Do you ever dream in Images – where is the inspiration coming from?
I often wake up with an image in my head that I would like to photograph – sometimes I even get the chance to make the dream a reality (at least in Photoshop!). The other place that I get inspiration from is talking with other people and bouncing ideas around. It really does not matter how mad the idea is at this stage, the crazier the better. Those who know me know that I can get rather excited about new ideas!
A good example of this was my Prince project. I needed something to do for my final degree show at university and about 18 months before the show I was talking to some other students and said, at random, what about images based on song titles by Prince, like ‘Graffiti Bridge’, I could paint someone with graffiti for that! Well, the idea did not go away and once I moved in to Banks’ Mill I set about planning a 2011 calendar with a single image for each month. Stage one was to go through my collection of nearly 600 Prince songs and find titles that appealed to me and suggested an image. This done I then sketched out rough ideas for around 15 and began the shooting. Each shoot was for one song and I knew I only needed a single image for each one. Funnily enough ‘Graffiti Bridge’ was the very last one to be done and after two and a half hours of body painting by Stacey Sanderson, Halo was ready for the shoot. The graffiti artist ‘Deus’, supplied by ‘Subism’, had already spent several hour painting a bare wall in my studio. All I had to do was take the final image. I only took about a dozen images and used the very first one! The final calendar images very varied but I was pleased how they worked out. You can see the whole calendar at Lulu and here is ‘Graffiti Bridge’.
Commercial and Industrial Photographer for Edinburgh, the Highlands, Lothian and Borders of Scotland 
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