Archive for the “Commercial” CategoryHigh quality commercial photography shot on location or in our fully equipped studio A quick press style photo shoot for Simon Wilkes of The Wilkes Group who has just landed a contract with Prince Charles’ privately run company Duchy of Cornwall to supply weter coolers on the Duchy estate. The full story will be in the Wakefield Express but you get a heads up here first
Got a call from Citigate, a London PR firm, to shoot some images for Santander Bank but unfortunately it wasn’t to be snapping Lewis Hamilton and the F1 team! Instead, I was shooting PR images for the bank for a press release to cover their deal helping local plant hire firm AFI Uplift with their expansion programme. The shoot took place at the AFI premises at the Europort at Normanton where I was tasked with photographing three representatives of Santander and the Financial Director of AFI Uplift. The brief was to get the typical PR shots of the guys shaking hands and closing the deal, however, the chaps wanted none of that, so instead I went more for the ‘power’ group shot with folded arms and all very “Dragon’s Den” like. The difficulty was in getting the huge brand new cherry picker in the frame while keeping the guys as the main subject. Here are a few images from the shoot.
It was a real girlie day in the the studio today - the whole place was awash with diamonds, furs and make-up for the shoot for a local jewellers in Huddersfield. Jodie, who works in the shop, was to be the model for the day and we had a top MUA & stylist Jessie Young who, although sounds like a wild west outlaw, was no cowboy when it came to the make-up! The shoot was to be a mix of high fashion and close-ups of the jewels and the idea is that the pieces being worn in each shot will be photographed individually and then the graphics guys will create brochure pages with each of the pieces blown up big alongside the main fashion image. Here’s a few of the fashion style images we did to be going on with.
Hit the college again today for the second half of the shoot to mop up on the departments we didn’t get round to on the first shoot. Once again we had a hard day having to nip in and out of classrooms and shoot students and teachers in as little time as possible while trying not to disturb the class too much - some were even sitting exams as we went in! Talk about pressure shooting! Anyway, came away with another 20gb of images to edit through so we must have done something despite the day going by in a blur :¬o
May
07
2010
 
High key shoot with MaddyPosted by John in Commercial, Fashion, Fashion & beauty, PortfoliosMaddy made a return visit to the studio today and, although it was a cold wind outside, the bright spring sunshine flooded into the studio making it perfect for some high key, summery fashion shots. The studio is a converted chapel, and has huge arched windows on three of the four sides and the sunlight just pours in making it very bright and airy. Although this can be a drawback to shooting low key work such as boudoir, it was ideal for what I had in mind for Maddy which was to shoot some high key images with a very shallow depth of field. Using just two lights to boost the colours and contrast we came up with a fabulous variety of images, though that’s not hard to do when you’re working with someone of Maddy’s calibre; this is only the second shoot she’s had - her first being back in March when she came to the studio! As an aside, all these images are uploaded straight from camera and none have been retouched! Photographers might like to know that Maddy is going to be the model for the first studio portrait workshop in two weeks time. The workshop will be on a Wednesday evening for around 2.5hrs and place are limited to 5 photographers so if you’re interested, get a mail off to me quickly!
Today I was at Pontefract New College for the first half of a commission to shoot a selection of images for the update to the college prospectus. I spent the day on campus shooting in the grounds as well as in the classrooms and, as always with these kind of shoots, its high pressure with just a few minutes allowed to go into the classes and get a few images that illustrate that particular part of the college. As a photographer, I have to be able to enter the room, assess the layout and decide on the lighting as well as picking out the best subjects to be included in the shot and the subjects must reflect the diverse culture of the school, so not just going for the class beauty! I’ll be shooting on campus again later in the month when we will pick off the classes not done today such as the art department, the library and even the photography department! Today’s assignment was made tougher by the fact that outside it was very bright and sunny which means a lot of contrast, burnt highlights and black shadows, while inside the building is lit by flourescent tubing which gives a really sickly green feel to the images! I chose to shoot most of the images with a few speedlights used off camera, mainly using a shoot through brolly, but outside things were tricky for flash with the bright light meaning shutter speeds way above flash sync speeds. Anyway, we coped and here are a few images from today showing life on campus! Thanks to James and Claire for lugging my lighting stands around.
My daughter’s birthday today and also very typical weather for a bank holiday Sunday with a cold wind and heavy cloud and the odd spot of rain! So, what to do? Well, we’d seen that the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway were celebrating 40yrs since the making of the film ‘The Railway Children’ which was filmed on location around Oakworth station and Howarth and, being outvoted 3-1, that’s where we went. I decided it would probably be packed and therefore have little photo opportunities so, ever the professional, I left my gear at home! Fortunately, I did take my backup DSLR and a consumer zoom ranging from 18mm-200mm to do some family snaps but boy! Did I regret not taking the big boy’s camera and a couple of very fast pieces of glass?! Throughout the course of the day, local actors from Keighley were re-enacting scenes from the film and, remarkably, for much of the morning the station was relatively quite which allowed for some great candid photography of the actors as they performed the scenes amidst the tourists and film aficionados (my wife!). However, I managed to have a few minutes away from the crowds with actress Barbara Boothroyd, who was playing the mother, as she stood inside the ticket office. Barbara was dressed in resplendant Edwardian costume and the setting was perfect in period detail and I had a great chance for a few quick portraits. The wide brimmed hat was throwing the face into heavy shadow (think mothers at weddings!) and at this moment I would have given my left arm for an aperture of f/2.8 and my California Sunbounce or a speedlight that I could have used off camera. As it was, I had to make do with a variable aperture of f/3.5-5.6 and not even a piece of white paper for fill! With only ambient light to work with, the only thing was to turn Barbara’s face to the windows and go for some soft natural light with the head tilted back slightly to get light into the eyes.
The studio lights had hardly a chance to cool from Dean Huffinley’s shoot this morning before Derek & Lisa of Rescue Accident & Assistance arrived for some corporate headshots. Lisa’s brief was that the images shouldn’t be just stuffy corporate images but that we should inject a little fun into the shoot while getting the professional image across. They also brought with them the company mascot in the form of a 6ft teddy which they wanted to incorporate into some of the shots too. The shoot resulted in a mix of individual portraits, shots of them together and, of course, shots of them with the bear. For your corporate photography contact me on 01924 229800
Whitby Photographic Society kindly invited me along to be their guest speaker for the evening and I duly obliged and ran them through a whole raft of images from my commercial, weddings, portraits and glamour shoots as well as some of my wildlife and landscape work. Being Whitby, I definitely made sure some of my Goth images were in there, but I hadn’t realised it was the Whitby Goth weekend this weekend. I would have stayed over and done some street portraiture! Anyways, going up there gave me a chance to do some seabird photography at Bempton cliffs which made a nice change from editing images!
Mar
29
2010
LoveSuspenders.com catalog shootPosted by John in Commercial, Fashion, Fashion & beauty, Glamour & boudoir, glamourHad a long day in the studio today shooting the new web catalog for LoveSuspenders. Not nearly as glamourous as its sounds, it involved a lot of standing around while the garments were arranged perfectly and then I’d shoot to a given set of parameters so that there was consistency throughout the images. We shot everything on white backgrounds so that the images could be dropped onto background templates or have text dropped onto them. But then at the end of the shoot, I got to play and have some creative input as we shot the ‘impact’ images for the website. The impact images are more pictorial than the standard packshot or editorial image. I used the old cheval mirror and the boudoir wall to create a moody image that would show both front and rear of the garment in the same shot.
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