All language subtitles for 2. Photo Breakdown 02

I took this photo on the set of the film, Darkest Hour,

Gary Oldman is playing Winston Churchill

and he's delivering one of his powerful speeches

to the Houses of Parliament.

Now this whole thing was a set.

There are 100's of extras

and really I did absolutely nothing.

I just chose a vantage point from

which I wanted to take the picture

but the one thing that I did that I want you guys

to think about was I did choose my exposure.

If you'd taken this picture on automatic,

you would have seen much more detail in all those shadows

but you will have lost the drama in this picture,

and the drama all comes from that one shaft

of light coming down and everything else going

into the darkness,

mind you, if you look into it,

there's still detail in that darkness.

You can still see there are people there.

This could be a ray of light,

you see it in sort of landscapes.

You see it in all sorts of situations

where there's one really strong light

and an automatic camera will just create a sort

of flat average of the shadows rather

than really sort of highlighting the highlight.

It's a really simple rule and people just forget it

but it's simply this, if you're thinking about the light,

you're starting to think as a photographer

and in this instance,

we've got a really powerful photo

because I was thinking about the light.

Once I was thinking about the light,

the picture itself was very simple.

I just had to wait til there was a good moment.

I shot this picture of Zendaya

for British Vogue and it's quite mad this shot

'cause this was shot on her phone.

I'm in England, she's in Atlanta.

Her personal assistant is holding her phone

and we're using this very clever app called CLOS

and CLOS allows me to take

over the camera of someone else's phone.

So in this case,

I took over Zendaya's phone and she's able to hear me,

we're on speaker,

so she can hear my direction and before we bothered her,

we got her assistant

to walk around and show me different rooms

and we knew the dress we had

and we shot loads of different setups

but this picture worked really, really well and it's mad

to think that it was a picture taken

through the internet on her own mobile phone,

it became a full page spread in Vogue Magazine.

So, really cool sign of the times.

I shot this picture of Liv Tyler,

Brad Pitt and Ruth Negga all pretending

to be asleep on a boat in Venice on their way

to the premiere of Ad Astra a couple of years ago.

I love taking pictures of people pretending to be asleep.

I love group shots when people should be having fun.

I get one to fall asleep over the course

of sort of following my photography you'll see it,

you'll see that concept repeated a number of times.

Other than that,

technically it's not a very interesting picture,

it's not particularly well lit.

It's just lit with the lights inside the boat,

shot on the Leica Q2, 28 mil lens, wide open

'cause it was low light and it's really an example

of a picture that's technically saying nothing

but it's actually a really cool shot because of the content.

I shot this picture of Tom Hardy at the stairs

of his old apartment that he lived in like,

I don't know, 20 odd years ago.

He's wearing, I think it's some mad old Gucci jacket,

anyway, that's his dog, Blue, behind,

his French Bulldog and Tom is sort

of blowing his vape out of his nose

and the whole pictures got this real sort

of center point perspective that all leads you to Blue.

It's a portrait of Tom but really,

the journey of the eye is all about taking you to Blue

and then coming back to Tom

and Tom famously has fantastic relationships with his dogs,

he's an absolute dog lover and so yeah,

the picture just got a great attitude, I love it.

I took it on the Leica Q2,

it's got a 28 mil lens and there's something

about 28 that you can be two inches closer

and miss it and two inches further back

and it sort of goes a bit vanilla,

so there's something about the exact placement

of the lens within a picture like this.

It's a hard thing to teach someone

but there is such a big difference in moving one inch

to the left or the right or up and down

or in or out and I suppose that's part

of the beauty of photography,

is finding your own voice

'cause when you find your own voice,

what you'll also find is,

you'll find your own voice with a particular lens.

So for me, the lenses I use the most are the 28 and the 75.

They're almost like the two languages I speak the most

and this picture I suppose is a good example of that.

I shot this picture of Daniel Craig on a break

from filming Casino Royale.

