Chris Sellers' portrait

I went to visit Chris with the object of taking some pictures of him in his own environment.
He is a Leica camera man through and through even though his choice of camera might not be the best for what he wanted it for.

Chris has been the chairman of the camera club for 12 months and has encouraged club members to do their best.  He's constantly coming up with ideas to boost moral when we don't do as well as we thought we would against other clubs.  He has also suggested speakers and subjects to be included in the programme to enable me, the programme secretary, a wide range of different items to keep the members interested.

When I joined this club about 5 years' ago, the membership ranged from about 60/70% social members and 30% keen photographers.  Through booking a wider range of speakers and workshops, I feel it's more like 60/70% keen photographers and 30% social members.  It's a friendly club where people talk to each other and offer / ask for advice on techniques.  We are growing the membership in the hopes of being able to offer better quality speakers in the coming years.

The picture below is my favourite.  Whilst I was at Chris' house he suddenly sat down at his piano and started playing boogie music.  Then he changed to a different style. After a few minutes he looked at the picture of his baby daughter of 5/6 months and explained about the picture of her on the piano.  Turning back to play again I noticed how alike the two expressions were and took a couple of pictures before we moved on to another part of the house.   If you look carefully, you can see that the baby Emily and Chris have the same expressions on their faces, priceless.  This is definitely my favourite image of the whole assignment. This was one that really caught my imagination.  What do you think?

I hadn't realised that the baby Emily was Chris' only daughter and he was immensely proud of her and his partner Margaret.  He's in his mid 60s and kept explaining how he never imagined that he would be so lucky to have a child.  I thought that as Emily was so important in his life I wanted to include her in this series of pictures, hence the following picture.

Once again, as I was in a home environment, it was difficult to get into the best position to take a well-balanced picture.  I'm not usually afraid to rearrange things for a better picture but with dogs, furniture, baby and piano it was virtually impossible to change things around too much.