It was great to see the early stages of rehearsal of the classic Tenessee Williams play Streetcar last month. This is the first Tenesee Williams play to be performed at the Liverpool Playhouse in thirty years and under the direction of Gemma Bodinetz this is sure to be a brilliant performance.
The sections I photographed for the Playhouse have the cast of Amanda Drew, Matthew Flynn, Sam Troughton (grandson of Patrick Troughton) and Leanne Best and they were all stunningly good even at the early stage that I saw them.
I’m really looking forward to seeing this next week and it’s well worth checking out here.
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Whilst it doesn’t feel like a year it clearly was this time in 2011 when model Radek Bober and myself wandered out to Hilbre Island, just off the coast of West Kirby.
Hilbre Island is a great little place to visit (whilst keeping an eye in the tides) and gave a nice elemental feel to things. Certainly the closer we got to the island the more experimental the shoot became.
Was rather glad when it got to 5pm and we had to trudge back as it was bitterly cold out there but it’s been good to revisit some of the pics again as I’m working on a bit of a project at the mo and the original shots got a bit lost with other work I was doing at the time.
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The very lovely Club Geek Chic had their seventh In Conversation With last night at a packed St Georges Hall and the audience were treated to the words and musical selections of ace actor Paul McGann.
Paul went through his career, with many great highlights along the way, including ‘Withnail And I’ (one of my favourite films), ‘The Monocled Mutineer’ and ‘Dr Who’ (with many Dr Who fans in the audience).
As well as Paul’s life we also were treated to his musical choices and there were some great covers of David Bowie and Billie Holiday during the show too.
Here are a couple of portraits of Paul I did before the show started, it was great to meet him and looking forward to the next In Conversation With now.
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Couple of portraits of top Liverpool boxer, Derry Matthews, which I did for Fighting Fit magazine at the beginning of this month. Derry was doing a series of exercise challenges as part of a series for the magazine comparing the strength, stamina and agility of individual atheletes from a range of boxing and fighting backgrounds. After seeing him in action I can certainly testify as to how fit he was and he did really well in the tests.
A couple of weeks later he was in action at The Olympia where he sadly lost the title bout, despite boxing with a broken nose. Hopefully we’ll see him back in action soon.
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I’ve been getting a nice lot of acting related work (photographically speaking of course) recently with pics for The Unity Theatre and Everyman Playhouse the last couple of weeks and lovely to hook up with Steven Fletcher again to do some portrait work with him.
It was a beautifully crisp wintry afternoon in Liverpool (the sun showed it’s face for once) and we did a range of shots in and around the Sir Thomas Hotel.
Steve came to prominence in Brookside and Hollyoaks and has had many tv and stage roles in his career and he now also has his agency at http://www.20tenentertainment.com with ace Liverpool impressionist Darren Farley on the team.
Next Saturday brings another actor in front of my lens courtesy of the Club Geek Chic team.
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Also from last week I got asked to do some publicity shots of Big Wow performing at the Unity Theatre and also saw the guys performing The Art Of Falling Apart on Saturday.
The theatre was packed out and I believe there are a handful of tickets available for the final run of shows this week. If you can, get along as the show was brilliant. Great script from Bob with superb characters and acting by Tim and Matt had everyone laughing throughout.
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A little tidy up from the weekend and some more shots of the boxing at The Olympia on Friday, this time with the matches prior to the main bout with Derry Matthews and Emiliano Marsilli.
Great to do some boxing again after a bit of a break (and a bit easier to focus with than poking the camera through the cage for the MMA work) and the TV lights didn’t half help make things nice and bright.
Hope the eye of Ryan Tom (third from bottom picture) has settled down now after it swelling to the size of a golf ball…shudder.
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A very exciting evening of boxing was held at The Olympia last night with the top fight for the vacant IBO world lightweight championship between Emiliano Marsilli and local boxer, Derry Matthews.
I met Derry a couple of weeks ago for a magazine shoot and it was good to be invited to do pictures of the evening. Also good to have the tv there so we had nice bright lights to work with.
