That Christian Bale Rant

I'm sure you've all heard about it. That poor Director of Photography moved on the set whilst the actor was rehearsinging the scene. Bale unleashed a tirade of f-words and kept going on and on and on. He was upset. It made me feel quite uneasy listening to it as I've just finished working on a film set as a stills photographer. When does a stills photographer get her picutres? Not during a take. So you have to hit the shutter button during rehearsals. But it does get noticed. Whilst everyone else on the set freezes in their actions - I'm sure that some will even hold their breaths - the stills photographer is still plowing away. I suppose on zillion-dollar budget features, they manage to encase their cameras in blimps so that the shutter noise does not reach anyone's ears. But on low budget ones ... Luckily, we had some great British actors on the set: Timothy Spall, Brenda Blethyn and Celia Imre.

As it happens, I was once evicted from a set ... well, kind of. I was visiting Luxor in Egypt and our guide, a former extra on "Death on the Nile" or "Jewel on the Nile" was showing our little troupe around the ruins of Karnak. Everyone had (silent) digicams apart from me. This resulted in my 1Ds' shutter swinging back and forth with the greatest of joy until I was challenged by him: "Young lady", he looked straight into my eyes with a piercing stare, "do you want to follow my talk or do you want to take pictures elsewhere?" I have to admit that his question did catch me a little unaware and I hesitated a few seconds before giving the correct answer - I'm a photographer after all - "take pictures elsewhere". Later all the digicam users told me that they had been clicking behind his back and were quite scared of him and would have liked to have joined me. :-)