DUBLIN GOT A little more Norse at the weekend when some 500 Vikings came to town to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Clontarf.

Around 40,000 people turned out to St Anne’s Park in Dublin for a large scale reenactment of the Battle of Clontarf,  as the Vikings proved that one thousand years is not nearly enough time to stop gloating about victory.

Of course, these guys aren’t actual Vikings. In real life, they’re Viking enthusiasts who travel all around Europe to savour all things related to the Norse warriors. But the one thing about them is that they REALLY stay in character.

Photographer Leon Farrell got some of them to pose for him – in between destroying their enemies and drinking blood from their skulls – at the festival, with impressive and terrifying* results.

How he did it…

Leon, senior photographer with our colleagues in Photocall Ireland, tells us that he decided to experiment with simple tools to see if he could shoot studio-quality portraits… without the studio bit.

So he had his daughter Leah, who you can see on the left of the frame of the final photo in this gallery, assist as junior photographer. She held the backdrop – a basic white cotton bedsheet – between two stands as Leon shot on just one lens camera, a Canon mark IV with a 24-70 2.8 lens (that’s for the enthusiasts).

“I wanted to do this sort of project to see if I could do good pictures with just the basics – no studio lights, reflectors, expensive backdrops, make-up artists or stylists. Just one camera, one lens and a bedsheet,” Leon told us.

*Note: May not actually be terrifying.