50 Shades of Orange

Right! Here I go! I promise not to sound too “bah Humbug”, but after 10 days of photographing Christmas office parties I’m beginning to lose the Christmas Spirit!

Why do they do it? The Oompa Loompa look! Yes, you’ve seen it! Females sporting the most outrageous orange spray tan! The I’ve just climbed in side an orange and not bothered to have a wash look! Remember that little fat orange man from the 80’s Tango adverts? He was less orange than some of these girls!  It’s ridiculous and for photographers its a bleeding nightmare!

It usually goes something like this. Ask any event photographer about this and they will smile wryly knowing just what you are about to say next! A group of oompa loompas all drift in to the studio, (poured in to size 8 dresses when they are clearly at least a 16, the magic pants fighting heroically to suck it all in but failing valiantly, leaving that golf ball effect skin look, thus making them look even more like an orange). Oh and then there’s the fake eyelashes! You are a bleeding human not a sodding Camel!

“Tek owa pickcha! Gooo On tek it!”.

Screeching it as loud as possible with frequencies high enough to only communicate with the local dog population. Cue the duck face, you know the look, (apparently young males of the species are supposed to find that lips like a cats arse pose attractive!). Then the flash, it takes 1/200th of a second, yet the one highly annoying oompa loompa, cats arse faced bimbo already knows she doesn’t like it with out even seeing it!

“Tek it agen, ar war ready, I ate that one, i ay ‘avin that wun!” ” Tek it agen!”

Eventually they get to the screen to have a look! Its like a Dulux colour chart!

“Fooking ‘ell Chardonay i luk well orange doh eye?”,

“yow ay as orange as me Britney”.

“ar dough lyk it, Ar look fat!”

There it is done! 20 years of experience, £000’s of pounds worth of high-tech state of the art equipment coupled with years of learning, all undone by a dozen bottles of Superdrug Oompa Loompa orange fake tan!

When we get to the venue and we build our studio, whether it’s Green Screen or just a classic colour such as white we spend a good 20-25 minutes every night balancing our lights, making sure the white balance is set properly, making sure that your pictures will look as good as they possibly can! That all goes out the window when in walks 50 Shades of Orange. There is nothing we can do if you look orange stood next to you pastie white friend who’s had the common sense not to have a bath in vat of B&Q fence preserver which is then over laid with a liberal coating of Home base Value Plaster which clashes in tone with your tan! The vast majority of people we are lucky enough to photograph at these events look amazing, glamorous and sophisticated. But oh no not the Oompa Loompa! They are a different species all together! David Attenborough could write 2, 10 part series on these folk!

It’s not the camera that makes you look fat. Cameras can’t add 10LBs or what ever the myth of the self obsessed T.V Celeb says to hide the fact they’ve been to one to many Luuvie Lunches! If you look a bit lumpy, and you’ve got your dinner down your dress, no we can’t photoshop it! Well we can but you couldn’t afford that kind of money this close to Christmas! I don’t think many people could!

I absolutely detest this celeb culture we now live in. Young people have such a skewed and distorted vision of what they should look like and even how they should behave. The whole KarCrashian thing. Those cretins have done so much more to damage the of youngsters of today than anything I can think of! It’s wrong , SO wrong but accepted? It’s a form of abuse as I see it. You want to look like that reality idiot, fine we can do that. It will take 2-3 hours of make up, 2-3 hours of hairdressing, 2 hours shooting, 2-3 days editing, reshaping, recreating bits that aren’t even there! Even when these magazines claim to print the unedited, no make up pictures they don’t. The trained eye can see every brush stroke, layer and liquify filter that’s been used! Some of the photo-shopping is so good that you can’t even tell these days it’s not real. A couple of years ago one of the major super car manufacturers did a shoot in the desert somewhere in the states. The cars were never there! they never even existed it was all CGI.

And that dear reader is the issue and moral to the story. I’m a photographer not a magician! I can only work with whats in front of me and if your fake tan clashes with your mates, then that’s your fault not mine.

I do know an amazing magician though if you need one!!