Beyond the Frame 30/
A magazine assignment with three award-winning filmmakers, an essential colour calibration tool and, best of all, remembering The Champions!
The Filmmakers
I’m listening to an episode of Desert Island Discs with John Waddell (Rankin); he’s speaking about the process of making a celebrity portrait.
“It takes one hour. 30 minutes to chat, 30 minutes to shoot.”
I am most definitely not a celebrity photographer but I have been known to accept the occasional portrait assignment for a valued client.
On this occasion, I didn’t have the luxury of one hour. This was a tight 45 minutes for a magazine feature celebrating the work of three young Thai filmmakers, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, Anocha Suwichakornpong and Lee Chatametikool.
The venue was a small movie library inside the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre. The main building is modern and spacious with an abundance of natural light. The movie library is small, dimly lit with a single screen and an antique projector.
On this kind of assignment, I develop a split personality. I’m chatting with the young filmmakers, putting them at ease, but also scanning the venue, noting light sources and potential backgrounds.
We begin on the wide, circular walkways in the main building. The space is neutral, undecorated, and benefits from diffused daylight coming through the glass ceiling.
I need a landscape-format image, suitable for a double-page spread intro, with plenty of space for the graphic designer to overlay text.
I make photos with each of the filmmakers individually and initially ask them not to look into the camera because that seems too posed for this location. I prefer it when they look as if they’re just hanging out at the art gallery, waiting to meet a friend.
Then I gather all three together but want to avoid having them in a line. I pause for a moment, thinking through options.
The muse can regurgitate the most unexpected suggestions when we’re searching for inspiration. Although perhaps that’s just my muse (I suspect she drinks).
Inexplicably, the opening credits to the best television series ever made pop into my mind.
I find the YouTube video on my phone, share it with the three filmmakers, explain that they’ll take the places of Stuart Damon, William Gaunt and Alexandra Bastedo and, probably only because they’re enthusiastic filmmakers and love a visual reference, they step neatly into place.
They take turns in each position. I favour the versions with Lee in the foreground but, in retrospect, I wish I’d asked the two in the background to look towards each other for the full Champions effect.
Should the three of them ever form a Shoegaze Indie band, they have a potential album cover. Lee on lead guitar, Nawapol on bass and Mai on vocals, obviously.
We step inside the movie library, run one of their films through the projector and use that for lighting and as a prop.
With our 45 minutes almost up, we just have time for some seated poses and a selfie.

45 minutes, no make-up, no wardrobe, we’d never met before, an unfamiliar venue, no additional lighting… I like what the four of us made with what was available. The magazine feature ran over nine pages, so it was a productive assignment and provided an opportunity to spend some time with three of Thailand’s most promising young filmmakers.
Accurate White Balance
The room made available for this quick assignment was lit by low-wattage bulbs with a warm, orange tone. The corridor outside was lit by a mix of natural light and cool, blue lamps. Ensuring consistent colour and white balance in a location with mixed light sources can be a challenge.
Unless you have the right tools!
Calibrite ColorChecker Passport
Here’s my glamorous assistant holding a Calibrite ColorChecker Passport. We can see the significant difference in white balance between the camera’s auto setting, Lightroom’s auto white balance adjustment and the corrected, colour passport version.
The challenge here is that the background (the main building interior) is lit mostly by natural light. My charming subject in the foreground is lit with a much warmer tone.
Auto settings simply make an adjustment based on the prevailing tone across the whole image, in this case the cooler, bluer background. Consequently, anything in the foreground, lit by warmer lights, will appear too orange.
In order to obtain the correct white balance for the subject, we must adjust the white balance manually. But what are the correct settings?
We can guess. But for accurate white balance, we need a neutral grey target to provide a measurement.
Enter the ColorChecker Passport.
The coloured panels can be used to build a custom camera profile, which is an essential part of a colour-calibrated workflow. The grey panels can be used to obtain an accurate white balance.
In Lightroom (CaptureOne, Apple Photos, etc.), we simply click on the neutral, grey panel with the white balance selector, et voila! The white balance temperature and tint settings are adjusted automatically.
For portraits where setting the correct colour is important, it’s a really valuable tool. Here are some examples from a photo workshop we ran in Malaysia.
I think I’m right in saying that the Calibrite ColorChecker is the only calibration target that comes in a pocket-size with a folding cover. If you’re making portraits and want to obtain accurate colours, I think it’s a must-have. I never leave home without it!
Calibrite ColorChecker Passport
A budget-friendly alternative is a Grey Card or a collapsible target. I have one of these tiny Impact models. It folds up to a pocket size, grey on one one side, white on the reverse.
In the old, old days, I’d write my contact details on a grey target and make it the first photo on every roll of film.
My theory was that if somebody found a lost roll of film and was kind enough to get it processed, they’d see my information in the first frame.
Admittedly, that was stretching my faith in fate and human nature but, you know, stranger things have happened.
Thinking about it now, I suppose that strategy would work equally well on a digital memory card. Should a card be found and the files viewed, contact details would be visible. Hmm, I don’t know why that hasn’t occurred to me before. 😬
I know you will be keen to find out more about The Champions, the greatest television show ever made. You’re in luck; some episodes are on YouTube.
The opening sequence shows the Jet d’Eau fountain in Geneva, home of the United Nations organisation that the Champions work for.
Some 50 years after being glued to the TV set on Sunday afternoons, I now live in the city of the Champions, I can see the Jet d’Eau from our apartment balcony and every morning my wife leaves for her job at the United Nations (although she continues to insist that she does not work for the Nemesis agency and does not possess superpowers). I am very much living the dream.
I sincerely hope that you are continuing to be a superhero this week.