A photographer and the photo

Occasionally, you’ll be able to find photos of the Beatles both depicting the photographer at work and the resulting photo. Like the one above, where Linda Eastman is taking a photo of Paul McCartney at the release party for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in Brian Epstein’s house in London.

There’s also a famous one of Ethan Russell taking a picture of the Beatles in front of the door at John Lennon’s Tittenhurst Park, which later was to become the cover photo for the “Hey Jude” (aka “The Beatles Again”) album.

Here’s Ethan preparing to shoot, Paul looks down a bit and Ringo looks at Paul, but once they’re done doing that, Ethan takes this photo:

Funnily enough, I have another example. In the summer of 1982, I ran into Paul McCartney outside his MPL building in London. I wasn’t the only one there, quite a number of the so-called “mpl scruffs” were there, and we all took pictures of Paul. One of the other fans snapped one of me, while I was taking another photo:

Notice my enormous instamatic camera there. As you can see, the angle I’m working from is not exactly a good position to take pictures from, as you’ll notice in the resulting photo:

I can assure you that I haven’t been actively pursuing a career as a professional photographer after this.

Note how short Paul’s hair was at the time, it was the shortest hairstyle I’d ever seen him sporting up ’till that time. Of course, a year and a half later I noticed the same hairstyle in the video for “Pipes of Peace“, where Paul was portraying two different characters from World War 1. So it’s an army haircut.