introducing myself to street food vendors and convincing them to let me shoot some portraits of them. I wanted to accentuate the glowing lights of the hot dog stands along with New York’s incredible natural light. There’s something about the colour tone of the buildings that makes the light down the non-sunny horizontal streets incredibly photogenic especially when combined with the sunlight cascading down onto vertical streets in the background. When in Manhattan you constantly feel like you’re at the bottom of a canyon and the resulting light effects are unparalleled.

PUTTING THE PLAN INTO ACTION

We started off outside the Langham hotel on 36th & 5th and started walking in the direction of Madison Sq Gardens. Before long we could see hot dog stands on every street corner and I quickly thought about my approach. My main aim is to make it as easy and least time consuming as possible for my subjects in all of my shoots and this particular situation required me to be extremely fast and efficient. I failed four times at the start of the day. Everything in New York is busy and fast-moving just like in London and these guys were skeptical about where the photos were going and about missing customers. The hot dog vendors tended to know only basic English and were also worried about their area managers seeing them slacking.

One other thing worth mentioning is that people nowadays have a totally irrational fear of what will happen if a stranger takes their photo. Ordinarily it will involve that photo going online to a pretty tiny audience of people who will give the photo about 6 seconds of their attention before moving onto something else. However, it seems what some people are afraid of is that you’ll take their photo, post it online and their entire life will rapidly be destroyed by a mix of their government, robots with lasers and possibly North Korea. So these days you have to allow for a good 15 seconds of explaining to people that you’re not going have them sent to a gulag in Siberia. 

Luckily we soon had a spree of guys who were perfectly happy with being photographed and the project started to get under way. I had my assistant carrying a 600w Einstein strobe on the end of a telescopic boom, firing into a 46″ Photek Softlighter umbrella. We didn’t bother to dismantle the gear between each shoot and simply walked around all day with it ready to be used. 

EXPOSURE & LIGHTING

I aimed to under-expose on the camera by a little bit and fill in with the Photek. Not too aggressively but enough to give my subjects a little extra pop. I had my assistant booming the light to roughly 45 degrees left/right of my subjects and also aimed to shoot fairly wide so that I was documenting New York to a decent degree. After all, why bother flying thousands of miles and not show the scenery?

Here’s a shot straight out of the camera.....

Camera: Canon 5ds Lens: 24-70L Aperture: 2.8 Shutter: 1/200 ISO: 125

POST PRODUCTION

I had three main aims here: warm skin tones, blue/cyan shadows and accentuated glow from bulbs/lamps......

Warm skin tones: In this particular situation I simply raised the colour temperature a little bit. Super simple. In other situations I might use the Curves layer in PS and add more yellow to the highlights, or perhaps the same technique in Colour Balance however I got what I wanted this time just by pumping up the temperature. 

Blue/cyan shadows: I am such a huge fan of Norman Jean Roy’s use of cyan toning in the showy areas of his photos especially in shots featuring a lot of grey urban landscape. I’ve been heavily influenced by his work since I started out and there’s a little bit of that influence here. On this occasion I opened a curves adjustment layer, switched to ‘blue’ channel and added a little blue to the shadows. Then switched to ‘red’ channel and dragged the shadows into the cyan region (opposite of Red on the RGB colour spectrum). This gave me just enough of the effect I wanted. 

Glowing bulbs/lamps: New layer in PS switched to ‘soft light’, make little radial gradients where there are bright light bulbs using a colour sample of whatever colour that light emits. You can see the added glow from the light bulbs on the hot dog stand and from the cars in the background. 

LESSON LEARNED

I got an email world renowned portrait photographer Art Streiber praising me for this portrait series. It was one of the best emails I’ve ever received as I’m a huge fan of Art’s work. He wanted to help me get this series printed in New York magazine and I jumped for joy around my studio. He then asked if I had got the contact details for each subject and a little mini interview to go with each of them. I didn’t have either of these things. Due to my excessively polite Englishness I didn’t want to waste another minute of their time and didn’t bother to have release forms signed or get any story to go with each person. 

The mini interviews would have made my project carry so much more weight when it comes to having it published and without the clearance from each subject I stood no chance. It could have been done so easily using an ipad with a release form app and something to record audio. 

