There was commotion by the door, I stopped mid-sentence and ran full speed towards her, along with more paps than I’d seen in my life. Our cameras were prepared hours ago, manual focus, exposure and flash were set and locked in with duck tape, all for this very moment, there would be no mistakes. She had emerged.
If there’s 1 thing I like about London, and there is more than 1 thing, but if there was just 1 thing, then it would probably be the fact that there is so much going on all the time. There are subcultures most people know nothing about, and subcultures within those subscultures that are even more clandestine. I mentioned last week about going the UK Air Guitar Championships, a prime example of such a group, but last night I managed to infiltrate a society that most people are aware of but seldom get to run with. Last night I was part of the paparazzi.
My contact, who wishes to be known only as “Miss S” is the girlfriend of a Guy I play basketball with. We got chatting after the game last week (we had a WAGS night which involved our wives and girlfriends watching us play followed by drinks and dinner at Elephant and Castle’s classiest Weatherspoons) and it emerged she heads out 3 to 4 times a week as a pap. I think my unbridled enthusiasm was pretty obvious so she offered to take me out on a shoot (with the ulterior motive of picking my brain about wedding photography). 5 days later and I’m meeting her out the front on Bond Street station, just a short walk from Mayfair, which, if you’ve ever played monopoly you will know, is the fancy side of town.
“Miss S”
“Miss S” had contacted her agent and there wasn’t much buzz at 10pm on this Monday night. Pearl Jam and the Arctic Monkeys were both playing in London so there was a chance some celebs would be out and about, but nothing was assured, we had to make out own luck. We did this by doing a whistlestop tour of all the swanky restaurants in the area (Gordon Ramsay @ Claridges plus a whole bunch of other ones I can’t remember, if you’re into that scene you’ll know what they are, if you’re not then the names will mean nothing) looking for other paps or big cars with tinted windows. There certainly isn’t a shortage of impressive vehicles, Bentleys and Mercedes galore, each with a chauffeur waiting anxiously for their master to emerge, but if the windows aren’t tinted super dark then they don’t belong to someone famous and we don’t want to photograph them. We’re not in Shoreditch any more Toto.
This next paragraph is for the photographers out there so feel free to skip it if you’re not interested in technical stuff. If you’ve ever wondered what settings, lenses and bodies paps use you’re not alone. I’ve often pondered what special tricks they have up their sleeve to get that shot. So here it is folks, the moment you’ve been waiting for. Everything is set to manual, the exposure is set at 1/250th, f/8.0 and ISO 400, the focus is set to manual (about 2-3m, although I slightly cocked this up and set mine too close resulting in soft images – f/8.0 gives some room to move and the wide lens also helps put it all in focus). Flash is also set to manual, again set at 2-3m, I’d never really used my flash on manual before so this was a good learning experience, I discovered that the stofen diffuser I use to provide soft lighting at weddings takes away a lot of the light with is fine for ETTL but doesn’t really work when shooting manual. I used some duck tape on the lens to make sure it didn’t get bumped and change to Auto focus, you know, because I’m a pro now. Lens wise the wider the better. I had an image of paps using these long telephoto lenses all the time, but these days the technique is just to get right up in the celebs face and blast away, I used my 10-20 set at 18mm on my 40D cropped sensor. Anyway, back to the story.
Our final call on our tour was at Guy Ritchie’s pub, the Punch Bowl. As we rounded the corner there appeared to be a congregation of some sort out the front. Drunken revellers? Paps? A combination of both? We hung back for a moment, played it cool, like a couple of leopards who’d spotted a pack of gazelle and were looking for some tasty young straglers who could mean easy pickings. Soon enough Miss S recognised a cohort, so we approached. After a brief chat we’d established that one of the Sugar Babes was inside, Amelle. I later learned she’s currently number 1 on the charts which makes her more of a big deal than I thought she was last night. I played it cool, but the truth was I’d never heard of her. So, we’d established Amelle was inside, but who else could be there? There were a LOT of paps, maybe Guy Ritchie was in? Or Brad and Angelina? We soon decided someone would have to do some reconnoissance, and as I was unknown in paparazzi circles I was the perfect choice. Without hesitation I marched inside, pretending to talk to someone on my phone as a way of looking natural and playing it cool, I was half way into the room when it suddenly dawned on me that I had no idea what any celebs actually look like. You know, unless they’re genuine A list, or were famous 10 years ago when I was more in tune with the latest flicks and the music scene. I returned a few minutes later reporting that I saw no one I knew, but that I didn’t really know anyone so that didn’t mean much. My rep was now on the line, I had to act quick so I calmly told them about my mobile phone ruse, how no one suspected a thing, how I was having pretend conversations and not just listening! At this point they told me the Punch Bowl is notorious for having no phone reception. I’m such a n00b – LOL.
All of a sudden there was commotion by the door, I stopped mid-sentence and ran full speed towards her, along with more paps than I’d seen in my life. Our cameras were prepared hours ago, manual focus, exposure and flash were set and locked in with duck tape, all for this very moment, there would be no mistakes. She had emerged. The next 60 seconds were unlike anything I’d experienced before, Amelle and some guy were walking reasonably quickly and we were all running backwards in front of them, all 15 of us, people were shouting warnings like “TREE” and “BIKE”, it was pandemonium, flashes were firing constantly, Amelle was lapping it up but the guy looked pretty flustered.
I chekced the papers today to see if she made it in, low and behold both the free evenings had several shots of her (both with the times totally wrong, she left at 11pm, not 8 or 9).
I picked up loads more info throughout the night, but as dinner is served I’m going to publish this now and have a feed, if you’ve got any questions leave them in the comments and I’ll get back to you, although I am off to Barbados on Thursday so you’ll have to forgive me if I take a few days!
