blossom_one

Heather Fell

I met Heather whilst on commission for The Sun newspaper. You know that one...Murdoch, in the papers themselves a lot nowadays, page three girls and the most ludicrous headlines on the red side of the Daily Mail. It was for their features page and all the usual ridiculous requests for photo ideas had been made and then carefully put to one side. For me I knew it was a standard quick portrait job that I knew this athlete would be squeezing in between her busy training schedule so I knew I would be pushed for time.

My car broke down that day so I managed to persuade Rebecca to drop me there in the van and I told her I would not be long... Now the problem with that was that I was a bit long, and yes I definitely did get told off.. Not because I made her wait but because we then got stuck in rush hour traffic in Bath....and then in Keynsham....oh and Bristol too. All the while in the van which isn't really known for it's about town comfort levels.

Anyway it took a little longer than usual for two reasons. When the journalist...or tv for that matter asks if they can go first the answer is always no. No...no..no, no, no. Not just because your being selfish but sometimes for that reason but also because it might just be that they run over..and they do that a lot. When they do run over, or when the subject gets tired, or bored for that matter it's you that still needs to get them to perform for the camera...and now you have to rush aswell. Great. Anyway I must have been asleep or being super duper nice because I was happy to let the reporter go first. The second reason is that it always takes a little longer when you have a good and willing subject because you just want to take a better picture.

Heather was a really nice and interesting person who was happy to have her picture taken...which on quick jobs for The Sun is always a little surprising. I'm sure she has been photographed a whole bunch of times and then some due to her Olympic success in Beijing and her future prospects for London 2012 but she was still happy to engage with me and work on a good photograph. She was so patient that I thought I would shoot a rogue roll of b&w that I found in my bag on my Mamiya 7 and see if I couldn't get a nice shot that ignored all the colour casting of the dimly lit training room that we had been graced with.

I really liked the results and here is my favourite frame. Good luck with your training schedule Heather and for the Olympics later this year.

Fish & Fish

For eighteen years of my life the only fish I would happily devour was that from the local fish & chip shop. I mean I have always loved fish & chips and it's still my favourite takeaway to this day, possibly one of my favourite meals.. So unless we were drenching dinner with salt and vinegar and wrapping it up in that day's misprinted papers, I wasn't interested. According to my parents I happily spent my youth referring to the dish as 'fish & fish', so I must have liked it deep down inside just not when it came to dinnertime.

So it comes as no surprise that I can remember quite vividly the first fish dish that stopped me in my tracks, and made me sit up and take note. I was at my Uncles in California (that would be you John - thanks again) enjoying the delights of the surf, the beach, my first surfboard and getting driven around in a lowered F150 truck (such a child!).. John suggested some fresh fish from this killer place on County Line that serves up the freshest fish, caught daily from the pacific opposite the restaurant. What with me being very British I felt it was a bit rude to say that I didn't really like fish so I shut my trap. What followed was a culinary delight though, Sea Bass sprinkled with flaked almonds, a generous pinch of salt and pepper and a hunk of butter. All wrapped up in foil and cooked to perfection on the barbecue of course. And perfection it was. Now I like fish, I said to myself.

I'm not the only person who now likes to eat fish. Statistics say that in 2009 the world ate over 120 million tonnes of fish. It's a staggering statistic and that rate increases by 6% year on year. So maybe we should be worried about running out of oil but we should also be aware of the rate at which the world eats fish. Some of the practices that directly affect fish heading for the UK markets were highlighted last year by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on a Channel 4 series called Hugh's Fish Fight. It was heart wrenching, educational and made me want to act. It also seems to have made another 770,617...and counting people want to act, which is great.

I'm glad to be heading out to Bangladesh at the end of this week with duckrabbit to work on series of photofilms for a Fishing & Aquaculture research institute there. It's made me think about how important fish are to this world, for sustenance, to provide livelihoods and in the environment as a species.

It's also made me think about just how hard it is to get a nice piece of fresh fish nowadays. Thankfully my brother is a chef so I had the nicest piece of trout I have ever eaten on Christmas morning this year.

And if you don't know my brother then perhaps it's easier to just go fishing. Like James Brown here..