Re-kindling old passions with Ines

Ines and I got to chatting one night as I sat outside my flat, wearing my bathrobe over my pyjamas for warmth, smoking a cigarette. She’d been at the house party next door, and I’d been in my room, working on some chapter or other for my PhD thesis. I allowed myself to sit out there with Ines and my neighbours for a while longer, granting myself a break from the laptop screen. It was Saturday night, after all.

Having been out of the portrait game for a few years, save for the odd picture I took for a mate or two, I was hardly comfortable enough in my own skin to ask a stranger to willingly sit there as I took pictures of them, although I don’t know what came over me that night. Remembering a conversation I’d had with a friend a few days before, I told myself to just “go for it”.

So, I asked her, and she said ‘yes’, and she even seemed excited about it! Granted, it was Saturday night, and people say many things on a Saturday night that they never mean come Monday. But Ines and I met again, and we had a fun couple of afternoons of planning, developing, and staging a little ‘shoot’ in the West End of Glasgow.

This is a long-winded description for a mere handful of photos, but my time photographing Ines was rather special to me not only because it helped me get to know a rather wonderful and eager young woman, but because her openness to experience helped me take that first step back into portraiture.