Eva Green

This was taken at the end of a day during the filming of Casino Royale. We were on Lake Como in a Riva (speedboat). The boat didn’t feature much in the film as I recall but it was around so we used it. Eva’s wearing her costume and it was starting to get dark.

I had a hair and makeup crew on-board and took pictures of her in the boat’s cabin as well as on deck. It’s all natural light and I didn’t give much direction. It’s what I’d call a reportage portrait.

I love this shot because it’s both sexy and natural. You feel there’s a real smile on her face and of course there’s the slit in her skirt. You see far less than you would were she wearing a bikini or a miniskirt, but it feels as if you’re seeing something you shouldn’t be.

Often the first image you take when you walk into a scenario is the best one. When you compose completely by heart it just works. When your head kicks in you start making corrections and, though the image may be technically better, it lacks the thing that made you take the shot to start with.

I could have kept her shoe in frame and cropped her elbow. Funnily enough I did that later on the contact sheet.

Years ago a photographer friend taught me a good trick; When you flip a picture around and view it upside down, or on its side, it loses some of its tangible meaning and you can view it more abstractly. Normally if the shape is pleasing to the eye then the picture works. In this case, when you crop it near her elbows it doesn’t work as a shape as well as it does here.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Rosie Huntington-Whiteley & Ryan Reynolds

2011

This was part of a campaign I did for Marks & Spencer’s Autograph range using Ryan Reynolds and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. It was cut to be cinema length but (at the time of posting) has only run online. We shot this in London at St. Pancras Station and the Royal Institute of British Architects and its environs.

It was shot concurrently with the stills on a Red Epic camera. Obviously, the client knew I was shooting video but I know they were blown away by the footage. We produced a film that would normally require double the stills budget and man hours for a fraction more money and with no extra time. I won’t pretend it was cheap but a couple of years ago this level of production would have required 35mm film, a large extra crew and a couple of days. That’s expensive. I shoot using film lighting, as opposed to strobe, so there is no need to relight for video.

This is, I am sure, how things are going to evolve for photographers. You’ll need to be comfortable and equipped for motion and stills work. I’m very aware I’m not alone. Every photographer I know is up to it in one way or another. You can’t buy a pro stills camera anymore that doesn’t shoot video.

It will be interesting to see how the advertising agencies change. Today most still have a TV department and a print department. They’re converging as you read this because as everything goes digital the idea of TV and print look increasingly out of date.

We shot the stills and would then spend an extra five or ten minutes at the end doing a moving version of the same pictures. As a result we haven’t created a commercial with any proper narrative. You get the sense of a new relationship between the two but that’s it.

We put in a little romance at the end as Ryan goes in for a kiss. It works nicely and gives us the beating heart of the piece.

Almost every shot is dirty, meaning it’s shot through something. The pictures on the cobbles have a fleshy hue because I shot through my fingers. I found that close to the lens my fingers created a dark wash and holding them open in front of the lens in daylight produced a pink haze.

We also shot through leaves, trees, shelves, lamps, glass, and flowers. Anything we could find to dirty up the foreground and give a bit more atmosphere. It helps to make the footage feel more voyeuristic, as if we’re watching these people go about their everyday, as opposed to them showing it to us.

There wasn’t much direction to give them except “You’re just meeting up and are excited to see each other”. It’s all pretty simple. “Walk from here to there and look as if you’ve noticed someone across the road and they’re an old friend”. I talked to Rosie about having protective feelings for Ryan and you’ll see she puts his hand on his chest, it’s a nice touch.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Halle Berry

2002

This is the moment Halle found out she’d been nominated for an Oscar. A TV crew came in to tell her and she did this little jump for joy straight after the interview wrapped. It was kind of spontaneous and kind of for their cameras but I wasn’t aware it was going to happen. They said something to her like “How does this make you feel?” and she jumped.

There’s so much wrong with this picture. It’s a good example of why people say technically perfect photographs aren’t necessarily the best photographs.

The angle is ‘Dutch’, as they say in movies, with the verticals tilted to one side. There’s blur because the camera was around my neck, hanging at my side, when she started to move. I just grabbed the lens, pushed my finger into the position where approximate focus was based on instinct, and shot from my waist before she started coming down.

