I met up with Russ and the MK Illuminations installation gang at Crystal Peaks shopping centre  in Sheffield tonight at around 8pm with the aim of getting some shots of them dismantling the Christmas lights. We had intended to get shots of them doing an installation job but due to various reasons this never happened so instead we went for a dismantle shoot and hope that no-one will spot the difference in the brochure ;¬) Owen, Luke and Mick provide the rope access skills to clamber around amongst the beams high up in the atrium whilst the rest of the team worked from ladders or a large cherry picker. The operation was pretty slick and the main showpiece was taken down smoothly and quickly bubble wrapped along with the rest of the lights and loaded onto an articulated lorry for haulage back to the depot.

Lighting was tricky because the guys were mostly dressed in black, were working around 50ft above me against glass which made for a black night time backdrop and to cap it all I’d left my light stands in the studio even though I was confident I had them in the back of the car :¬( This meant I had to do some MacGyver style lighting, strapping speedlights to parts of the mall and on top of a monopod which was balanced against a tripod or other structure! The speedlights, as good as they are, were struggling to light the guys up in the gods but we eventually got some pictures of the lads at work which will illustrate their efforts.

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After a hectic build-up and a workload that had me in a spin, Christmas came and went in the blink of an eye, but at least the three days I had off gave me chance to relax and have a beer ahead of the next onslaught that came in the form of a shoot at London’s Stratford City shopping centre! The seven labours of Heracles were nothing compared to this shoot! Collecting the apples of the Hesperides, cleaning the Stables of Augeas or fighting Cerberus, the two-headed dog that guards the entrance to the underworld would all have been relatively simple tasks compared to obtaining a press pass and then visiting Europe’s biggest shopping mall at 16:00hrs on a Friday night two days after the Boxing Day sales had begun. I suspect most of the southern half of England were in the mall that night, wandering round in an aimless daze and after queuing for 15mins to get into the car park and then battling through a sea of humanity to the management suite, I finally got adorned with the said pass and was out shooting! Fortunately, the crowds weren’t as bad outside and inside they had dispersed a little around 17:30 but when I did leave at 18:30, it took over half an hour to get out of the car park! Hopefully, I won’t have to go back there again!