Mustard with Greens
Oct 2021
Sometimes a colours just randomly makes it into a lot of your portraits in a short period of time. The more you think OK I’ve done mustard (or lemon, or buttercup) the more it just appear in the places you shoot in. Add to the mix Library green or apple green and thats pretty much all the colours that I’ve shot in the last couple of months. OK I’m exaggerating a bit - maybe its just a way of posting about several shoots at the same time…..
Tarunima Sinha is an amazing baker! I know because she sent me and my assistant home with a selection of delicious cakes that she made for our shoot. These weren’t cakes to be used in any of the shots, they were just cakes that she made for us to eat during and take away after! This is in no way the norm on food shoots where you rarely get to eat, yet alone taste any food, as chefs will often whip away the plate used in the photo, declaring ‘it is now cold and can’t be eaten..’
We were photographing Tarunima for an Observer Food Monthly story. When we arrived at her home in north London, she was very shy and surprised at all the equipment and backdrops that we brought and couldn’t understand why we were making such a fuss. She was also surprised that I wasn’t Indian (her husband is called Amit too). It’s a reasonable assumption considering there are about 1 million Amit’s in India and only a small number in Israel (of which half are women).
This was a portrait without food, but we included her collection of cake tins, some of which are family heirlooms, including one that her mother used in India which inspired her company name - @mylittlecaketin
She was such a lovely person to photograph - shy, kind and fully deserving of the attention that she will hopefully continue to receive.
Journalist and writer Lucy Mangan, dreams about libraries. More specifically she dreams about having a library in her house that will hold her 8000 books. I was sent to North Norfolk, to her new home were she had just finished building and filling her dream library, which just happened to be painted in Mustard and Library Green! Read her story in the Guardian Weekend Magazine here.
The wonderful Actor Niamh Cusack was the last shoot to ‘cut the mustard’ and make it into this blog, shot again for the Guardian Magazine.
Some of the colour choice was incidental but some was due to magazines wanting to match shoots to the colour of cakes or having too many other colour already on the pages, but either way I do love a colour theme to work with. The last two are slightly off in a different direction but foreshadow next months theme of green and purple…..