I was using a Leica M6. Some Leica lenses have a handle on the focus ring. You learn that when you’re pushed all the way over to the right you’re at infinity, when you’re all the way over to the left you’re at 0.7 metres, and when the handle’s pointing straight down you’re at 1 metre. When you get used to them, and I shot nothing but Leicas for six years, carrying four at a time, each with a different lens, you always know where to push your finger when something happens. You can get the lens pretty close to in focus fast.

You can see the whole story in the shot. The mic is being held by the guy in the camera crew doing the interview. On the right you see a backdrop, which was supposed to be the ocean Halle comes out of in her iconic orange bikini. The tubular object behind her is the set of the tunnel in the London Underground where Bond gets his invisible car.

Technically it’s massively flawed but despite that it’s a very real, human, photo of an important moment in someone’s life. It was just a lucky shot.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Vogue Italia

May, 2007

The story was about a girl from the future who was terrorizing a human girl. It’s not my favorite, but I like this picture because it’s contains a few special effects.

I have an inherent dislike of too much retouching. I retouch people normally only if they’ve got a spot, or a particularly ugly wrinkle. Something unsightly. I feel that the more retouching you do to a persons face the more character you lose. It’s our imperfections which make us human. I try to do as little polishing as possible.

In this instance we were trying to give the impression there was an orb flying overhead which had some sort of hold over these girls. Rather than go the way that a lot of people would, and using Photoshop to comp in a model built in 3D, we shot the whole thing in camera.

I built the orb myself. I was living in New York at the time and I went to a plastic shop on Canal St., bought the plastic and made it in my basement in Brooklyn where I was living at the time. We stuck the orb on a stand and put a powerful, little, HMI light called a Joker-bug 800 on another stand behind it. The Joker-bug puts out 800 watts and we fired it through a spotlight lens which produces a very strong directional beam. All we did in post-production is paint the stands holding everything up out. The little red lights you see are the spots from laser pointers we fired at it. There was no power to the orb at all.

It seems obvious but it’s not the way a lot of retouching is done today. It meant the orb was really there so the reflections you see on it are real. It helps make the whole image ring true.

We used a lot of smoke and a lot of wind. I think in this case it was a leaf-blower. It was editorial and we didn’t have the budget for a massive fan. I love the redheaded model’s expression. It’s fabulous. She’s so emotive face. She’s a model but she could be an actress.

I shot this in a house in upstate New York near Vermont at magic-light. People have different ideas of when magic-light is. In theory it’s just before the sun sets. I, and many others, think it starts after the sun sets. That’s when we see the most beautiful light of day. I love it when house lights and street lights come on but there’s still some light in the sky. I call the other time, that hour before the sun goes down, sunset, not magic light.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Jude Law

2009

This was taken for Figaro magazine and it’s a still from a Red camera. What’s interesting to me about it is the moment it captures, and what I went through to get it.

We did this shoot with Jude where we effectively got him to run through little scenes. The whole thing took place in an underground car park in London. I told Jude to imagine someone dangerous had just walked into the car-park and his life was at risk.

I could have taken this picture on a stills camera. I do feel that I’ve done enough good reportage in my life to say I do know about capturing a moment.

I would also say that moments happen so fast that I could probably put a fair few of the great moments I’ve caught in my life down to chance. In the time from when your brain says go, until you push the shutter, until the camera actually records the image, things change. Everything involves a bit of luck and just because you take a photo with a stills camera doesn’t make you some sort of genius.This is even more relevant when you start using motor drives. There is a huge amount of chance at play.

I can’t claim the decisive moment in this shot, as I can in my old reportage stills, but I can say that when I shot it I knew I had got something. I watched it happen.

There’s a debate about this approach being the death of photography but it’s interesting to see what you get when you can go back and forth between frames and pull out a moment. With my Red Epic camera I can pull 5K frames 96 times a second if I need to. I can’t imagine getting the same performance out of an actor while running the noisy motor-drive of a DSLR as easily as I did for with the near-silent Red One.

It’s a strange and controversial argument from someone who loves still photography as passionately as me, but I sincerely believe this is the future.

We captured a real moment. We created the scene, decided the angle, and I asked for the performance, but the moment wasn’t decided when I clicked the shutter.

