Although sometimes I do shoot fashion!
Earlier on this year, I met a very nice and very good portrait photographer from Liverpool who referred to me as a fashion photographer which in a way sort of horrified me as I really just see myself as not specialising in anything and if I am known for anything in particular then it's music having had a book out last year of my music based work. Click here if you haven't seen it! Wink wink! Even though I do shoot lots of music related stuff and will be updating my main site with recent work over the next few weeks, I also do lots of commercial work and the portfolios of that work can be seen here.
However, with regards to fashion, I've sort of let it take a back seat for a while which is partly down to the fact that I don't see the point in being branded as a fashion photographer in a city that doesn't require much fashion photography but one in which there's loads of people running around claiming to be fashion photographers. And a lot of them are a bit rubbish to be honest! There's also more grief in fashion circles, though I think they call it bitching, and over the last two years I've had stacks of people come to me to tell me what such and such has said about me and how such and such would do my commissioned work for nothing just to get in there etc etc. And whilst I find most of it very funny, it does become a drag after a while. Maybe commercial photography just isn't glamorous enough to fight over, and although there's a fair bit of gossip and nonsense that goes around the music scene at times, there's nothing to match some of the cranks that seem to be out there in Liverpool's so called fashion circles. People also seem to talk a lot these days about the Liverpool fashion industry and forgive me if I'm wrong but I thought the whole point of an industry was to make money and I've never had so many requests for freebies as I have from some local fashion clients. So with that, along with free magazine culture that seems to be a constant in the city, I've sort of not been doing much in the way of fashion with the exception of a few regular clients.
In fact this shoot here is, I think, the first editorial fashion I've done this year and the reason I took it on was down to the fact that some of my favourite people were booked to work on it. The shoot was put together by Christine at Impact, the styling was by My Wardrobe's Joanne Watkinson who is amazing, the make up was by Kate Smith and the model is Jenny Cooper. I was also assisted on this shoot by Anton Rodriguez who, though still at college studying fashion, is in my humble opinion way better than most of the other new kids on the block! And some of them ain't even kids!
And if you think I'm just taking a snipe at other photographers then you're wrong as I'm happy to talk about people that I like and respect in the city who do shoot fashion with my two personal favourites being Mark Shearwood (who mostly shoots tests at the moment though he works all over the world as an assistant) and Dan Kenyon. But if you are thinking about joining the throngs of photographers out there who borrow a Prada shirt from a shop in town and then post the picture up to Model Mayhem saying client : Prada, then maybe you should learn to take photos first and a good port of call might be a Bruce Smith masterclass who is a photographer based in, correct me if I'm wrong, Crosby but teaching fashion photography all over the world!!!
And it is a funny old world! These photographs appear in the current edition of The Liverpool Lifestyle Magazine.
