Continuing my collaborative projects with actors, I worked with Liz who is an American actor living in London.

We decided to try and make her origins and profession a feature of the main shot, and so I did some research, looking for American words used in London. I was particularly looking for a sign that had an Americanism, such as Sidewalk, when I discovered a film from the 1930s entitled Sidewalks of London, with a sub-title of St Martin’s Lane. The film starred Vivien Leigh and was about a pickpocket operating in London. So armed with this information we headed for St Martin’s Lane, where we had Liz acting out the part of a pick pocket.

The final shot ended up being one of the early shots where Liz kept her gloves on (it was very cold), and I felt they added a Fagin-esque quality to the shot.

We had to wait for the area where we wanted to shoot to clear so we grabbed a couple of other portraits first.

Thanks to my assistants Oli and Tim for all their hard work.

I’ve been collaborating with actors on some new personal work recently and got some great shots from it.

This session was with an actor called Adnan, who had recently grown a fabulous handlebar moustache, this being the first time he had been photographed with it. We worked through a variety of looks, and with Adnan complaining that a headshot he had had taken recently was so ridiculously over-retouched that he looked extremely young, we decided to emphasise the character of his features.

We also worked on an idea where he played a playwright deep in thought at his desk.

Here are the results.

Thanks to Tim from the University of Surrey for being my assistant for the day.

Here’s some portraits taken over the summer: