Douglas Hodge as Willy Wonka

Here is the tear sheet for last weekend's Saturday Review in The Times featuring the portrait I took of Douglas Hodge as Willy Wonka. And here is the spread inside, featuring another one of my portraits, and some of my behind the scenes photos.

As part of my ongoing work with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I was asked to take some portraits of Douglas Hodge in full costume as Willy Wonka for editorial and advertising usage. Most of my theatre work is rehearsal or production photography, which means I capture the actors on stage or in the rehearsal room. This involves me working on my own and being as quiet and discreet as possible, so that the actors can concentrate. With a large scale portrait shoot however it’s all about capturing great photos which means that I use a team of people to help get the best possible shots. For this shoot my first assistant was Ben Peter Catchpole, digi tech Sheila Udeagu and assistant was Tom Ortiz. As the photographer, responsibility ultimately lies with me, however having a team around me allows me to utilise the best of their knowledge and for us all to bounce ideas off each other. Ben is a lighting expert - helping to create the fantastic lighting for the shoot, Sheila is extremely adept with software and was able to tweak the output and show it to the client immediately. Tom worked with Ben to get everything set up quickly and correctly. In the days before a show opens the actors work very long hours and barely have time for their lunch, which means we knew we would have to do a great job as quickly as we possibly could. We used two backdrops for the shoot – one white and one blue. By having a team around me I was able to focus on Douglas and the composition, whilst leaving the heavy lifting to the team. Once the client had chosen the images they wanted the pictures were retouched by the excellent Matt at Tank.

For anyone interested in the technical details I used a Hassleblad H4X Body Prism with PhaseOne P65 back and a 100mm F2.2HC lens. We used Profoto lighting which was hired from the always reliable Direct Photographic.