Fairtrade chocolatier in the Guardian …and the chocolala toilet tube photo challenge

• 1st Jan ’08 at 11:39 UTC
• By Niladri
• 0 comments

A couple of months ago we had a great article about us in the guardian. It was mainly about the ups and downs of setting up a business making fresh handmade chocolates, and becoming fairtrade registered. You can read it here.

I was a bit apprehensive about it at first, but the whole process was a real delight. Louise Tickle, the journalist who wrote the piece, was fab and did us proud. Many thanks to her.

The paper version also had rather a large photo of me on it (… I think it made my father’s year), but the Guardian online have been wise enough not to post it up on their website.

The photographer was a chap called James Glossop. He works for the Guzelian agency and he was lovely. (…Years ago I had a friend in Bradford who was also a photographer with Gazelian. He was lovely too. I wonder if loveliness is on their person spec?).

Anyway, it was one of the nicest photo shoots I’ve experienced.

Some of it was very funny, and the bit that made me laugh most was when James he told me that he wanted to try a new piece of photographic equipment that he’d been constructing at home… I imagined James soldering circuit boards and inserting various chips to create some piece of high tech electronic kit, the kind of 21st century wizardry that would leave me baffled.

I was completely delighted when he pulled out of his bag the front of a cereal box that had been cut out and sellotaped into a tube, rather like an oversized toilet roll. I’m sure he’d spent a lot of time getting it just right, and perfecting the size and shape and function, but it reminded me of a school boy proudly bringing home the sculpture he’d made in class. Gorgeous.

This marvellous piece of homemade kit is to help take moodier photos (whatever the technical term for that is). You place the tube over a flashgun so that the light is concentrated in one area of the frame, leaving the rest darker and more mysterious.

I wish I’d had the wherewithal to take an action shot of James and his technical prowess in action. In lieu of that, I’m being rather naughty and posting one of the photos he took (…without having got permission from Gazelian, but I’m sure they’ll let me know if they want it removed). It’s of me doing sinsiter chocolate piping…

Moody toilet tube photography… definitely something to try for yourself at home! And if you manage to take any moody chocolala related pics, do send us a copy or a link…