East London is Pretty

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Matt Christie Photo

In a brief burst of post-marathon enthusiasm, I’ve been running outdoors for the last two weeks. Not continuously, that would be weird. Running along roads is really dull, so I’ve been scouring google maps for all the bits of green in the vicinity, & found the little strip of blue that represents the Regent’s Canal. For something in the middle of Mile End, it’s startlingly pretty, & I hope to see more of it as my legs allow me to run a bit further each day.

These are iphone shots, as I didn’t want to be carrying the big camera while running. Top tip: When running on a narrow towpath on a bendy river, looking down at your phone to open the camera app instead of where you’re going may result in excessive unplanned moisture.

London Marathon 2013

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Matt Christie Photo

The London Marathon goes with 50 yards of my house (twice!) along The Highway, so it’d have been rude not to pop along & take a few photos. I chose the 2nd pass-by, at 22 miles, as I thought the photos would be more interesting later in the race. It was a really busy spot, with a friendly encouraging crowd, & even a choir of Gamesmakers from the Olympics singing the runners along their journey.

Some of the outfits were incredible, it’s hard to believe that people can run 26 miles in the first place, let alone dressed as a womble! I also saw a 7 foot fire extinguisher, an 8 foot shark, various fruit & vegetables, a honey monster, an FA Cup, several superheroes, 2 camels (someone ran 26 miles as the back end of a camel!) , some rhinos, hundreds of fairies and many many more.

I didn’t realise that the runners mostly wore their name on their chest. This meant that when the crowd were cheering them on, they could call them out by name, which really gave them a boost. This was amazingly uplifting to watch & be part of, I got really emotional. It’s hard to appreciate just how difficult it is until you see the race close up & the pain etched on the faces of the runners.

I got a shot of one guy smiling at hearing his name being shouted, & it turned out we had a mutual friend who tagged him in the photo on Facebook, resulting in a lovely message from the guy in question. He’d been on his last legs at 22 miles, & hearing his name made a big difference, so by sheer fluke I captured a pivotal moment in his race. Getting that message made the whole day out worthwhile.

Needless to say I was motivated into getting my trainers on this morning, & managed a not-quite marathon standard 20 minutes before collapsing, but if I could increase that by just 5 minutes a week over the next year I’d be at slow marathon pace….. can’t see it happening though, I really really hate running, plus my earphones keep falling out, so I’ll probably stick with the Wii Fit.

Snow

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Matt Christie Photo

During the heaviest of the snowfalls in January, I couldn’t resist running outside to take a few photos. I’d forgotten how wet snow is, I literally just grabbed the camera & ran outside, & had to hide it under my jumper to stop it getting soaked. I’m lucky to have a very pretty part of London on my doorstep, and it was nice to get out & shoot something different from my usual glamour. It’s hardly Game of Thrones levels of wintriness, but still very pretty.

Mind you, my house looks out over a graveyard, so come the zombie apocalypse I’ll be the first to go. Are zombies good at climbing?

A tidy mind.

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Matt Christie Photo

My girlfriend, the wondrously talented Vina Green, has moved in recently, & to fit twice as many people into my space I decided to have a clear out. Not just a bit of one, but anything I hadn’t used for a year, & couldn’t convince myself I’d use in the next one, had to go. This resulted in several sacks of rubbish, & ten boxes of books & DVDs for the charity shop. Apart from the lovely feeling of giving that gave me, we actually have more space now than before she moved in, and everything is far more tidy & organised than previously.

The reason I’m telling you this is that it’s completely changed my life. Having no clutter at all in the house has had a transforming effect on my brain. I’d often heard the phrase “tidy house (or is it desk?), tidy mind”, but thought it was one of those things that works for other people, but suddenly I’m not just making lists, but actually doing all the things on them! Things seem much easier to keep tidy now they all have a place, I’m setting myself goals which is something I’ve always found hard in the past, I have far more energy, & I’m getting so much done that I’m actually finding time to use said energy for exercise & socialising for the first time in a few months.