Art Streiber rightfully gave me a schooling for this. I felt like I’d let down one of my heroes and it’s taught me a valuable lesson to slow down, be more thorough and make sure when doing solo projects that I am entirely my own producer and journalist. 

So off I go in a few months to re-shoot the street food vendors and attempt to get this project printed in the US national press!

Behind The Scenes Video here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ZsScs-Ers

Thanks for reading!

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JING LUSI - BRITISH ACTRESS

British actress Jing Lusi photographed in my studio in south London. Jing is currently starring in Stan Lee’s Lucky Man on Sky 1. 

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British Actress - Stefanie Martini - Photographed in my studio in south London. Stefanie is currently starring in the ITV series ‘Doctor Thorne’. 

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Michael Xavier | British Actor

British stage actor Michael Xavier photographed in my studio in south London. 

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SHERIN AMINOSSEHE PORTRAITS

I photographed Sherin Amonissehe on the roof of the London treasury and cabinet offices. We were originally given a office room on the top floor but we forced open and old window that was meant to be glued shut and spent 5 minutes shooting portraits on the roof. Talk about speedy and stealthy! 

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IVAN MASSOW PORTRAITS

This is Ivan Massow. Ivan is a gay rights campaigner and London mayoral candidate. Photographed for Estates Gazette magazine just off Russell Square. 

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ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL -START TO FINISH

I’m really proud of the results that came out of shooting the Isle of Wight Festival and wanted to show you all the effort that went into it and how my team and I worked together during the festival.

This was one of the most enjoyable weekends of my year so far and I can’t wait to do similar shoots at festivals next year.

About 3 months ago a solo artist friend of mine, Ben Montague, mentioned that he was playing at the Isle of Wight festival this summer. He also mentioned that he was on good terms with the owners of the festival and that he could introduce me if I wanted. I jumped at the opportunity to speak to them as I already knew exactly what I wanted to talk to them about….

Every year I’ve always loved seeing the photographs from Mark Seliger’s Vanity Fair booth at the Oscars and Cannes Film Festival. The same goes for Brantley Gutierez’s recent work at Coachella festival and pretty much anything that Austin Hargrave produces when he shoots portraits at music and film festivals for The Hollywood Reporter. I noticed last year that this sort of thing is barely ever done at similar events in the UK where all the artists are photographed in a timeless and non-commercial way to produce a really great series of portraits. I’ve been wanting to do something along these lines for a while and being introduced to the people behind IoW festival seemed like the perfect time to get it done.

I sent the organisers a simple and short pitch of what I wanted to do, how much space it would take and what the results would look like. They were instantly up for the idea and things started to take shape. I was really excited but incredibly skeptical about whether it would go ahead and also whether the right preparations would be made by IoW to make it worthwhile. One thing I’ve learned is that if you get booked for a cool shoot and then tell your friends or your girlfriend, that shoot will almost definitely get cancelled. It’s just life being cruel and on this occasion I wasn’t telling anyone until I was sat in front of a musician with a camera in my hands. Fortunately it didn’t get cancelled and here’s how it went…..

BUILDING THE SET

The people at the IoW office told me they’d got me a 6m x 6m tent to shoot in right next to the press tent. The idea would be that the artists would do press related things first and then be taken over to my tent for a portrait shoot. This was fantastic news and it was all playing out even better than I expected. The next thing I had to do in the lead up to the festival was design and build a set that I could take with me in my VW Golf all the way to the island with an assistant and a videographer.

The sample images that I showed IoW were a combination of mark Seliger’s shots from the oscars and some of Brantley Gutierez’s shots from Coachella. I didn’t want to do exactly the same thing as them but it made sense for me to build something similar given that these photos are what helped convince the client in the first place. When I shoot more of these in future I’ll branch out and design something different for each one.

The backdrops are hand painted in my studio by me. I chose to use grey as its a neutral tone that works with anybody’s skin tone or choice of clothing. I also wanted to work on something quite light given that it was a summer festival. The natural coloured sheets that you can see hanging on the left and right of the backdrops are painters dust sheets from my local hardware store (£20 for 3!). All this barely cost me much and the biggest expense I had to make was buying more backdrop supports and more stands. I could have rented these but having all this extra gear is pretty useful in the long term given that I might be doing similar shoots to this in future. Other than that we just needed a sh*t load of A-clamps, duck tape and cable ties to hold it all together.

