I know Jade through the Beltane Fire Society. She was always pretty cool, but after watching her spinning two fire staffs at once at a camping weekend over the summer I really wanted to do a shoot with her.
The weather had conspired against us a couple of times, but last night I brought a few lights, Jade brought the fire, and we had a couple of hours of fun on Calton Hill in Edinburgh.
We had a few minutes shooting some natural-light portraits in the gloomy grey before it got dark. Then she lit up!
Beautiful model. Amazing skills. Far too much fun.
For the last couple of months I've been pretty busy with some non-paying work as one of the Beltane Fire Society photographers covering the Edinburgh Beltane Fire Festival and the preparation and rehearsals leading up to it. It's been exhausting, frustrating, more expensive than I can afford at the moment, and massively rewarding. The photography has taken me well out of my take-your-time-landscapes-and-inanimate-objects comfort zone and into the scary realms of shooting people in the dark at a live event amongst a crowd of thousands whilst trying not to get burned alive. Plus I got to know some great people, I had a lot of fun, and even got some OK pictures. Awesome!
In 2014 I went to the fire festival as an audience member (I wrote about it a year ago) and mostly enjoyed it, although the weather was pretty awful with gales and cold, cold rain which made us more than ready to leave as things started to wind down after midnight. But thinking about it in the following months I decided to find out if they could use an extra photographer. The society has a public meeting a few months before the festival to recruit volunteers, so I went along and put my name down and was lucky enough to be given the chance to join Photo Point - the society photographers. It's a bit of a commitment, especially for someone travelling through to Edinburgh from Glasgow. Photo Point meet at least twice a week for the two months leading up to the festival, up to three or four times per week in the last couple of weeks: to plan, practice techniques, get fire training, shoot performance group rehearsals and occasional studio shoots for performers, take part in walk-throughs, shoot a busk and a couple of Family Beltane events. And as all volunteers are costumed and wear face paint, we also had an evening of cloak-making.
Here I am modelling Photo Point's "Mulberry Raccoon" facepaint, just before heading up to the festival.
I shot a bit of video of Fire Point, the fire dancers, rehearsing in The Meadows in Edinburgh one evening.
I was a little sad that they did such a thorough job of clearing the vegetation from the Govan graving docks. Pretty much everything is gone.
To be fair, there is still a barren industrial beauty about the place, but I do miss the sight of nature making its move to reclaim the space.
So today I went down to the docks specifically to photograph plants that are still there. Little things growing in the cracks.
There was a cold wind and I had a mind to wait for a warmer day - despite what the say in Game of Thrones, spring is coming.
But every time I have that slight nagging fear that this time the developers will have arrived for real and there'll be no more access to the site. A chance for memories, lost.
