photo-i caught up briefly with Lord Lichfield at his current exhibition "Getting it Straight". We asked him some questions about his thoughts and use of digital equipment.

photo-i - What has been your involvement with digital photography?

I haven’t used any film for 3 years - I shoot everything digitally mostly on a Hassleblad with a digital back. The quality I get with this combination is fantastic, I get a 48 mb image from an 16 million pixel file. I have saved £76,000 on film and processing in the first year and £75,000 last year, I expect to make similar savings this year, so it’s more than paid for the equipment. It’s a fascinating thing to get into - the trouble is very few photographers will go and take digital, they would rather take film and scan it.  Snowdon rings me up all the time saying should I go digital and I say “Yes, yes.  You’re not too old, even you are not too old!”

photo-i - So there’s no going back to film for you?

No, not unless there’s a hiccup - we always carry a film back and a Polaroid back with us just in case because the computer can crash. The only thing that I miss with digital photography is the wonderful revelation in the dark, when things start coming up  and judging when the print is fully developed.  But the main thing is you’ve got no more chemicals, no more silver recovery problems and, more importantly, no more customs or airport x-ray problems. I also have peace of mind when I have finished a shoot because I can see that I have the perfect shot. Chewed finger nails whilst waiting for the film to come back from the lab, is also a thing of the past. I can have an art director standing beside me looking at a laptop and saying, “That one, that one.” If I’ve got a difficult client they can come round the back and say, “Can you take a bit of this out?”  I’ve got a wonderful retoucher - he took 40 lbs off Whoopee Goldberg while she was standing there! So you can please the client, please the art director, do the layout, and choose colour or black and white as a post production option, rather than switching between cameras or film backs.

photo-i - Has it changed your working practises as a photographer?

I can lay pictures out if I’m working on an assignment, like a fashion assignment -  you get back to the house at the end of the day and you’re already retouching.     When I was shooting a cover for an American magazine recently in the West Indies,  we retouched it in the house when we’d finished, we sent it by ADSL across to America and they sent it back for some extra retouching. We did that and never made a print.  It was on the cover two days later across America - absolutely perfect.  Things like catalogues are a lot easier - that’s important.   People say to me “Why shoot it digitally” when you could do it on film.  Well, once you get that discipline right it’s easier working with digital because on a medium format camera   plugged into a computer  the client is looking at  something that’s a lot better than a Polaroid and they are seeing a laptop with the full blown thing.  

At this stage Patrick was whisked away to do a presentation and greet some of the many celebrities that turned up for his exhibition. "Getting it Straight" The thing that struck me, was Patricks endless enthusiasm for photography and his acceptance of new ways of working. Like it or not, we are all going to be shooting digitally within the next few years, our clients will expect it from us.

photo Vincent Oliver