Douglas Kurn, Photographer

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Urban Soldier

Another of my actor projects saw us in Peckham working with Michael who took on the role of an Urban Soldier, living on the woods and heading in to the city to fight the powers of evil.

It was a horribly cold and wet night, but Michael was a true professional and stood there in a t-shirt looking like you wouldn’t mess with him, although as Michael put it himself “a black guy, at night, in Peckham, with a gun, is kinda asking for trouble”! Luckily none came and we managed to get these fab shots.

Special thanks to my assistants Oli and Tim for braving the elements and for wading through the mud keeping the lights covered from the rain.

Sidewalks of London

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.

Art, moving house, an exhibition and the Beeb!

What with moving house (and wondering if the people in that industry really know what they’re doing), organising my first major solo exhibition, and coping with work it’s been a busy time. The exhibition was at Brooklands Museum in Weybridge and was of my night photographs of the Brooklands race track, which was a great place to have it. I received some tremendous feedback including from people who wouldn’t normally visit art galleries.

Some of the prints can be seen again at the Windsor Contemporary Art Fair in the Windsor Race Course Grandstand on November 9th and 10th, so if you’re interested get in touch as I have some 2 for 1 tickets available. It’s usually a very laid back affair with some fabulous art on display.

Also the BBC have featured The Spirit of Brooklands on their website, and not to be outdone, Top Gear have also run a feature. It’s amazing what appearing on the BBC does for hits to your website!

I’ll be posting some new work soon so it will seem like feast or famine when it comes to my blog posts!

:DK

The Roar of the Engines

It’s been a good first couple of weeks for the exhibition at Brooklands Museum, with my prints being enthusiastically received. Many of the comments have mentioned how peaceful and serene the images look, and how they capture the very essence of their time.

The annual Brooklands Double Twelve saw over 5,000 visitors visit the museum during the weekend, and they were treated to lots of motor sport activity, with speed trials and driving skill tests on the Mercedes Benz World test track.

There were some enthusiastic cadets who decided that they wanted to challenge themselves by pulling a car (with driver) up the Brooklands Test Hill, which gets gradually steeper before reaching 1 in 4 at the top!

A week or so later was the Henry Surtees Foundation Brooklands Team Challenge, which saw several teams enter a 2 hour endurance Go-Kart race around the Mercedes Benz world Test track. Just prior to the race the museum started up their Napier Railton and gave it a run round the test track. The Napier Railton is fitted with a 24 Litre Aero engine which has a rated BHP of 530! Oh and it weighs just over 2 tons, and occasionally needs to be bump started!! I’d like to see the cadets try and put that up the Test Hill!

Once the Go-Kart race got under way I was struck again by the noise that went on during the testing and racing of all these motor vehicles, and thought back to the night when I took this shot of the Campbell Circuit which runs alongside the Mercedes Benz Test track, and the mood that visitors have commented that my images convey. It felt like a different world.

Exhibition at Brooklands Museum

I’m very excited to announce that the Spirit of Brooklands project is is being exhibited at Brooklands Museum, officially opening this Saturday (June 15th) to coincide with the biggest event in the museum’s calendar, the annual Double Twelve weekend. There will be a number of the prints on display in the art gallery in the Clubhouse, all of which are for sale with 30% of the takings being donated to the museum.

It’s a great day out, especially if you have kids. They have the first Concorde ever to travel at Mach 2 in the museum and trips aboard can be booked, which is worth doing. They also have the old scale model Concorde that used to sit on the roundabout on the way in to Heathrow Airport, now sitting at the entrance to Brooklands Museum and Mercedes Benz World.

The exhibition runs for 6 weeks, so there’s plenty of time to head down there and check it out!

Acting up

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.

Brooklands Online at the AOP

I’m very excited to announce that the Association of Photographers (AOP) will be showing my Spirit of Brooklands project as part of it’s online series of members exhibitions. The exhibition will run from May 9th until June 5th and further details can be found at the AOP site.

The AOP have chosen this image of the Clubhouse as the lead image for the promotion, and it was actually the last image that I photographed in the entire series, thanks to a nudge from the editor of the Brooklands Trust Magazine! I quite like the way the lights and stairs look like the headlights and grill on the front of a car.

The Brooklands Clubhouse

There’s been a fair amount of publicity for the event so far including online coverage by the London Evening Standard, 55 Baker Street, LondonTown, and Vicinitee.com

I will shortly be announcing another exhibition of prints at the Brooklands Museum so watch this space!

Some “behind the scenes” stuff

There’s been all sorts of things going on lately, including some personal work using actors which I’ll be posting details of over the next few weeks. But I thought I would re-kindle (if that’s not a trade marked expression nowadays) my blogging spirit by posting some stuff and nonsense from a variety of my shoots.

Imagine the scene – you’re setting up on a shoot and the lights don’t fire, so you check that the camera’s on, that the radio slave is properly attached, and that it is on the same channel as the receiver, test the shutter release, and get a photo of…… an (out of focus) light stand:

Once you’ve got the lights firing consistently it’s time to check the lighting, but in the absence of any subject you have to improvise and use…… your hand:

When your subject shows up it’s important to help them relax with some of those Gretag Macbeth moments:

“It’s no good hiding behind there, I can see you…”

“Who me?”

“Perhaps it might help you to relax if you imagine you’re leaning against a bar?”

“That’s a very high bar!”

“You’re expression is quite blank……..”

“….. can you be a bit more pensive?”

“That’s better.”

“You’re looking quite skinny – can you make yourself look bigger?”

And that moment when the photographer says for the umpteenth time “Just one more shot…”

The Seven Deadly Sins

A while back I created some images as part of a personal project, called the Seven Deadly Sins. The idea was to use actors to portray the Seven Deadly Sins using only facial expressions. I had a lot of actors interested in taking part, and I shot it over a couple of weekends. I have mentioned this project to a couple of clients recently who have expressed an interest in seeing the results, so thought I would post them all together on the blog.

The Seven Deadly Sins are Greed, Lust, Wrath, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy and Pride, and here are the resulting photos – have a go at guessing which is which (click the thumbnails to see larger images).

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