on assignment : Les Dennis
December 10th, 2008 | Published in on assignment
I was commissioned to shoot some publicity stills for a new Channel 5 quiz show called “In The Grid”, hosted by Les Dennis.
Over the years I’ve worked on various TV sets and I’m always surprised at how much smaller they are in real life than they appear on TV. This one was no different. Filming was in progress when I arrived so I stood in the dark at the back of the studio audience waiting for a chance to speak to one of the crew about how I would be able to shoot my pictures.
It turned out that I was to get only about ten minutes in between recording sessions and I couldn’t use any lighting. Not an ideal situation but you can’t argue with the crew on a TV set!
Les was very professional and did all the necessary poses without needing much direction from me. I worked with the existing TV lights which were reasonably bright but were tungsten balanced, which would have been OK if the big screen behind him hadn’t been daylight balanced! Basically that meant that when I corrected the colour for the skintones, the screen turned an ugly shade of cyan! This was corrected in post processing and I got a nice set of pictures in a short amount of time.
