This is my first post for about 2 months and like an unpaid bill or bank statement, I’ve really been putting off opening it. This blog business moves so fast and there’s so much coming at you that it often feels like you need to be out there showing off some shiny new project every damned day. The simple fact of it all is, however, that sometimes, in fact, for weeks at a time I don’t really have all that much to say at all. Like everybody else I’m just trying to get by, earn a living and stop the bank from getting too curious about what I’m up to. After that, I try to find the time to produce interesting things.

It’s now the first week of October and this post can trace it’s roots back to mid July when I was commissioned by The Sunday Times Style Magazine to photograph three men for the Mens Fashion Special. They were Patrick Grant, director of Norton & Sons and E.Tautz, a pair of Savile Row tailors; Joseph Corre, founder of Agent Provocateur and now the driving force behind A Child of the Jago; Theo Hutchcraft & Adam Anderson, who make up the duo, Hurts.

The original call was to simply produce a portrait of each man depicting his personal approach to the daily ritual of dressing. However, I had also been recently asked by Kate Suiter, the photography director of Style, to give some thought to the possibility of producing some short films for the Sunday Times website.

This story seemed to lend itself not just to the moving format more than the still one, but also to the audio format. I’m very aware, as a photographer, that if I want to make the move into film then it’s extremely important that I pay attention to the narrative and the sound, as much as, if not more so, the imagery. The mantra has to be ‘no story, no film’.

Kate and I agreed that I would photograph each of the men and also make a short film on the theme of “How I get dressed.” Apart from that, she had the grace and confidence to let me get on with it without questioning or dictatingmy methods and, remarkably, did not even ask to see anything until the deadline day, which was the Thursday before the Sunday of publication. I really do believe that it’s possible to do your best work when the client gives you the space to do the very thing that they hired you to do for the very reason that they hired you to do it, and Kate has done that consistently throughout the years of our working relationship. So, big ups to her.

Each of the men was scheduled to be photographed/filmed on a different day and in a different place and this threw up the most difficult part of the series, with the emphasis on the word ‘series’. I wanted all of it – the photographs and the films – to be of a piece. I wanted them all lit the same and shot on the same background and I wanted the men isolated from their daily environment and put into a neutral space.

I approached each of the three days in the same way. I and my assistants, Ben & Sarah, would arrive and while they loaded the equipment in, I would find the biggest/best space to work in and then leave them to get the lighting ready. While they were doing that I would spend the time talking to the subject and explain the idea behind our visit. I was looking to film a quiet, dignified study of a gentleman at the most contemplative part of his day – the time he spends dressing and preparing to face the world – and not, as Joe Corre put it, “poke around in my sock drawer.” The photographic portraits would come first and, if the truth be told, I felt that I could get those in the bag not necessarily with my eyes closed, but certainly much quicker than the time it would take for each of the films.

In the course of shooting each of the films, I felt that I was riding a learning curve that seemed to increase at a phenomenally exponential rate. Stills and movies are not the same thing but they certainly share a lot of the same genes, so after nearly 20 years as a photographer I have found that film making, for me, is like arriving on a planet with a lot of very familiar landmarks.

As filming progressed I realised that not only did the films need to be stylistically similar with regard to lighting and background, but also similar in composition, angle and speed/rate of cuts between shots. All of these were edited in iMovie, the main reason being that I don’t even possess a copy of Final Cut Pro and, also, speaking honestly, I find FCP scarily complicated. It’s a whole other kettle of fish to get into and I’m sure I will, in the same way that I did with Photoshop, organically and over a good many years so that it becomes something that I absorb by osmosis rather than in a concentrated, intense classroom way.

Once we had all the film in the can – well, digital footage shot on the 5D backed up in triplicate – we then spent about one day per film editing and then went back to each of the guys to show them their film and sit down to record their voiceovers. Patrick Grant recorded his in his basement studio at Savile Row by speaking it off the top of his head in sync with the film. Joe Corre watched his film in his office and used it as a visual springboard to express his thoughts on style, fashion and the power of make up, while Theo Hutchcraft and Adam Anderson, who make up the band Hurts, emailed me their monologues on the great white shirt and the importance of polishing your shoes from somewhere on the road, as they were touring and unavailable to meet me for a sit down. This is the weakest of the three. The voiceover they gave me, despite probably being the most romantic and evocative, was also too short for the film I’d cut so I had to stretch it out by inserting silences between each of their monologues. I’d like to have done it with them in person and teased out a bit more than what they gave me, I think it would have been stronger.

The final trio of films and series of portraits is, I hope, a good start for me in the world of the moving image. Documentary is what interests me and it’s the story that I want. I am not a conceptual photographer so why would I be a conceptual film maker? As ever, this is a conduit through which I can ask questions and learn about what makes people tick. From them, hopefully, I can discover something about myself on the way.