After my quick and fun shoot with Sebastian Smith he was meeting with some people to discuss displaying and selling his paintings. I was just packing my kit up and briefly introduced myself and handed over my card. This is something I so often do and rarely leads to much, but is still worth doing because sometimes it does.
A few days later I get an email from Jimmy Galvin, one of the men I met briefly, who is a Bristol based artist and musician. Jimmy loved my images of Sebastian and wanted to spend some time with me taking photos. He paints massive abstracts and lives in an awesome flat on Royal York Crescent - an impressive architectural terrace overlooking most of Bristol. It sounded like a perfect place to have some creative fun and see what I could do with the opportunity.
I met with Jimmy the week before our shoot and discussed briefly what we could do - I came up with loads of crazy ideas including dangling paintings from the high ceiling on wires so that I could play with layers in my images. This meeting meant we both had a good idea of what was going to come, but we didn't plan too much as we were both up for messing about on the day - probably the best way to be creative.
The shoot it self happened on a beautiful day with the sun streaming in through the large windows of Jimmy's front room filling the space with beautiful glowing light. But as well as using the light I found I also messed around and tried out loads of different looks bouncing light all over the place. Taking control of the light like this meant I could concentrate the viewers eye on certain parts of the image enabling me to make Jimmy stand out that little bit more from his background.
At about 4 o'clock the light started turning golden and gorgeous so I took one camera and one lens out on a walk with Jimmy. But you'll have to wait for those images which are coming in second post sometime soon...
A massive thanks to Jimmy for all his cooperation and ideas. To find out more about him please head over to his website: www.jimmygalvin.com
[UPDATE: part 2 can be found here]
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Labels: artist, bristol, clifton, Jimmy Galvin, portraits, sunlight