To be continued I guess…

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Christina Hendricks

2nd November, 2011

This shoot was a strange mix of commercial and editorial work paid for by a metal company who had commissioned Vivienne Westwood to make some Palladium jewelry for them. Vivienne chose Christina as her muse, not only for the jewelry which we see in her hair, but also for Vivian’s clothes which she’s wearing in the pictures.

It was shot in a great Art and Crafts house in Kilburn. At the back you can see a box, my DF-50 hazer, which produces what I call heavy air. It’s air that holds light. When you use it correctly you don’t see smoke, just a fog which hangs in the air. I’ve seen it used on countless movies and learnt to love and use it as much as possible. It literally creates atmosphere.

You can see what’s been done here quite unashamedly. It is just a light on a stand with a red flag in the background muting the brightness. I’ve spent so much time shooting behind the scenes reportage on movie sets that, when I’m creating the whole environment for myself, I never mind seeing equipment in the background of my pictures.

The entire photo is taken in a mirror. I didn’t set it up that way, but when I looked back I thought the reflection looked better than the direct angle. That kind of thing is another reason I don’t work on a tripod. I like to be free to change my mind and make decisions about which way to point at any moment.

I’m at an aperture of f/1.8 so the lens is really open. Not quite fully wide, it’s a f/1.4 lens, but wide enough to allows me to shoot in incredibly low light. You can feel how dark it is in the room.

Sometimes you see behind the scenes video from movies and while the film looked dark and moody, when you see the set it’s all really brightly lit. My sets tend to look like my photographs. With the ISO’s you can use safely today on good digital sensors you’re in a wonderful position to shoot very naturalistically.

Christina looks fantastic. She’s got the perfect body for Vivienne Westwood. Beautifully curvaceous, feminine and sexy. You feel she’s experiencing something in this moment. There’s a thought but you don’t know what it is. You can look at this picture and ask a question. Wonder what’s going on behind her eyes. It’s dreamy.

I find a lot of my pictures in the edit. I know that I’ve got something good and when I look at the contact sheet I can see a picture arrive and then disappear again as I go through the frames. I look back on shots sometimes and realize if my mood had been different during the edit I might have chosen a different picture. Not in this case though. This is a keeper.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Robert Downey Jr.

December 13th, 2006

This was for a cover story in Esquire magazine when Robert was starting to work on the first Iron Man. The story was announcing that Robert Downey Jr., who’d had a few well publicized problems in his past, was once again tipped to be an insurable A-list Hollywood star. Sure enough he was. Talent floats.

We were lucky enough to rent the backlot of Universal Studios in Los Angeles. I got to use the New York set, which this is shot on, ‘Spartacus Square’ built for Stanley Kubrick, and the western streets.

I’m lying on the back of a golf cart, on the floor about six inches off the ground, shooting up at Downey as he runs towards me. It’s kind of lucky that I caught him in mid-air. He wasn’t jumping he was sprinting.

On assistant ran across the road with a smoke machine just before us and Robert came running through. You can see a smoke generator on the left of the picture.

I love it because it feels like a moment from a Hollywood action movie. All that wonderful California light and the smoke and the energy work together to create a pastiche of that ‘hero-running-down-the-road‘ scene from a million movie. Of course it’s also a portrait because he’s looking straight down the barrel of the lens.

I bought the camera I shot this on, a Canon EOS Ds1 mk II, in November 2004 to shoot King Kong, the first job I ever shot purely on digital. It’s now nearly 2012 and my Ds1 Mk 3’s are starting to come to the end of their life. It means I’ve only had two sets of cameras in eight years. I shoot four bodies an average of 3,000 frames a week and have taken over a million photos in that time without a single problem. When people wonder why cameras like this cost more than used cars there’s your answer.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Brad Pitt

4th September, 2011

I took this wide open at f/2 and 160th of a second and it’s handheld. Simple. Nearly everything I do is handheld. I use a tripod only if I’m at such a slow shutter speed I can’t keep the camera still, or if I’m using some form of plate and I’m locked off. Generally, for the pictures I love taking, I would never use a tripod.

My background is as a photojournalist and I am used to having a fraction of a second to take a picture. If I shot a portrait back then I might have five minutes or five seconds with someone. It might be that there’s only time for one frame. Your brain makes decisions on the correct height and angle and framing fast. It’s so last-minute, the last thing I’d want to be is stuck on a tripod.

