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Pictures copyright: © 2007, Peter Marshall
unless stated otherwise.
All pictures here were taken with a Fuji
FInepix F31fd digital camera. .
Etienne Tombeux
Inez introduces Alex ten Napel
Nina and a cat
Naomi is a cat-lover too
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Etienne Tombeux spoke in French, and was translated into Polish. I was possibly the only non-Polish speaker who had made it for the session, and when Inez asked me if I needed an English translation I thought I could probably cope.
It was a little hard to follow at times, but I could grasp the essential details, especially about how they worked, and the short film about making the 'Wrath' image - based around wars - helped, despite the technical problems in showing it.
The process is really much more like making a film than a normal photo session. Although the take only lasts for a few seconds as the Swiss-made Seitz camera rotates through 360 degrees to to record the view around it, costumes, make-up, rehearsals and the rest can mean a 3-day shoot.
Remarkable though this picture is, at the end I'm left wondering whether it is worth all the effort (and thinking that the lighting on the foreground vehicle was perhaps a little too much - the riders in it looked rather better in the video clip than on the print.)
Alex ten Napel had left me at breakfast and gone to write down what he intended to say, as English is not his first language. He made a great job of it, and also in answering the questions that followed.
Alex started his portraits of swimmers because he wanted to shoot the Dutch people as a nation united despite their differing backgrounds - and in the water, everyone is equal. His first series of swimmers was actually shown in a moat around the town where a Dutch photo festival was being held, and the images were mounted to give the impression that the swimmers were emerging from the water.
Some of his images there led to the current pictures, where he works with just the heads (and sometimes the shoulders) of children. He works in one particular pool where he has a studio set up in one corner of the pool area, with a white background supported on weighted stands on the pool floor. A light behind this ensures it is white. He stands in the water with his subjects, holding his Hassleblad, and there is a large light source on the pool side behind him to give a diffuse and essentially shadow-free illumination.
He looks in the pool for children whose behavoiur and faces suggest they might make interesting subjects and then approaches them and their parents for permission to photograph them. The parents are usually keen, although the children sometimes resent being taken away from their play.
He gets them to duck under the water and stand facing him, instructing them not to smile, and waits until he sees a suitable response before he takes an image. He takes either 6 or 12 shots of each child, and the session with them takes 5-10 minutes. They often resent being kept there for so long.
As Alex starts signing catalogues, I go out in the foyer, where I stop to talk to the Rosenblums. When a man comes in cat on a lead. I discover they are cat-lovers. I also find that the F31fd is considerably less useful than my Nikon D200 would have been in the lowish light there.
(continued on next page.)
FotoArtFestival Diary 2005
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