Trinity Career’s Shoot

I’ve just remembered I was supposed to put up some pics from the photoshoot I did recently for TCD.  I’m not sure if they are going to use any of them, the publication doesn’t come out until the beginning of the next academic year.  We’ll see.

Anyway, the brief was to have four or five students, equal numbers of boys and girls, all smiley and happy around Trinity on a perfectly cloudless summer’s day.  Now, day’s like that are few and far between in Dublin.  So after rounding up my happy smiley volunteers, I kept my eye on the weather reports to pick out the best day.  The weather was looking pretty grim after an unusual heatwave, but the weather changed on the last day of term and we were returned to cloudless skies.  All systems go!

My subjects were in great spirits, which helped as we spent a good hour and a half working, and they seemed happy enough with my continued barking of ‘SMILE, BE HAPPY!’  Once we’d finished, the girls asked for a couple of individual shots for the craic, so I obliged!

Rax and Christy

Did anybody watch the BBC4 Wonders of Iceland season?  Well if you didn’t you missed a wonderful programme about Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson who has been photographing scenes from Iceland that he belives are becoming rarer and rarer.

The photos are stunning, the dark moods within are amazing.  The portraits are candid and both amusing and tragic.  It was pretty inspirational stuff.

One of the things I’ve taken from the programme and in viewing his website in particular is not to worry so much about eradicating blur, or making a portrait pretty.  Sometimes honesty in a picture gives the subject more depth, and makes them a stronger character.

So, with this in mind, the next time I took a portrait, I tried to evoke the Rax-esque in my composition.  And on Friday, I was delighted to be invited along to an event that afforded me that opportunity.  A wonderful man called Christy, who along with his extensive life experience has a mischievous and enthusiastic sense of the slightly ridiculous.  Every year for the past 7 years, he and many of his friends have held ‘Eliza Doolittle Day’ on 20th May, in honour of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.  The merry band take over a Dublin Tour Bus for an entire day, and drive to various spots all over Dublin.  The Lord Mayor even gets involved.

I was able to take loads of pictures of the day, of eccentric Edwardian fancy dress, of fantastic projects showing how a community working together can create something wonderful, and most particularly of my favourite subject of the day, the man himself – Christy.  So here is Christy, in a style inspired by (but certainly not matching up to) Rax.

By the way, if you want to see the other pictures from the day, you can visit my Flickr page.