Benj

We had a bit of a problem with Benj.

Nothing to do with the boy himself...

But our cameraman fell in love with him.

That wasn't hard to work out. 

When he came back to the office, all he could talk about was what a beautiful boy this was, well-spoken, charismatic, the sort of boy that he'd always been looking for, etc., etc.

And then, when we took a look at the pictures, the signs were everywhere.

In the first place, our guy had taken the pictures outdoors.  Now, anyone who knows him will tell you that he absolutely hates working outdoors - all down to a combination of not being able to be in full control of the lighting conditions and a case of lifetime chronic hay fever.  When we asked why he'd chosen to work in the countryside, of all places, he could only come up with "Well, it's just so romantic, isn't it?"  Look closely at some of the pictures, in fact, and you'll see that our guy got so carried away that he actually scattered pretty little flowers over Benj in some of the shots!

In the second place, we knew that something unusual had occurred because of the pictures themselves. 

After all, isn't one of the golden rules of portrait photography that you should focus the viewer's interest on the model?  And what's the first thing you notice in these pictures?  A field full of garish and very distracting oilseed rape!  (Forgive me if I've got the crop wrong here - botany was never one of my better subjects at school.)

It's a mark, of course, of young Benj's genuine attractiveness that he overcomes that distracting background and our snapper's chronic hay fever to emerge looking as good as he does.  And, according to our lovesick photographer, he's also a really genuine and charming young man - a quality that we think comes cxlearly across in the photographs too.

So we're all looking forward to seeing him as our photographer's "other half" at this year's staff Christmas party... though we imagine that he'll be wearing rather more there than he is here!