Another day of photography (first helping)

I’ve been working hard on the manuscript of the book I’ve written around the Dreams of Amarna, and one of the things I want to do is stitch the story together with pictures of the ordinary Egyptians working on the dig. They are honoured in the stitchery (View of the Excavation and Loading The Felucca), but that didn’t seem quite enough.

So I’ve been doing lots of little watercolours of labourers, basket carriers, and fragments of the dig and the scenery, and now I’ve sorted out the overlays (there will be more about my experiments with ink and inktense later), I bundled up the whole kit and caboodle and took it across to Bernard Rose Photography to see what he could do.

We rattled through the watercolours in fine style, as apart from occasionally flattening a piece of paper (I tend to paint a bit sloshy…!) there was little adjustment needed.

Then, however, matters became more complicated… The overlays are big, and the fabric is slightly shiny, and I hadn’t worked out how to hang them. So we started with the easy bit – overlays on their own, in front of a background. You get a hint here of the reflectors spaced all around, and just the general sense of engineering involved. There are two pairs of tripods with poles between them, one with the background, the other supporting the overlay, suspended on fishing line through eyelets. Then there are the tripods with the diffusers on, and out of shot, there’s the tripod with Bernard’s camera in place.