Lastly, there was the issue of the floor. I thought our studio-tent would just have grass to stand on and I originally planned to use the 3rd dust sheet as a floor for the set. Luckily when we arrived we found the tent had a perfect battered wooden floor which worked perfectly with our backdrops and the general colour scheme of what I wanted.

EXPOSURE AND LIGHTING

The technical set-up for this shoot was incredibly simple. I brought several lights with me along with a load of different light modifiers and quickly realised that I barely needed any kit to get the results that I wanted. The entire series is lit with a 600w Paul C. Buff Einstein strobe and a 46″ Photek Softlighter. Even the group shots are lit this way. I positioned my light to camera right and feathered the light onto my subjects. This means aiming the face of the umbrella across the front of my subject rather than directly at them. You get an incredibly flattering lighting effect when using this side-spill from the Photeks. 

My camera settings were as follows..... (Sample image straight out of camera)

Camera: Canon 5dmkIII ISO: 100 Aperture: f/9 Shutterspeed: 1/160

SHOOTING

These shoots were incredibly quick. I knew that the artists had more important people to speak to and plenty of free beer to drink just outside my tent so I worked as if I was being timed for a game show. Working at this pace is definitely something I’m used to and the benefits can be huge. It raises your ability to get the best out of your subject very quickly and being able to deliver a great result in under a minute leaves a good impression on the artists, their PR agents and whoever your client is. The aim is to deliver the best result with the least inconvenience to the people around you. The quickest shoots during the festival were Jessie Ware (30 seconds) and James Bay (45 seconds). 

POST PRODUCTION

Minimal retouching in these shots. In fact we were putting the images out on Instagram (@willbremridge) within ten minutes of shooting. There was a tiny bit of warmth added to the images by putting a little more yellow into the highlights. I also added a very very small amount of blue to the shadows. Both of these were done using Curves adjustment layers. A little extra punch given to the blacks and lastly my ‘Smart-Vignetting’ technique which I’ve covered in several previous Start-To-Finish posts. 

Thanks for reading!

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ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL

I HAD A GREAT OPPORTUNITY TO SHOOT PORTRAITS OF THE ARTISTS PLAYING AT THIS YEAR'S ISLE OF WIGHT FESTIVAL. NOT ONLY WAS I GIVEN FREE REIGN TO SHOOT THEM HOW I WANTED BUT I ALSO HAD A HUGE TENT IN WHICH TO BUILD A STUDIO. I DIDN'T GET TO SHOOT ALL OF THE PERFORMERS, HOWEVER I STILL CAME AWAY WITH A GREAT SERIES OF ARTISTS. HOPEFULLY PLENTY MORE OF THESE FESTIVAL PORTRAIT BOOTHS TO COME.

JAMES BAY

FIRST AID KIT

ELLA EYRE

JESSIE WARE

THE VIEW

NOTHING BUT THIEVES

JOSH FRANCESCHI | YOU ME AT SIX

TIM ARNOLD

LUKE SPILLER | THE STRUTS

KODALINE

SUNSET SONS

IMELDA MAY

PAUL YOUNG

SUZANNE VEGA

SPICE GIRLS - EMMA BUNTON & MELANIE C

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HERE’S A BTS VIDEO FROM MY RECENT PORTRAIT SHOOT WITH AMERICAN STAND UP COMEDIAN - ALEX EDELMAN. 

ALEX WON LAST YEARS EDINBURGH FESTIVAL ‘BEST NEWCOMER’ AWARD AND IS KILLING IT ON THE UK COMEDY SCENE AT THE MOMENT. 

HE’S AN AWESOME GUY AND I CAN’T WAIT TO WORK WITH HIM AGAIN ONE DAY.

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PIPPA MALMGREN

Here’s some portraits of Pippa Malmgen, chief financial advisor to the Ronald Reagan and George Bush presidential campaigns.  

Photographed at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mayfair, London, for Estates Gazette Magazine. 

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BRUCE DICKINSON | START TO FINISH

A few summers ago I was called by FHM magazine to shoot Iron Maiden frontman and commercial pilot - Bruce Dickinson. 

