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WINTER 2016
“In 2007 I was commissioned
to create the photo
illustrations for a retelling
of Charles Kingsley’s classic
1863 book,
The Water-
Babies: A Fairy Tale for a
Land Baby.
The version I read
as a child was illustrated with
paintings, but this retelling
combined my photos with
artwork from illustrator Heidi
Taylor to create the whimsical
fantasies of the book.
“I fell in love with
Sue Flood’s
Whale Calf
photograph and was delighted when she agreed to let me
use it for the book. I had to get the child to fit the existing
composition, so we shot him against a gray background
underwater, which actually worked much better than expected.
I love the child’s wrinkly little feet and the white parasitic crabs
on the whale from the original.
“The otter wasn’t nearly as sweet as he looks. He spent
the whole shoot trying to jump onto my head, and the stink
of his musk was incredible. Really — they had to air out the
swimming pool room for days after we left. Photographing
both the child and the otter in a swimming pool was the only
practical way to match the lighting.
“In the story the main character, Tom, meets all sorts of
incredible underwater creatures; I thought the turbot image
came together really nicely. I used a stock image of the fish,
and the challenge was to get the light on the boy to match the
lighting on the fish. Once this was achieved, it was a blessedly
simple composition.”
IMAGING
SHOOTER