Robert Leslie: Feeding the Beast
Whether you’re shooting on the red carpet at the Cannes film festival, or undertaking the Herculean task of covering 100 speakers over four days at the TED conference in Monterey, one of the biggest challenges facing any event photographer is having to trawl through thousands of captured images. Then there’s the task of getting the money shots out to press agencies, online blogs and all manner of new media. When it comes to the cult of celebrity, the 24-hour global media has an insatiable appetite.
This is the environment inhabited by London-based photographer Robert Leslie, who has been quick to adopt Aperture as his software of choice to help him deal with these issues. Speed is key — both on the spot and after the event. And when the job can involve capturing an endless flow of celebrities heading down the red carpet, your post-shoot workflow needs to be robust and efficient.
Robert Leslie working on his MacBook Pro.
“Shooting on the steps of the Palais at Cannes is always a challenge — given that there are 300 other ‘official’ guys there shooting too”, confirms Leslie. “A late-night premiere is even tougher because of the uneven lighting at the start of the carpet — my favourite spot.
“I like to shoot with a 30-year-old manual focus lens on a digital body — it gives a more nostalgic feel to the image and lets me shoot at low light. But the risk is that many of the shots can be out of focus, or over/under-exposed. Aperture’s full-screen preview and zoom control allows me to check both these potential danger zones straight away”.
A self-confessed workaholic, Canadian-born Leslie is a contributor to Vanity Fair Italy and USA, and lists a raft of magazines as clients including Paris Match, Harpers Bazaar, Conde Nast Traveller and French Vogue. So there’s no room here for working one image at a time, and Aperture’s ability to take batches of RAW files and export them in one hit for any pre-set purpose is invaluable.
Leslie explains the situation: “At a major event, I might easily capture thousands of images, which can mean anything up to 100GB of RAW files — as was the case at Ted 2007. From that content I’ll get down to around 900 selects, and then top-rated images will be heading straight out to Web sites and press. Using Smart folders, I can display only the best shots filtered by date, keyword or just about any other bit of metadata that helps me. Being able to search so fast and get to a single shot is a real advantage. And all this happens on the spot, thanks to my MacBook Pro”.
Even in the most surreal of environments, such as Cannes, there’s a picture to be found that takes an alternative perspective and offers a fly-on-the-wall document of a scene. Leslie’s work regularly steps back from the hoards and the press rope. One of the most noticeable traits in his work is the sense that he captures a bigger frame than the other photographers packed in behind the barriers.
It is rare for Leslie to concentrate solely on an individual — often the context is telling the real story. Ironically, this means that the celebrity can be reduced to bit-part status, and many of Leslie’s most defining pictures are as much images of other photographers as they are of celebrity faces.
He explains: “Whereas in the early years of Cannes I might take a bag of film and shoot maybe less than 100 frames, now with digital capture I’m literally shooting thousands of images each night — Aperture lets you experiment where you might have been cautious in the past. I think that my shift to digital has had a big influence on my transition to working primarily in the event sector. The capacity to have really fast turnaround and deliver a selection of images to the client within hours has been a huge change in the way that I work”.
