Prints currently available online at www.theprinterofdreams.com
What is this?
For the past 2 years I have been producing my “Moonlighting” project, a large-format film based exploration of landscapes and seascapes, that push the boundaries of night photography. The scenes are remarkable, powerful, painting-like photographs, which take hours hours to expose. Often my images look like moon photography, or filmic scenes that have been put under tremendous post production and gradient filters. However, they are produced through natural phenomena and not created through photoshop. I often cannot even see my camera when I open the shutter, as it’s pitch black; it’s only after the 2 hour exposure that the outlines of the landscape and my kit become barely visible. Over the process of the long exposure, the clouds and tide change, sometimes dramatically, allowing me to document scenes which I cannot control and unfold uniquely over time. The process is, a respect for the artform of film photography, basing shots on instinct and fundamentally, the simple creation of unique pictures, unable to be repeated. The photographs are unlike what we are used to seeing when we envisage night photography.
Tell us a bit about your practice?
I’m a photographer who started out working in the advertising and design industry. I do, and have always shot my own personal projects that are nothing to do with the commercial side of my photography. Making pictures totally for my own satisfaction. One major reason why Moonlighting came about is because it is the polar opposite to the ‘day job’ that can involve up to 30 people either side of the camera and a massive amount of production and people involved. Covering every option possible. Moonlighting is just me, a 5×4 camera, a location and one maybe two sheet’s of film a night. It’s delightful.
How/When/Where do you do your work?
My work is very considered, set up, camera locked off and thought through. I don’t shoot hundreds of images and then try to choose one later. I shoot one set up and if I get it wrong, I get it wrong. My approach is very traditional. I feel as a photographer you’re always working, maybe not taking pictures but looking at things. I can’t read a Sunday supplement or watch a film without looking at the photography or the lighting. I work all over really as a lot of my work is location based, but I do have a studio in Shoreditch that I work from day to day.
Final words of advice…
Keep shooting and shoot what you want to shoot and not what you feel you should be shooting and hopefully other things will develop. Photography is one of the best jobs in the world (not that I’ve had any others to compare it with)
At the moment I am…
Reading… this
Listening to… my ipod. It lives on shuffle and has over 80gb worth of music. Who knows what will come on next
Watching… don’t really what so much tv tbh
Looking at… everything
We can find you at…
website www.paulthompsonstudio.com
blog www.paulthompsonstudioblog.wordpress.com/
twitter @pthompsonstudio
facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/paulthompsonstudio/117647168278216