This was shot for Entertainment Weekly but wasn’t published by them. I obviously jumped at getting a decent shoot with Brad. He’s very into photography so it was lovely to work with him because he was interested in what I was doing.

There’s hardly any depth of field; f/2 on a 135mm lens is very shallow. If you look at this picture closely you’ll see his ear, some of his hair and his cheek are in focus but his nose is out of focus, his eye is going out, and his shoulder is a complete blur.

It’s also a very tight crop. Most of the pictures I shot were wide but there was something about this picture which was almost like an inspection. It was lit with hot lights. In this case 650 and 1000 watt tungsten Fresnels and a Dedolight.

I’ve never been finicky about color temperature on a light. I just dim it till it looks right. Obviously the dimmer you make a tungsten light the warmer it becomes and the dimmer you make an HMI light the bluer it becomes. In this case I was shooting tungsten so that’s why the picture feels quite warm. I dimmed them quite a lot and then cooled them off with ½ CTB daylight blue gels.

I use a lot of back light. I have a front light but it is literally a single light bouncing to a poly-board which gives the very soft foreground light which you see permeating his face. It’s just there so the cheek doesn’t go black. All the backlight I use, all the light you see highlighting his hair and wrapping around his shoulders, is there to shape and sculpt the face.

I didn’t have to direct Brad. I always show people the images on the back of the camera because I think portraiture is collaboration. I’m very interested to know other people’s feelings. Brad saw the pictures, new what I was going for and then held a position. I just said I want to shoot you being and thinking. He isn’t posing in this picture, he’s being.

It’s all styled. The jumper’s not his and the seat you can just see out of focus was brought in. I asked for an old leather chair and they got me a 70‘s vintage designer sofa. The walls in the background are just the white walls of the studio.

The shoot was initially scheduled to be an hour. We ended up getting about three hours of Brad’s time because he thought we were taking interesting pictures. It was great. A really nice job.

I like this shot because I sense a story and I want to know what he’s thinking. He looks as if he’s at peace, for now, but that there’s also something in his mind. The cogs are whirring and that’s when people look interesting in pictures. It reminds me of some old portrait of Mallory, one of the great mountaineers, or Hemingway. I love it because it’s emotive.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Olga Kurylenko

February, 2008

I believe this picture, published in August 2008 by Vogue Italia, was the first picture in a major magazine that was a still taken from the Red One camera.

The shoot was about 24 pages and a cover. I never told the magazine this still was different to any of the others and they never questioned it. They just published it. They didn’t know.

I didn’t know if it would look grossly inferior in quality. I was thrilled with the result but it does look different. I’ll tell you a couple of reasons why it looks different. Firstly it’s out of focus. I don’t think that a photo has to be in focus for a picture to work. In fact in a lot of my favourite pictures, it’s the ear that’s in focus, or the jacket that’s in focus. The only thing that’s sharp here is the print on her jacket and the microphone in the window. It helps make the picture more ethereal. Secondly, it’s how we treated the file. We made it feel a bit retro with the unsharp mask and some colour tweaking.

The Red camera is designed for cinematic photography and therefore the grain you get is higher than you get on a DSLR. It doesn’t matter to me because I spend my life trying to screw photos up. Shooting through my hands, shooting through windows, trying to add more depth to the image. More… textural stuff. The grain that might offend you if you were doing close-up beauty work for a cosmetics company doesn’t affect my editorial work.

I’m always in trouble with the guys who comment on forums. They all tell me what I’ve done is technically wrong. Ultimately I’d rather have a beautiful flawed photo than a technically perfect boring one. I think that’s often the other outcome.  I sincerely believe that flaws make images believable.

This was shot in the suburbs of South London. We’re in the back of a car. Again. I think it’s a vintage Volvo.

I use a lot of shoot-throughs. In this case I’m shooting through a car window with dappled leaves reflected in it. I could be shooting though my hands, a block of shelves or a hole in a wall. Anything that makes the foreground dirty. In the film industry they call it a dirty shot.

The extras in this shot are my assistants. We rented some old cameras and I put them in suits. We came up with this story about a starlet who is scandalized based on 1963′s Profumo affair. The idea was she’d left some Mews house in Chelsea to get away from the press and had come home in disgrace to her mum and dad in suburbia.

When see the whole story you see pictures of her crying and looking at a newspaper headline. You see her in trouble with her mum and dad who are obviously very Christian and middle class. You see her getting a quiet thrill out of all the attention.

