Chasing the Ambient

I started out out, like most people with a camera, just shooting pictures with natural light. I hadn’t yet got to grips with flash and I loved the simplicity and spontaneity of daylight.
I served my apprenticeship on the ambient. Forever studying the play and complexity of light, I developed an awareness of it that is now like a ‘sixth sense’.
I see the world in the way the light transforms it.
There are so many things in a room I fail to notice but light is definitely not one of them.
Ironically there are now so many aspiring photographers and film makers that I meet who just want to fast track their way into the business of making images.
Bypassing the process of learning the most basic concepts of light and an ability to craft a still image they just want to race on to ‘higher’ things.
For me, as a photographer, the road to ‘higher’ things was a long, hard and challenging ride.
When I finally achieved commercial success and moved into global advertising my world was flooded with flash…..Assistants, light meters, strobes, flags, soft boxes, – the whole caboodle needed to produce the slick glossy images that I was tagged with.
As a photographer if I get asked one question more than any other it’s…….. ‘how do you achieve the ‘flash’ in your pictures?
Nobody really wants to know how – they just want to be told the formula and move on.
And that’s the point…how can you understand the use of artificial light if you have no knowledge of the natural?
So that’s my advice…start with the the most basic and beautiful light there is – daylight, and work your way on from there.

 

Dotty Trailer – cinematography by John Hicks

when searching the blog today I realised that I hadn’t yet uploaded the trailer for ‘Dotty’.
With so many social media platforms – it’s hard to keep up sometimes so, without further ado, here it is!!!
Currently picking up awards for Best Actress for the luminous Sadie Frost at the Hollywood Independent Film Festival and selected for many other prestigious competitions   – you can read more about it  here via the London, Hollywood blog of writer Dominic Wells.

Dotty Trailer – cinematography by John Hicks from John Hicks on Vimeo.

 

Emma

Bless me blogfather for I have sinned….it has been too long since my last post and I am overcome with feelings of social media shame. I also confess to stealing that line off the wry and witty Dominic Wells who was the screenwriter on Dotty – which I shot last year and for which Sadie Frost has just been awarded best actress by the Hollywood independent Film Festival.

Maybe I over think it, maybe I’m too self critical, maybe I’m just more concerned about taking new and original photographs than I am in posting them – whatever, I promise to try harder to be a better blogger for 2014!!

Here’s a recent photo shoot I did with the insanely talented tattoo artiest Emma Garrard of The Living Art Collective.

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portrait of the artist as a young man

I’ve always looked for the beauty in dereliction. Decaying, abandoned buildings, peeling walls, rusted artifacts and long discarded objects all hold a visual fascination for me. I spend time searching out and photographing these places – both in their own right and as a backdrop for my environmental portraits.
Recently I stumbled across an old abandoned ‘finca’ with an amazing series of graffiti artworks decorating its walls and inhabiting its spaces. It was a gallery of work – years in the making, that nobody had ever seen. Through each room you could see the development of the artist as they fueled the need to paint these crumbling walls. I was intrigued by this ‘unknown’ artist and what inspired them to paint a building that would soon be demolished. Most of all I was overwhelmed by the respect the ‘unknown’ artist showed this devastated house and how the graffiti complimented, rather than detracted from, its environment.
I posted a photo of the ‘artwork by unknown artist’ on Instagram but nobody knew more of this mystery creator.
I was left with nothing but questions. What drives an artist to produce art that may never be seen, let alone bought, by anyone? When the building is demolished and the artwork reduced to dust – where does that leave the artist?
I can relate to the physical need to make images – to take photos or paint pictures, because it is compulsion, obsession, vocation and from the day I left the ‘finca’ I was determined to find this fellow artist.
I did that yesterday. His name is Mangüe López. He’s just 17 years old. If he had a website to link to I would but he’s an original talent and he’s not doing it for the fame or the gain – he’s just doing it because he is.