He's leaning out of the Aston Martin DB5

that his character, James Bond,

wins in a poker game and it's one

of my favorite shots I've ever taken on a Bond set.

It's a really lovely picture of Daniel

in his absolute prime.

It's a quiet picture

and there's something reflective in it

and it's just, I suppose,

of a lot of the photos I've taken,

it's one that I thinks gonna age really, really well.

So this shot I did of Kate Winslet in the ocean,

I turn up, it's just me and a bag

of cameras and a thunderstorm is starting.

People (indistinct) just saying, look, what you wanna do?

You know, the weather's gonna be bad,

do we find somewhere indoors and I said well,

if Kate was up for it,

let's see the, let's use the weather

as if it was a really expensive special effect

and we brought them water towers and everything,

let's use the rain.

I started doing portraits for outside

and it was raining and it rained heavier

and heavier and heavier and her hair got wetter

and her clothes got wetter and then one of us said,

well why don't we go and do it in the sea?

And then we just kept going deeper

and deeper and the rain got heavier and heavier

and we just became more and more aware

of what a cool picture we had in front

of us and I guess the thing I wanna say just

to encourage people is that, you just need a camera

and a subject and an idea and then a lot of luck,

so anyway, that's the story behind that picture.

I took this shot of Joaquin Phoenix

for a cover shoot for Italian GQ Magazine

and it was the first time I'd ever shot Joaquin.

He turned up with his glasses and, you know,

they were broken and he fixed them with this safety pin.

I absolutely love things like that

because it's something he'd done,

he'd got a pair of glasses and rather

than chuck them away or, you know, buy another pair,

he'd recycled his own glasses

with the use of a safety pin and in so doing that,

told me something about him.

For me, the picture's more of a portrait

of him with the safety pin

than it would have been without it.

So I focused on the safety pin.

I suppose the point I'm making

with this is that those things that you couldn't write

and you couldn't make up are the things

that turn a picture of somebody into a portrait of somebody.

The picture was shot on a 90 mil lens

on the Leica SL2 with a soft box with a grid on the front.

Well, it's the light I probably shoot 80, 90%

of my lit portraits are all shot under that kinda light.

It's nothing particularly clever,

it's nothing particularly technical

but it does allow for an honest portrayal

of someone in my opinion.

It's a light that you don't think about.

You don't go, that's clever, how did he do that?

You look at the subject.

I took this photo of Stormzy

at the Coachella Music Festival.

This was quite a few years ago

and I'd first met Stormzy at Glastonbury

when he was playing sort of smaller stages

and before he became so big and I tried

to arrange access to him and none of his management,

no one was coming back to me.

So eventually I just DM'd him on Instagram,

and he was like, (indistinct) back,

goes yeah, yeah, come over man, come over.

So I was like, brilliant,

I'm welcome but I've got no way of getting there.

So I had to do some mad dodginess

to get through security to get to the back

of that particular stage,

I didn't have the right passes and literally did one

of those tricks I do, I put a phone

to my ear and I talk really loud and really engaged,

like the most important thing in the worlds going on

that I can't be disturbed by and just storm my way through

into a place and it totally worked and so I walked

and there was security going, oh, what's this?

And they were trying to get my attention,

they're walking behind me and I see Stormzy backstage,

I'm like, if I can get to him,

I'm fine and I eventually get

to Stormzy and he's like hello mate, how you doing?

Gives me a big cuddle and obviously

at that point everything's fine,

no one's got anything to say,

so I end out on stage with him taking this picture.

It's a back lit shot,

you can see the shadow coming towards me of him.

It's deeply contrasty,

you sort of just sense the pure magic

of when this guy goes mad on stage.

He's playing his song, Too Big For Your Boots

which is my favorite song and going absolutely mad

and I love that I've got his tongue hanging out in this way.

Picture was shot on the Leica Q, I think it was back then,

I don't think the Q2 was by then but,

very much same thing, the Leica Q with a 28 mil lens.