I'm constantly running around with my camera, photographing beautiful women in beautiful locations, doing regular website updates, tweaking things here, swapping out an image there. But me? I'm the phantom behind the camera. The man without a face. Not out of modesty, but simply because I feel more comfortable on my side of the lens. I prefer being the one who sees, not the one being seen. And that has nothing to do with quiet observation. Quite the opposite. I'm a very active observer. I compose, I stage, I direct. I just don't like being on stage myself.
Try pointing a camera at someone who knows exactly what that camera is capable of, what the light is doing right now, which angle to avoid, and where the chin is supposed to go. The result is about as natural as a dentist's-chair smile. You know too much. Any photographer who claims otherwise either has an extraordinary talent for self-deception or has had a very good whisky.
The cobbler's children always go barefoot.
That saying is so worn out you're barely allowed to use it anymore. But it's true. It's so painfully true it hurts.
So: high time to change that. I put on an ironed t-shirt (that's very important to my wife, and I think she has a point) and headed to a location I'd just discovered on Tenerife. A small gorge, right next to the TF1 motorway. Sounds about as romantic as a rest stop outside Frankfurt. But once you're standing there, among the cacti and volcanic rocks, with tall grasses swaying in the wind, you stop thinking about the motorway. You think of Arizona. Or a Sergio Leone film. Anything but the TF1.
I unpacked my Sunbounce reflector, the one with the zebra coating. That's how we did it in the nineties, and as everyone knows, the nineties are making a comeback in all things. A little fill light from below into the face. More for the feeling than for the actual image, if I'm being honest. Then a smile. Which on me looks about as spontaneous as a passport photo booth, but you do your best.
And with that, it was done. You can finally see me again as I actually look right now. Not three years and seven months younger, not smoothed out by some soft filter, not benefiting from a particularly flattering angle. Just me, in front of a gorge by a motorway, in an ironed t-shirt, with a reflector from the nineties.