I definitely did a little dance around the room when I got this phone call. Firstly because its Bruce bloody Dickinson!! Secondly because this job came along during a very quiet and frustrating period. It was during the London 2012 Olympics which seemed to put me and all my photographer friends in two different camps. All of London’s attention was on the games and nothing else so photographers were either really busy shooting Olympic related stuff or, like me, they were bored to tears. I shot quite a lot of Olympic athletes on the lead up to 2012 but when the Olympics kicked in things got very quiet. 

I headed off to Cardiff, Wales, with a journalist from FHM to check out Bruce’s company - Cardiff Aviation. 

This still remains one of my favourite portrait commissions to date.

Once we arrived and dumped the gear we were given a tour of the entire premises by Bruce himself. Cardiff Aviation are based just outside the Welsh Capital on a site made up of several aircraft hangars and two runways. We were shown all the different aviation equipment that Bruce’s company builds along with various different planes parked on the premises. Bruce mentioned that he wanted to see Britain become a nation that builds things again and his knowledge about all things aviation was incredible. 

CHOOSING THE SETTING

Sometimes I’m presented with a location thats overwhelmingly photogenic causing a hundred ideas to float around in my head when I’ve only got a short time to make some decisions. I’ve learned that in these situations you cant possibly shoot everything you want and you have to be disciplined in what you want to achieve. It’s much better to shoot a handful of set ups really well than shoot a huge variety of rushed, mediocre work. 

I was given an hour to wander around the site alone and scout for locations with only one bit of advice - “Don’t go near that end of the airfield or you might get shot”...... Bruce’s airfield bordered a high security military site and I was warned that if I go too close to the perimeter and they see an anonymous man loitering with a camera things could get pretty ugly. 

I didn’t need to worry though. I had plenty of inspiration without having to go near the danger zone. I knew before leaving London that I wanted to get a hero shot of Bruce with an aircraft in the background, preferably sitting on the wing or in one of the engines. Fortunately there was a disused commercial jet parked right in the middle of the airstrip for me to use. The sun was hitting the metal aircraft and the tarmac in a harsh but stunning way and I began to figure out my lighting after a few test shots. 

EXPOSURE AND LIGHTING

I used a fair bit of fire power for this shot. Although the sunlight was coming from roughly the right direction, it was the middle of the day in peak summer which meant that the sun was really high in the sky and I needed some strobes to help me out. I wanted to light Bruce from a realistic/natural angle and used my strobes create a slightly cleaner and evenly balanced version of what the sun was already doing. I wanted to underexpose the plane to give the shot a feel that resembled evening light conditions and fill in my subject with just enough pop. I got called up for the job the day before so I didn’t manage to find an assistant but luckily there was no wind at all to smash my gear to pieces!

This was lit with two 600w Einsteins with 5ft octobanks to camera right, 12 feet high and aimed straight at Bruce.  Here’s a lighting diagram showing the set up along with a Straight-Out-Of-Camera shot.  I really need to remember to take a few steps back and shoot a BTS photo more often. 

Camera: Canon 5dmkII Lens: 50mm Aperture: F/14 Shutterspeed: 1/200

SHOOTNG

I was warned by Bruce’s PR guy that he wasn’t a fan of having his photo taken and that the best way to keep him relaxed was to allow him to keep being interviewed while on set. That was fine by me and I could call his attention for short bursts rather than force him to pose for minutes on end. I didn’t need any theatrics from him and I just wanted him to sit in the engine while I clicked away for a while. I shot 21 frames on this set and then moved onto the next idea. 

POST PRODUCTION

Not a huge amount going on here. Just a bit of colouring and contrast work. I pulled down the exposure using a curves adjustment layer and then painted some of the original brightness back into Bruce and parts of the plane. This gave the image deeper shadows and made the highlights pop a bit more. 

Next I worked on colouring the image so that the light looked less ‘midday’ and a bit more ‘early evening’. I did this using a Colour Balance adjustment layer to put more warmth into the highlights and another one to put cooler tones into the shadows. 

A little bit of selective sharpening on Bruce and I was done. 

We shot 4 or 5 different set ups, had a beer with Bruce to finish and headed back to London. 

Thanks for reading!