Aside from the tangible results, I just feel completely different, like I can achieve anything if I put my mind to it. My time management has always been fairly poor, largely because I have too many things to do on any given day, & so I know at the start that I won’t finish them. This gives me far too much leeway to put things off & spend too much time on Facebook. Now I’m being tidy, my daily list is smaller & I make sure to finish it; extra items are given a specific future time to complete, or put on a wish list. Having nothing floating about untethered lets me focus far more on what I’m actually doing, which in our distracting world is tremendously helpful.

So, no photos today, just a piece of advice: tidy up the clutter in your life, & good things will happen

Rome Day Three – Vatican

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Matt Christie Photo

On our third day in Rome we got up early to avoid the worst of the queues at the Vatican. It turned out you can book tours that take you straight to the front of the queue, so we save ourselves a couple of hours waiting in line

Everyone has the Vatican down as a must-see when in Rome, but I was left underwhelmed by it. Sure, it’s got a huge amount of pretty art in it, but it’s so incredibly packed, like a tube station in rush hour, that you don’t get chance to take it in as you’re shuffled past.

St Peter’s Basilica & the Sistine Chapel are undeniably amazing, but again overflowing with people & I’m a little uncomfortable with organised religion spending quite so much money on those at the top, not sure how blessed that makes the meek.

Also it rained for the whole day, which probably didn’t help.

Rome Day Two – Steps & Fountains

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Matt Christie Photo

On our second day in Rome we took a very long walk from our hotel near the Termini to the river via Piazza della Republicca, Piazza Barberini, The Spanish Steps (don’t see what all the fuss is about, it’s just a very busy bunch of steps!), the Trevi Fountain (amazing, but completely packed, would recommend going in the morning to avoid the crush), The Pantheon, Piazza Novona where we had a fantastic dinner at Cul De Sac, & then a moonlit stroll to take in a view of a couple of bridges & the Castel Sant Angelo. It was a bit of a random route but I discovered later we’d covered most of Angels & Demons by accident!

It was a fantastic sunny day, & remembering the polarising filter certainly helped, but I actually missed the angry skies from the day before.

The photo with the car tail lights trailing through was taken with a slow shutter speed of 3.2 seconds from our table outside Cul de Sac, & with the camera balanced on a railing.

Rome – Colisseum & Ancient Rome

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Matt Christie Photo

I went with my girlfriend for a long weekend to Rome recently & took my main camera for the first time. It’s quite a pain to carry a 5DMkII around everywhere so I was hoping the results would turn out to be worth it, but after seeing what CS6 can do to the photos, I’m very glad I did. All the photos are the original files processed through photoshop CS6, no skies have been added.

I found myself with a bit of a dilemma, namely that I’m now carrying a camera that can take pretty nice pictures of everything around me, but if I stop to do it properly, it’ll end up feeling like a 4-day photoshoot & not a holiday at all. Inevitably these are something of a compromise. I didn’t manage to get up at 5 to catch the sunrise, but we got pretty lucky with the weather on this first day, it was hot & sunny in the Colisseum, but with a few fluffy clouds to make the sky interesting. As we walked over the Palatine Hill & to the Forum, it clouded over & made for some fierce-looking backgrounds. My only regret is I forgot to take my polarising filter with me, it made quite a difference on day two.

Photography aside, Ancient Rome really blew me away, you can really transport yourself back a couple of thousand years. We found that there’s an overwhelming amount of unmissable sights that’d take months to get round, so I’d recommend reading a guide book before going (Lonely Planet seem to be the best) to narrow it down a bit. That said, you could quite happily potter about & just see what you run into, it’s all very pretty to look at

Top Tip: Avoid the queue at the Colosseum (it can be 2-3 hours) by booking a guided tour, you go straight to the front. It wasn’t hugely more expensive & included the Palatine Hill. Not sure you should believe every word they tell you though, we passed another guide telling her group the exact opposite of what ours had said!