The atmosphere in The Olympia was absolutely intense as Italian and local fans shouted out for their respective boxers and after a quiet opening round things started to heat up as both fighters traded punches and being fairly equal after the third round.
Sadly for the local fans Emilliano started to make his presence felt in the following rounds and by round 7 it was all over for Derry as his cuts became too bad for him to continue.
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Nice photo shoot tonight for Big Wow at The Unity Theatre. They currently have their ace show of ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’. I was treated to a preview of some sections from the production and it was amazingly fast, frenetic and very amusing.
Here are some portraits of Tim and Matt, the more theatrical ones will come soon but I’d strongly recommend getting a ticket (soon as the shows are almost sold out).
More info here.
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Big Wow (aka writer Bob Farquhar and performers Tim Lynskey and Matt Rutter) return to the Unity Theatre (for whom I did these photos for) this week for a run of their new show ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’). The show is described as “following a number of out-of-sorts people living out-of-kilter lives, all against a backdrop of a city on the edge of badly organised chaos.”
The show follows on from their previous sell-out performances Insomnobabble, Dark Grumblings and The Friendship Experiment, and brings their trademark fast-paced and anarchic comic theatre to a piece on how we all cope with just being alive.
It was highly entertaining watching the reaction of the public as we trailed around Liverpool one a late October Friday afternoon with Tim and Matt dressed with their sandwich boards and trouser legs rolled up. Brave men indeed doing this and coping with the laughter and abuse!
More information can be found here, it’ll be a great show to see.
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Last month I did some photos for a modelling agency and one of the models was this young lady, Louise. We did a range of shots including a section at the end with Louise doing some boxing shots in a Wavertree gym – a bit different to the usual photos I do with the boxing stuff but good fun to do.
Hopefully some other shots will come out soon from another shoot just before Christmas.
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Christmas has been and gone and now it’s preparations for the New Year; hope everyone has had a good time.
Second half of the year brought along a diverse range of work and photo opportunities so here we go with July. The month started with an interesting project documenting an event called Curious Minds looking at creativity in education. The sessions ran over two days (one each at the University of Lancaster and Liverpool Hope University). Some very interesting debates took place and good to see social media forming an integral part of what was going on. Also, it was another trip down to Silverstone for the British Grand Prix. I rather liked the chap who was watching a talk by Martin Brundle with Lewis Hamilton hovering behind him.
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August was a chance for a holiday and a tour around the Baltic regions. Sadly the weather was rather variable (only to be expected I suppose) so St Petersburg didn’t shine as well as it would do. The highlight of the trip had to be The Church Of The Spilled Blood though which had magnificent painted walls and ceilings and was truly breathtaking. Stockholm was also a fantastic place to visit especially seeing all of the little islands as we came into port. The month also had two photo shoots with folk musician Andy Steele, whom it was great to hook with after not seeing him since school days, and did some photos for his Nightfishing album.
The standout event for September had to be a stellar night of music at The Olympia in honour of the 96 victims at Hillsborough. A variety of Liverpool musicians took to the stage including John Power, Ian Prowse’s Amsterdam, Pete Wylie and The Farm before being joined by former Clash man Mick Jones – great memories and all for a worthy cause. Great to see this go out as a national tour earlier this month too.
October was a busy month with event launches and cage fighting but it was lovely to do photos for Liverpool Design Festival and cover the three days of the event at St Georges Hall. I also did another photo job for the Unity Theatre for the Big Wow show coming up next month which drew some funny looks from passersby as the two actors wandered around the city centre with sandwich boards over them – all good fun of course though.
The highlight of November was taking photos of the celebrations of the centenary of the Liverpool Playhouse. The day included a children’s puppeteer, a theatrical performance that covered the 100 years of the venue (including a very brave actor playing the guitar in the open air in just his boxer shorts and then there was the four foot cake which came out at the end of the brilliant Ladykillers show).
December closed (similar to the start of the year) with more cage fighting and some work with a model agency which will hopefully see the light soon. All the very best for 2012 everyone and thank you for looking at my blog.
