Have you ever driven through a city, late at night?

So late it’s early.

Lights from bars, clubs and closed up shops illuminate, so starkly through the darkness. They blur as you coast through empty streets.

There are stragglers, but outside, it’s quiet.

Inside, the soundtrack is Protection.

Protection is an electronic act comprised of two obscenely talented musicians and producers is the shape of Scott Paterson (Sons & Daughters) & Iain Cook (Chvrches, Aereogramme, The Unwinding Hours). So, quite the fucking roster, right?

Their management got in touch with me to discuss photographing promo material for this new project. Naturally, I jumped!

I’d met Iain briefly when working on CHVRCHES live shows but didn’t know Scott other than through his work.

It is however, hard to imagine a nicer, more laid back pair showing up at the studio pre 6am on a Thursday morning, ready to catch the rooftop sunrise. We had strong coffee and day old croissants and a brief stint outside lingering on light that never quite came through how I wanted. Such is light, right?

Let’s rewind a little thought and talk about how we got to these images. The brief was to go relatively low key. Something a little darker in tone than may be typical for a ‘launch’ promo shot. There were some colour palettes, and an idea to incorporate the early morning light in the city.

I went to the roof hopeful that I might be able to shoot something ‘naturally’ but prepped to be able to shoot something more striking with some added colour.

Back inside, I had 2 concepts ready to go. One was the blue image which was the first used in launching the project and another, yet to be seen image. The side lit shot you can see here, was a last minute ‘holy shit, look at the light, we need to shoot in this’ moment. One of the beautiful happy accidents that almost always end up being my favourites. When all the right things conspire to come together at the exact right moment.

And then we were done. Wrapped before most people were at their desks. A wildly productive and very fun morning thanks so much to the wonderful creative input and patient sitting of two men who are absolute masters of their craft, kindly trusting me to do my thing.

This whole shoot came together incredibly quickly due to travel schedules. Only a couple of days after our zoom I was doing that exact early morning drive through Glasgow with the first two tunes released ‘Doll’ & ‘Still Love You’ cranked and on repeat.

Protection have just released their first EP, SEEDS I, and it is brilliant. I genuinely love it and have been rinsing it since the first play.

I’m very excited to hear what comes next for these two. Wild to think that this awesome music is a side project!

How do you think this stacked up against the mood board? Do you mood board your own shoots? I love having some visual reference as a starting point going in to a shoot and it’s nice afterwards to look back and see how it influenced the direction we ended up going.

Thanks so much to Protection for bringing me on board to work with them on this.