Hugh O’Malley Fashion Photographer London

I recently shot for London DesignerEmma Bell for Vauxhall for a night she is putting on. Emma is getting a lot of media attention with her designs made of food and other mental visions. The shoot involved a car covered in pick and mix with models Rael and Rosie (whose image i stumbled across in the national portrait gallery yesterday).

You can see coverage on Dazed here and further coverage on Planet Notion.

it’s always such a thorny loaded debate and one i’ve been struggling over recently.  I’ve always had Nikon kit but recently i’ve been intrigued by the Canon 5ds Mark ii.  A beautiful full frame camera that also shoots video at a pretty high quality.

This is the video that intrigued me - Reverie - by Vincent LaForet.  Ok the actual mood is a little bit cheesy but the quality blew me away.  The shot of the city at night in the helicopter… the reflection in the guys’ mirrored shades while he’s in the helicopter.  And that’s from an SLR.

I know Nikon have produced something similar with the Nikon D700 but the quality isn’t as high and the megapixel count is so much lower.

I never worried about pixel count too much until a jewellery client told me, half way through the shoot, that he wanted to use one of the shots on a billboard.  I made a tiny little *gulp* and wondered if my D200 could handle that kind of magnification.  Not something i would have even thought about if I had been on the 5d Mark ii.    But hey, it’s not even out yet.  Let’s see what happens when it hits the market.

Close Up at the V&A Friday 26th September 2008

I’ve always been greatly inspired by Nick Thornton-Jones and Warren du Preez. Their approach is frequently to eschew the well-trodden commercial line and to play on the borders of art, fashion, technology and science.  When I heard that they were giving a talk at the V&A about their work, I nearly wet myself with excitement and I made sure I got down there pretty early to get in line, not dreaming that I’d manage to get a chance to see them.  I couldn’t believe my luck when I got to the front of the queue and was told that there were seats available.

The talk was on in the National Art Library and before the talk started we were invited by Warren and Nick to browse around various images from the archives.  There were prints by Julia Margaret-Cameron, Man Ray,  Moholy Nagy,  Eadweard Muybridge and others.  It was amazing to see these images from the archives up close and personal.

During the talk, Nick and Warren described their working methods while showing a slideshow of their work.  They admitted they were a little nervous about talking about their work as they had never done so in such a context before.  I felt especially privileged to be there when I heard this.  They described their method as ‘trying to recreate in camera, what used to be done in the dark room’.  And although there is often a lot of post production in some of their work – they mentioned ‘render farms’ processing their work for weeks – they aim to capture the bulk of what they do in camera.  The work that they had lain out for us was all relevant to their practice too – solarisation was a favourite technique of Man Ray’s and the creation of pictograms was a favourite method of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.  Coincidentally there was a Hungarian sat beside me.

The slideshow was really mind blowing – what has mostly stuck in my mind was the work they did with Alexander McQueen. And I shit you not when I said the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.  There was something chthonic, elemental, raw and occult-like about this series.  They admitted themselves that the shoot had been something of a happening whereby they were in the grip of forces  beyond themselves, of an energy that was more than the sum of the players in the shoot.

Ultimately I think it was very brave of them to reveal so much of their practice in public.  There were a few moments where Warren interrupted Nick with phrases like ‘without revealing too much of our methods’ and would turn the talk in another direction.  Nonetheless I was quite inspired.  To see more of their work, have a look here: Warren Du Preez, Nick Thornton-Jones

and I’ve borrowed a few of their images from their UK Agent’s website Artist Representation/Management

I hope they don’t sue my ass for it.

Hugh O’Malley Fashion Photographer London

Was walking around Carnaby Street with Adele the other day and i casually picked up a copy of New Consumer Magazine. I flicked straight to the fashion pages as i always do and was surprised to see 3 images from the shoot i did with Revamp as a fashion spread over 3 pages. Jen from Revamp had told me it was going to be published but i had totally forgotten. It was a nice surprise. A couple more of the images had been published in Metro a few weeks ago too…

just tryin’ out some stuff…

One of my clients, Designer Rebecca Cella, who I’ve shot for on numerous occasions has had a few of our images placed in Tatler and also in Fabric. Haven’t seen Fabric yet but these are the images used in Tatler. Nice to get another publication under my belt. It’s not exactly 20 pages in Italian Vogue but it’s good to make some progress…

These are the images she chose…

I bought this book on Amazon recently and found it really informative and inspiring:
Fashion and Advertising (World’s Top Photographers Workshops). There’s some beautiful images from photographers like Alexi Lubimorski, Warren Du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones, Solve Sundsbo, Richard Bush etc. It’s mostly fashion based but there’s some strong beauty and still life in there as well. The interviews with the photographers are invaluable and they’re not precious about sharing their information going as far as to reveal their lighting setups.

Also invaluable are the interviews with the photographers about their career, their relationships with clients and magazines, their methods and how each shoot developed from conceptual phase right through production, post and on to publication.

The book was published in 2007 and is available from the usual online retailers but i remember seeing it in the bookstore in the National Portrait Gallery when i went to see the Vanity Fair exhibition recently.

Revamp are an umbrella organisation that work in tandem with Cancer Research UK, taking ‘finds’ from the various charity shops and revamping them with the help of a number of up and coming designers to transform them into completely new designs.

Pretty smooth shoot. Minor hiccup at the start where we tried to work with fabrics draped across the back of the shot but it really looked too cluttered and just messy basically. There weren’t enough of the materials to make it work and the clothes are all so different we would have had to change the set with every shot so there wasn’t enough time to make it work either. We pared the look back to something a lot more basic.

Models Erica and Liberty from Cape Models
Make Up: My Alehammer
Hair: David Cordeaux

Big thanks to Jen from Revamp for styling and co-ordinating the shoot and also for the really cute hand painted skirt which she gave to me for Adele, my Petaling Jaya bunny.

Was shooting for Irish Tatler Magazine for their designer show case at the Irish embassy. Designers included Paul Costelloe, Ciaran Sweeney, Helen Cody, and a few others. Covered the event with my ex business partner Jan Masny. Fun evening, good models, champagne on tap and I think we covered the event well. They’ve since published 8 pages of my shots in the magazine.

I got contacted by Tom Saunders from the Life Channel a few weeks ago to do this shoot for them. The Life Channel is a channel that goes out in schools and doctor surgeries and they wanted to do a program on a fashion photographer outlining the process and showing how the images in magazines are rarely a true representation of reality. Sounds obvious but I guess people rarely get to see the before and after. So we casted from an extras agency for the girl and chose Niamh as we felt she represented the normal girl and we shot her in Lingerie to emphasise the body sculpting aspect of photoshop. I didn’t want to go too crazy on the photoshop. Just tidied her up a little… What do you think?