Rainbow Room International

3 Years of competition photography for Rainbow Room International Glasgow.

There's a specific kind of shoot I don't do enough of - fashion-adjacent, a bit editorial, with room to push the images somewhere interesting. The Rainbow Room International competition shoots are the closest I regularly get to that, which is why I keep saying yes.

I tend to get the brief in advance - mood boards, references, a sense of the direction the team want to go in. What you can't entirely plan for is the pace. Several models rotate through multiple looks across the day, each one disappearing for hair and make up changes while another steps in. By the time you've got the light right on one look, it's already gone and something completely different is standing in front of you. Fast, relentlessly moving, and actually quite fun once you stop fighting it.

I came to Rainbow Room through No Disco In The Desert - a DJ I kept crossing paths with at events, who follows my work and thought to pass my name along. It's been the same team for three years now and they're brilliant to work with.

This year's collection won the Rainbow Room International Annual Congress Award for Salon Team Collection, which I found out about after the fact and which I'm genuinely pleased about, third time the charm I guess. Though I'll be honest, I thought some of the images from previous years were stronger. But hey - awards are mysterious things!

The selection here spans all three years - a mix of the competition entries and a few outtakes I’m particularly fond of: