18 March 2011

Filled with fresh vigour after posting my first blog, the following day drained all that away when my bag - complete with wallet and cards and mobile - was stolen.  I left the pub to walk to my Derby County match and left the bag lying under the table - a simple, stupid mistake.  Mind you, after feeling angry, distraught and, worse still, foolish, I soon found myself adopting a pragmatic state of mind to the whole wretched ordeal - that's after I had got through the massive inconvenience of blocking my cards and phone.  For one thing, I'm fully insured, had only a £20 note in my wallet, and had at least kept my keys in my pocket.  It could have been so much worse. As for missing a Derby County win - a rarity at the moment - I found it was the main match on the Football League Show that evening.  I also found myself reflecting contentedly on the fact that I am not living a life as desperate and amoral as the piece of ordure that took my bag.
I felt even better when, having worked out that I had lost about £100 as a result of this theft, had an email from a client rewarding me with an extra £100 for a job well done.  I am now completely over the experience, and will never, ever let my bag leave my shoulder again!
I've even surprised myself at getting through such a week without a drink: I'm supporting my wife Francine after she decided to give up alcohol for Lent.  Did you know, though, that ironically Sundays don't count?  This has made it easier, though left me a bit bemused: are we to glean from this that Jesus roamed around for for six days and then, on Sunday, came out of the wilderness to go to the pub?
It was hard, though, sitting in a  Pizza Express with a lemonade while my daughter and partner sipped on a large one.  That evening got better, though, after watching Derby Shakespeare's production of Hamlet, a particularly vigorous affair, made all the more visceral by being seated on the front row, exhilaratingly close to Hamlet's spit and Leartes' blood.



My daughter Helena used to perform with Derby Shakespeare but, even though she now lives in London, she has a bigger stage in Derby than ever before. I used Helena and boyfriend Gareth as my models for a photo commission from Derby Cathedral Quarter and just recently, they were standing 100 feet tall, quite literally: they are the faces on a massive banner adorning Chapel St Car Park.   









I also used Helena and Gareth for a series of photos that I could submit to the Trevillion Image Library which specialises in book covers.  I've only got 20 images in the library but have been fortunate to sell several of them.  I've just received the news that I've sold a photo of Helena for the second time.  Here is the image as it appears on the first book.  It's a novel by Jodi Picoult who is quite a big name in America.  Schuldig, by the way, means 'guilty'.















I've also sold an image of Helena with Gareth for a book by Anita Shreve, another big name Stateside.  Funnily enough, both images were taken within a few yards of each other - in a country lane in Brailsford, Derbyshire.  The doomy skies obviously helped.  What has been an eye-opener for me is that when a novel is published in other countries, you can get a completely different cover.  The Picoult novel is in German, the Shreve in Polish.  You get different titles, too: I can't find a Picoult novel called Guilty.  Skradziony Czas means 'stolen time', though the title of the American novel is Resistance.




I have worked with two other models in the last three months: Mark and Tamzin.  I discovered both while shooting production photos for the theatre troupe the Marlowe Players.  I was commissioned to shoot pictures to promote the Derby Cathedral Quarter Christmas lights.  Both Mark and Tamzin were very professional and as the images went down so well, I had no hesitation in asking them to model suits and jackets for my squash club colleague Rupert Bowling who runs an online company called suitsmen.co.uk. We recently completed a shoot in Ashbourne which went really well.  I'll say more about this shoot in future blogs.