AD 2016 Q1
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IMAGING<br />
SHOOTER<br />
“In 2007 I was commissioned<br />
to create the photo<br />
illustrations for a retelling<br />
of Charles Kingsley’s classic<br />
1863 book, The Water-<br />
Babies: A Fairy Tale for a<br />
Land Baby. The version I read<br />
as a child was illustrated with<br />
paintings, but this retelling<br />
combined my photos with<br />
artwork from illustrator Heidi<br />
Taylor to create the whimsical<br />
fantasies of the book.<br />
“I fell in love with<br />
Sue Flood’s Whale Calf<br />
photograph and was delighted when she agreed to let me<br />
use it for the book. I had to get the child to fit the existing<br />
composition, so we shot him against a gray background<br />
underwater, which actually worked much better than expected.<br />
I love the child’s wrinkly little feet and the white parasitic crabs<br />
on the whale from the original.<br />
“The otter wasn’t nearly as sweet as he looks. He spent<br />
the whole shoot trying to jump onto my head, and the stink<br />
of his musk was incredible. Really — they had to air out the<br />
swimming pool room for days after we left. Photographing<br />
both the child and the otter in a swimming pool was the only<br />
practical way to match the lighting.<br />
“In the story the main character, Tom, meets all sorts of<br />
incredible underwater creatures; I thought the turbot image<br />
came together really nicely. I used a stock image of the fish,<br />
and the challenge was to get the light on the boy to match the<br />
lighting on the fish. Once this was achieved, it was a blessedly<br />
simple composition.”<br />
96 | WINTER <strong>2016</strong>