How I Got Started

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Matt Christie Photo

This is something that I get asked quite a bit. Although I was always the guy with a camera on a night out, it hadn’t occurred to me that it’d be possible to do anything else with it, so it’s all been a bit of a serendipitous whirlwind. Anyway, here’s what happened…

In 2005 I was working as Elwood in a Blues Brothers tribute show in Gran Canaria (if you can find another photographer who can say that, you get a free shoot). We used to do two 45-minute shows per night, & I was only out of the house for three hours, so my days were completely free. That’s me on the right, being out-posed by a seal.

I’d taken up web design the year before to fill up my daytimes (I’ve never been a sunbather), & as an indirect result of this, I ended up translating (porque hablo Español tambien) for a TV company that came over to shoot Holiday Showdown. I bought a camera with the money from that just so I could take photos of the bars & restaurants I was designing websites for, I had no plan at this stage to become a photographer, or even any reason to think it was an option. Incidentally, the translating led to a couple of other interesting jobs, including appearing on 10 Years Younger in front of 8 million people at one point).

I’ve always been someone who learns well from books, so I bought a book on photography, & it was full of pictures of girls on beaches in bikinis (the girls were in bikinis, not the beaches). At this point a small light bulb appeared over my head, as I was working in bars full of girls, & living in a beach resort. I asked a couple of friends to pose for me, with no plan other than to get used to the buttons on the camera. (The photo on the left is of Katja, the first girl I ever shot, who was a barmaid in Covent Garden Disco Pub. Ah, lovely Katja *sigh*) The photos came out really well, I shot some more, word got around, & by September I decided it was worth upgrading to a better camera (Canon 20D), thinking I could earn a small amount of extra pocket money shooting local portraits, families & weddings.

I joined a UK forum online for technical advice, & in early 2006 a model came on asking if anyone wanted to help her with her portfolio. I jokingly said I’d do it, as I hardly thought anyone would travel 1800 miles just to have me take their photo, & she pointed out that shooting on the beaches of Gran Canaria would make anyone look like an international supermodel, even if they’d paid for it themselves, & I should advertise in the UK. She helped point me at some sites where I could find models (most came from Starnow) & around 10 girls came out that summer, some paid & some as a test.

I still had no thoughts of being published, or even shooting full-time, but in early 2007 I received an email out of the blue from a picture sales agency offering to sell my work, & asking if I’d be interested in having them send models over to Gran Canaria, as it’d be cheaper than flying a photographer out. This unsurprisingly made a huge difference to me, in their first trip out I met the likes of Elle Liberachi & Lauren Pope, and shot my first Page Three Girl (Ruth Reynolds) & a Miss Great Britain runner-up (Claire Evans, who now does make-up for me). My first published photo also came from that trip (Rachel Cole in Zoo Australia)

By the end of that summer I was getting published fairly regularly, & I’d noticed that I was getting a few emails from myspace, which I’d joined but not really used. I beefed up my account & it all went a bit crazy. I’d had a couple of previous shooting trips to London, & shot maybe 4 girls each time, but the first trip I mentioned on myspace got me over 20 bookings, followed by another 20 two months later. Myspace gave way to Facebook over the next 12 months, but it was clear that, largely thanks to The Social Network (not the film), there was an awful lot more work for me in London than in Gran Canaria.

My plan for 2008 was to spend one week each month in London shooting, & the rest of my time in Gran Canaria retouching the London shoots & shooting anyone who could afford the trip overseas. This meant giving up the day (well, night) job, which was a bit of a leap as I’d be relying solely on photography for my income (wow, have I really only been pro for four years?!) but I figured the extra bookings from the UK trips would cover it. The London trips sold out, & were extended to two weeks each, whereas only three or four models were making the trip to GC each month, so it slowly began to dawn on me it might be time to move permanently to London.

