This Week • 12 JANUARY 2003

What a week!

Doing a fashion-shoot requires more than just a camera and a model. Professional photographer Bryan Azzopardy tells Ramona Depares about his work

Monday: This is the best day for doing fashion shoots. Hair salons are normally closed, which means that we have the hair stylist available. Fashion boutiques are also very quiet, so they don’t mind us going to take the clothes. And of course, we’d have had the weekend to prepare.

So first thing in the morning off to prepare a photo-shoot for a magazine. The whole team was involved in this meeting: we’re preparing the shoots for the February magazines and you can’t imagine how impossible the deadlines are. Discussed which models to choose as well as the locations. The most important thing of all is that we’re different and it’s quite a long-winded process until we finalise a photo shoot. I must say that it’s fantastic to work with Maltese magazines these days. They have become so professional and there’s such good stuff in the shops… When I first came to Malta from England, things were quite scary professionally speaking. I mean, people would expect you to do a cover shoot without getting in a hair-stylist or a make-up artist. There just didn’t use to be any budgets for that sort of thing. Thankfully, things have changed for the better.

Tuesday: This is what my wife Astrick and myself refer to as result day. Astrick is a make-up artist by profession and I use her a lot on my photo-shoots, she usually knows what style I want to create and we work well together. Some people might not agree but it’s great that we work a lot together. We get on well and after all, it’s very useful to know that half the team is always there!

Like I said, result day today, the end of the shooting process where we actually get to see what we achieved. And we choose which pics we want to use. This is a day long process. I like to have a bit of a say in which photos will go in the magazine and what sort of lay-out will be used. That’s part of the photographer’s job after all, to know which particular photo will create the effect that the client needs.

Meetings with the designer to discuss this particular shoot: took quite a while, a couple of decisions were taken over lunch. It’s great when business can be combined with pleasure. Finally handed over a selection to the designers and nowit’s up to them.

Wednesday: Took some private portfolios today. We have different clients every week, there is no set routine to this sort of work. We get women who have never modelled but who realise that they are getting older and decide that they want to take some good photos of themselves. Or they might want to give them as gifts to their husbands or the other way round. These people normally need a bit of a pep talk because they’ll be quite shy at first, not being used to it it’s very understandable of course. I try to keep this things for during the week, when we don’t have the advertising clients and magazine shoots.

Afternoon did some work with children. I like to make friends with them before actually taking the photos. So I go for walk with them and their parents, I pick flowers, I help them look for snails… in short I almost become like a kid myself. They have to be made to feel at ease before any pictures are taken. Parents will sometimes want to rush the job but that’s out of the question. Of course, one needs tons of patience but it’s rewarding when you get the results you’re after. NOT long ago we had a shoot in Buskett and it was raining. There was mud everywhere. A model will appreciate that she has to take care of the clothes but if you put new trousers on a child, he’ll just want to see how fast they can run! Great fun though.

Thursday: Had another private shoot in the morning. Thankfully the woman in question was prepared to take a day off work to do it as it would have been impossible to fit her over the weekend. That’s one of the most difficult things in fashion shoots: getting everyone to be available on the same day. Modeling does not pay much in Malta so models are not likely to want to take a day off in the middle of the week. I can tell you our weekends are always pretty busy.

Friday: Had to co-ordinate a jewellery advertising campaigning today. This is quite different from fashion shooting. You have to go closer, give it a more romantic look…

In the afternoon decided that it was time to spend some time in the dark room. You have to be in the right mood to do this as (quite unsurprisingly) it tends to be rather dark and lonely in there. But it’s not boring at all, especially if things go right. And I have to say this: it’s a bit like magic, one minute you have nothing and the next there are all these wonderful results. And I do it by following the traditional method, printing on black and white and then toning. People tend to prefer black and white photos in fact but few people actually do them due to the hard work involved. You can easily tell which photographers who print on black and white, it’s almost like a signature. In fact it takes a considerable amount of work and effort, almost like a painting.

Saturday: Early morning thought a bit about an exhibition I’d like to do. This will be my first exhibition in Malta so it’s quite a big deal. I don’t believe an exhibition should consist in a total of six photos, like some other people have been known to do. It should be more like fifty. So I won’t do it before I am sure.

Then off to a fashion shoot. These big jobs are always kept for the weekend and they’re always somewhere outdoors, on location. My wife and I love going for country walks, it’s so brilliant for inspiration. Sometimes we’ll just see a wall or a bunch or country steps and we’ll think hey, they’d be brilliant for a photo shoot. The simpler something the is the more likely it is to work out.

Sunday: Today is not necessarily a holiday for us. In fact today we continued with another photo shoot. Also got some good news about some contacts I’d made abroad. I started working in photography in England, I lived there for ages. I’ve had my work in fashion magazines and I’ve done countless shoots for modelling agencies. The opportunities are naturally bigger, I mean just doing the shots for Boss, one of the agencies, would be enough to keep me going for ages. But then Malta is such a safer place to live in!