Irish Eyes and Talladega Knights

Here are some polaroids taken on 2 really fun days of work last week. On Thursday I assisted on a shoot for a new Irish band who were lots of fun and down to earth. At the end of some shoots (obviously only the shoots with people who don't take themselves too seriously), this photographer gets his subjects to completely relax their face, then shake their head from side to side very quickly, while he shoots at a fast speed. This results in hilariously ugly photos. That's me looking special with the band.

It's tough posing for polaroids all day.

After that shoot finished we rushed to the airport for our next job, shooting a Nascar driver at his home in North Carolina. Due to bad weather our flight was cancelled, so we stayed at an airport hotel and flew out early the next morning. My love of hotels diminished slightly when I saw the quality of this supposedly 'fancy' establishment. It was old and crap!

Next morning, we landed in Charlotte, NC only to discover that no luggage had been put on the plane - that means none of our lighting equipment, and we were only getting 20 minutes with this guy, to shoot a cover photo! Luckily there was another photographer shooting for the same magazine, already at this Nascar guy's house (he was doing lots of media that day) and she reluctantly lent us one of her half a dozen lights. That's all we needed though so it worked out. That's one great thing I've learnt here - to take a really good photo, you don't need elaborate lighting setups. The best fashion photographers I've worked for use only one or two lights, or if it's outside, often no lights and it looks better. Anyway, that's getting a bit technical. You don't really care do you?

So as we were setting up, I learned how interesting this guy's life is. His dad was a hugely successful Nascar driver, probably the most famous in the history of the sport, and he died about 10 years ago. Now this guy is currently the most successful Nascar driver, I think anyway, and has won $30 million in prize money, plus lots of sponsorship dollars. His property was so cool - it has several houses, a little golf course (as opposed to mini golf), a dozen buffalos and horses, a mini western town with a real saloon with real bartenders, and 20 go-karts with a track. Even a paddock full of dogs...yes, a paddock. That was weird but I guess they don't fit in the house?

I am not at all interested in car racing, but I have to say that this driver, and his entourage/buddies/support crew or whatever they call them, were really nice guys. I have to go rent Talladega Nights now. I asked one of them if they'd seen it and he answered in a very thick southern accent: "I seen it, but I'm not sure about it...sorta seemed like they were makin fun of us". The photographer reassured him that he felt the same way about Zoolander.

Funniest moment on the trip: When the Nascar dude arrived at the shoot, the magazine editor said to him "This is Louisa, she's from Australia - you were just in Australia a month ago" and he turned to me and said "yes, I was in Sydney, and Melbourne, and Philip Island" so of course I replied "oh, did you see the penguins?" and he looked at me like I was a freak and said politely, "er, no, to see the race track". D'oh, I forgot there were two reasons people go to Philip Island! This would not have been embarrassing normally, but there was a film crew from ESPN filming this stupid conversation. I don't want to be on television!!!

Overall it was a really fun trip. What's funny is, our journey there and back took 24hours, we faced many obstacles like lost equipment and cancelled flights, and we only shot 5 rolls of film in the end! All that trouble just for one photo.
This was taken before the guy arrived. We were shooting in his garage with the 20 go-karts, so I sneakily put on a helmet. I think I look very "Daft Punk".