A chance meeting over an Itsu with an old school friend who’d just got divorced & bought a place in Notting Hill meant I had an offer of a place to live & shoot in Central London at an affordable rate (“So, you want to bring a succession of models into the house, in their underwear, & you want to give me money as well? Is there a downside I don’t see?”), & it really felt like London was calling me, so six weeks after that Itsu I moved back.

Since then it’s been a bit of a blur… clearly there’s been a huge element of luck throughout, but I should point out that I’ve mostly worked 7 long days a week, shot over 1000 girls & taken 200,000 photos in that time so it’s not been entirely random. A big factor in getting to a decent standard quickly was that with me working at night, my days were free to practise practise practise, but it meant doing 12 hours a day of photography, then going to perform in the evenings. Still, I’m not complaining, it beats working for a living

Matt x

Motivation & Mojo

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Matt Christie Photo

What motivates me as a photographer? I suspect many people would think hanging out with models would do it, but that’s really not enough of a reason to devote your whole working life to something (not for me anyway!)

My motivation comes down to three things:-

1) Bringing about a change in someone. Take the following example…

Last summer I worked with someone who’d been in an abusive relationship for three years. Her boyfriend had made her feel unattractive and worthless, & having had the courage to break away from him, she’d decided to reboot herself by having a year of new, life-affirming experiences (now *that* would be a blog worth reading!), one of which was a semi-naked glamour shoot.

She arrived on the day enthusiastic but full of nerves, which is an ideal combination for me as I always seem to be able to get people to relax around me. She was really attractive, but understandably found it hard to believe that after what she’d been through. One of my absolute favourite things about my job (& there are quite a few to choose from) is watching someone like that blossom from frightened rabbit in the first few shots to sex kitten over the course of the shoot, and to see it (& help cause it to) happen in someone who’d had such a hard time made it one of my favourite shoots of the year.

I’ve seen this happen so many times, perfectly lovely people just don’t know how to point themselves at a camera, & in a world where we’re photographed daily, it can have quite an effect on someone’s confidence. To help show them how attractive they can look and to give them more confidence makes me happy. I’ve always felt that a person’s attractiveness is mostly to do with what lies beneath the skin, so it’s just a case of bringing it to the surface.

2) Something shiny & new.

I’m often asked what my favourite photo of mine is, it’s usually the most recent one where I’ve done something creative. There’s something exciting about finding a new background, angle or lighting setup that always gives me a tingle when I get it right. It can be quite terrifying to step out of my comfort zone but it’s pretty much always worth the effort. I realised towards the end of last year that I was losing my work mojo, & it was because I was concentrating solely on paid work and not being creative as well. I’ve started 2012 with some more creative shoots such as latex, couples, (boys, DJs, first glamour for a while & art nude to come in future blogs), and I’m suddenly more fired up about my photography than I have been for quite a while.

3) Praise.

Yep, I’m not ashamed to admit it, I’m sufficiently insecure that I’m motivated by praise. I have a job that brings me quite a bit of it, & I never get remotely tired of hearing it. I’m drawn to shooting portfolios for better known models more for the response it’ll bring than for the photos. I can’t help it, it’s just the way I’m built, I’ve always had jobs where I got plenty of feedback as I went along.

In summary, give me a nervous newbie, a creative pro or someone amazing who’ll get me lots of blog comments & I’ll continue to be a very happy and motivated photographer.

Matt

Hello world!

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Matt Christie Photo

Well after a whole seven years as a photographer & at no prompting whatsoever I’m going to share some thoughts with the world. Expect updates from shoots, more nudity than Facebook allows, tips on modelling & photography my thoughts on portfolios, fashion, celebrity, glamour, boudoir, erotica, latex, how to make a nice cup of tea & anything else that pops into my head between shoots here in sunny Shadwell, Central London.