50 Shots of happiness: Getting the shot

Trigger warning

Time can be an interesting thing. The time it takes to get a person in front of you for a project like this can feel like an eternity…but not nearly as long as the time it takes you to get the camera up to your eye as you see that person give you a genuine smile. It’s one of the things I’ve really struggled with when taking portraits of people and trying to capture a moment of genuine interaction. Those moments are so fleeting, that if you’ve got that camera away from your face because your talking to the person you’re taking a photo of, it can be gone by the time you get the camera up to take the shot…but if you’ve got a camera in front of your face the whole time, then you may never create that connection with the person that sparks their genuine reaction.

So for this project I tried something new, a remote trigger. The basic idea was that I would get the shot set up and then just get the person chatting, if I saw a moment, I would press the remote button in my hand and it would take the shot. There were a few challenges, one being that I had a tendency to stand taller than the camera, so a lot of the shots had people looking slightly above the line of the camera. It also meant I took A LOT of photos. I’m someone who is notorious for taking way too many photos at the best of times, but by the time I reached 40 people, I had taken over 1,700 photos, and when each of these photos is over 200mb, it’s fair to say my SD cards and hard-drives were filling up very quickly.
But the aim was to capture genuine moments of happiness, and I definitely captured a lot more of these than ever before, so I will 100% use this approach again.

Human interaction

For my day job I do a lot of interviews for videos. These are usually with people who aren’t used to being in front of a camera, and so a lot of my job is actually just getting people relaxed and talking despite having lights, a camera and complete strangers in their face. I’ve always considered this one of my strengths, but I really noticed how rusty I had become over the COVID lockdowns. So I really wanted to use this project as a chance to reconnect with that ability to get people relaxed and talking. Fortunately, my super-power of not knowing much about anything, but a little bit about a lot of things, was enough to get me through, and I got some really lovely feedback from people who said they normally hate having their photo taken, but really enjoyed this.

Music to take portraits by

In my normal videography job, I’m doing everything I can to avoid any noise that might interfere with the edit of the video. So it was actually incredibly liberating to be able to play music in the background of each session. When I take portraits of musicians, I usually play music for those sessions, as it feels in keeping with the people I’m working with…but this was the first time I’ve done it for ‘normal people’, and it really helped ensure there weren’t any awkward silences, and helped set a relaxed vibe.

Although, when I asked Jane to play her uke and sing a song…we found out pretty quickly that ‘Ambient Scando electronica’ playing on a speaker in the room, really wasn’t helping.

But a big thanks to Nils Frahm, Jon Hopkins and Max Cooper for the tunes!

Happy accidents

At the end of each session I asked if they could flip the card with their number from one hand to the other, and I would just roll the dice with a single photo to capture what happened. Some of these photos were my favourites!