This was shot after Olga had appeared in The Quantum of Solace. I’d met her on the set.

I story-boarded the whole shoot and explained to Olga how I saw the whole thing unraveling. I find actors prefer to be directed in a performance rather than just being asked to pose. We just shot it like a movie in stills. Even though I was shooting motion on the Red camera, the end product was stills.

After the shoot I just went through the footage to find the right frame. I like the emotion behind her eyes, I like the shape of the image. I like that her face is out of focus and I chose this over an image where her face was sharp. It’s about feeling an emotion and this picture makes me feel an emotion.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Rosie Huntington-Whiteley

24th June, 2007

This picture was taken on the 24th June 2007. We were in London, Mayfair, in in the back of a vintage Daimler limousine and had a lovely old chauffeur who was driving us around. We could have been parked for this particular shot but for most of the set we were moving through London. We drove all over the city.

Obviously it’s quite tight in the back of cars. I looked at a bunch and took the Daimler because it has a particularly long wheelbase which means you can get back far enough to frame a picture. I shoot quite a lot in the back of cars. I’m not sure why. For some reason I enjoy shooting women in the back of cars.

The problem in the back of a car is light. There tends to be a lot of contrast, especially during the daytime, because it’s dark inside and the light coming in through the windows is bright. So as not to completely lose sight of what’s outside as we meter for the inside we try and lift the ambient light level.

There are a number of ways you can do that. You could use a reflector but I find it too directional. You sort of know when you’ve seen a reflector. We could set up a light but then you have a lot of colour balancing to worry about. Plus on the move any lights have to run off batteries unless we put the car on a low loader with a generator which, would blow our editorial budget to pieces, so I prefer to use haze or smoke of some sort.

Driving round town you can’t plug in a big hazer so we use these little cans. I think it’s called ‘Fantasy Haze’ and it looks like something you’d buy in a party shop. It’s literally an aerosol can of hazy smoke. You spray it in a car with the windows closed and you’ve probably got a good 40 seconds of decent fog to shoot. It’s odorless but it’s probably not very good for you.

It makes the light inside the car slightly heavier. All the ambient light that’s coming in hangs around inside the car and is held. It brings up your ambient levels and it gives this slightly dreamy effect.

I tend to shoot wide open. I almost always do on wide lenses. This picture was taken on a 35mm f/1.4 lens and I was at f/1.4 handheld at a thirteenth of a second. I’m only at 100 ISO as I wanted the exposure to look as good as possible and the chip on the Canon 1Ds Mk. II was best at base ISO. Today, with a 1 Ds Mk. III  I would be safe at ISO 320.

A thirteenth of a second is quite a dangerous speed for camera shake, but there’s a trick to avoiding blur without using a tripod. If you set the camera on motor-wind, and shoot three frames the middle one tends to be pin-sharp as there’s been no movement of your finger either applying or coming off the shutter.

I don’t just shoot at f/1.4 because I need all the light I can get. If I could have shot at 1/500th of a second I would still have been at f/1.4. To add to this dreamy feel you get through the haze you also have the dreaminess of a shallow depth of field with the focus dropping off massively in the background.

The foreground and elbow of her jacket are both out of focus. I believe I was focused on her belly but that’s probably just breathing. With these apertures the depth of field is so shallow that as you breath you can see your focus is coming in and out.

Obviously the feel of this shot is also a lot about the styling. You’ve got one of the world’s sexiest women, a pretty raunchy set of clothes, a fantastic jacket and a dreamy expression on her face. All in all they all add together to create a picture that feels… sumptuous. I’ve worked with Rosie a lot and I still do.

I got the idea from a Helmut Newton shoot in Oui magazine. She’s definitely wearing knickers but it doesn’t look as if she is. I’ll have photoshopped them out where you might have seen them.

I love this 70’s idea of the millionaire’s mistress in the back of his car. I like the idea that he is some sort of ambassador and his girl is sort of raunching around London. I generally try and put a little narrative into my photo stories so that was what I gave Rosie to work with.

The street wasn’t blocked off. Nothing was blocked off because It was an editorial shoot and there was no money. There were builders wolf-whistling at Rosie and Rosie shouting back telling them where to stick it out of the window. It was great. Our old driver couldn’t believe his eyes.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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