The Big Picture

As regular readers of my blog will have come to learn, Tom and I are big World cinema fans with Tom particularly keen on any new French films that come to our favourite art house cinema The Cornerhouse in Manchester.

Some of Tom's recommendations don't always turn out to be as great as he expected but The Big Picture, a French adaptation of Douglas Kennedy's American novel proved to be a winner for the pair of us. Directed by Eric Lartigau, the film is essentially about a successful lawyer who becomes a photographer via a complex mix of events which includes the murder of his wife's lover - who also has an interest in photography but can't indulge in it to the same extent as his well heeled friend.

The film manages to grapple with what seems, on the face of it, a fairly absurd plot but just about pulls it off to make a number of telling points, the key one being that you can achieve your artistic ambitions without quite realising how you're doing it - and sometimes the rewards for having true artistic freedom are frustrated by the consequences of your past. The Big Picture has a galloping plot (rare for French art house films) but leaves you pondering on a whole range of issues - stolen identity, artistic integrity, the pursuit of truth, money and art, wealth and boredom, and so on.

What was particularly interesting for me as a photographer was the audacious luck that the lawyer-cum-murderer central character (complete with his dead friend's stolen identity) managed to bring his way. If only all photographic assignments had such apparently successful endings.

The film starts the romantically dishevelled Romain Duris, previously seen in The beat that my heart skipped,

Two weddings, same bride and groom

Well it's not often that a bride gets the chance to have two goes at a wedding but when our clients Clementine and Yogesh briefed us on their weddings plans they warned us that our cameras would be needed for not one but two ceremonies.

Firstly, they would be having an English registry office wedding in central Birmingham on one weekend, followed by an Indian temple ceremony a week later in Smethwick.

For a photographer this kind of commission presents a fantastic, and rare, opportunity to record two ceremonies from two completely different cultural perspectives. As you'll see from the photographs Clem's first wedding gown was a beautifully simple dress which showed off her amazing figure and looked fantastic against the varied settings of her city wedding. Starting off in the beautifully Gallic inspired Hotel du Vin in central Birmingham, we then moved on to the minimalist interior of Birmingham's central registry office (which had a hint of the pared down Japanese aesthetic) before heading over to one of two restaurant venues, the first being close to the beautiful St Paul's Square in the heart of the City's Jewellery Quarter.

In complete contrast the following week Clem and Yogesh (Yogi) attended the temple in Smethwick for their blessing, providing us with a ceremony that was rich in colour, ritual and visual spectacle. Temple blessings, I discovered, are a surprising mix of the formal and informal with some truly amazing rituals that give the whole occasion an amazing sense of magic and mystery. In complete contrast to the pared down classic lines of her English wedding dress, Clem's Indian gown was a tremendous mix of beadwork, silks, chiffons and satins and was beautifully arranged to set of an amazing collection of bangles and henna hand dyes.