Gavin Inglis: Writer, performer, MC, everything else...

Gavin is a non stop powerhouse of a man, with fingers in more pies that I can count. He runs Underword, works with Writer's Bloc, has worked with most of the Festivals in Edinburgh and is generally a fascinating and lovely chap.



A lot of images of Gavin show him looming out of the darkness, often because he will be in a gloomy venue so all you can make out it his face. I thought it would be nice to work with the looming so we went for a wander around the High Street, up and down closes and stairwells. This seemed to best capture him.

Dave Coates: Poet

Dave Coates (blog here) has had a good handful of writings published in various places (for example, here and here).



As he has spent a lot of time volunteering at the Scottish Poetry Library it seemed the ideal place for him, and it was! Sadly I made the mistake of bringing a flashgun I wasn't used to, which left most of the shots not quite right. Although it's very far from a traditional portrait, I do like this one.

Russell Jones: Poet

Russel Jones (blog here) was placed third in the ESRC Genomic Forum's poetry competition and didn't quite win a recent 'friendly' poetry slam with his poem titled, Why I Hate Poetry Slams.



I've been trying to offer my subjects a choice of location, both to make them feel comfortable and to put them in an environment which might be better suited to their work or personality. In this case I had an image in my head of Russell standing dramatically in the Old College quad and suggested this to him. It didn't quite come out as I had intended but I like the air of calm confidence.

Emma Beeby: Screenwriter

Emma is a screenwiter who most recently completed a Doctor Who audio drama, The Doomsday Quatrain for Big Finish. She has also been working on various films and computer games.



I had intended to avoid cheesy hand-to-face style portraits but liked this one so much I decided to go with it anyway.

The plan

When given an very open brief from college to produce ten images which show my strengths I decided quite quickly on my subject matter: author portraits.

It's fairly well known that the majority of authors are represented, both on book covers and on the internet, by photographs which do not show them at their best. This is largely due to the traditional poses used, which only work well on a few subjects. What I wanted was to break down the traditions and produce a series of images which more than anything were flattering. Location and pose can make an enormous difference to a photograph, so I believe they should be tailored to the person and not predetermined.

As Edinburgh has a flourishing literary scene that ranges from up and coming poets to world famous authors it seemed reasonable to make contact with a number of these writers and attempt to show the diversity in genre and personality amongst them.