Posts

People in June, my top 5 shots

So this weekend I am on a residential training weekend with the Enterprise Agency and 40 other business owners from the North East. For three days I am intensively looking at my studio business, working process and new ideas.

Today is focussing on marketing and media platforms so a live task is to post a piece of content that may be of interest to my clients past current and future.

So with only 30 minutes to pull this post together I am (probably with many typos!) throwing out there 5 top photos shot in June. The theme is people in a documentary context, not posed and just naturally doing their thing shot with a shallow depth of field giving that lovely atmospheric blur. This style of photography is particularly helpful when the summer drinks shot was taken in the rain!

Having gained many new contracts this month I have met lots of new faces and so had a good variety of people to choose from. Below are a selection taken from commissions from Metro newspaper in conjunction with Jack Daniels and local businesses Adventures in Aude catering and Transcendit IT company.

I hope they inspire you to think about how the people in your business can be represented in photography and how this reflects the brand of your business in attractive imagery for editorial or website use. Happy working Saturday folks!

Aldi Summer 2016

Currently in the shops are some surprisingly good items of summer clothing by Aldi with packaging shot by me! I photographed these earlier in the year at my studio in Newcastle city centre for Bebe clothing, who create the clothing and packaging for Aldi women’s fashion. The colours were really pleasing and the model was fab! A great shoot indeed and who’d have thought the goodies in the central aisles could look this good?

72dpi Aldi

Arts Council Artsmark Schools

This month has been fabulously busy and I have added three new brands to my portfolio. One of these is The Arts Council’s Artsmark as The Forge, an organisation that creates arts activities amongst the young in the North East commissioned my photography. This month I visited three schools and colleges in the local area to capture arts based school photography for the Artsmark awarded by the Arts Council.

The images will be used across the Artsmark and Forge Websites and feature Northumberland and County Durham located schools: Collingwood Media Arts College in Morpeth, Greenfield School in Newton Aycliffe and Ovingham Middle School in Prudhoe.

The classes I photographed were lively and the kids were clearly loving the arts activities particularly Ovingham where the the teacher Neil played Oxygen by Jean Michelle Jarre and had colours spots lighting the class. Very atmospheric! The most challenging shoot was the photography studio at Collingwood. Shooting in other photographer’s studio spaces and lighting set ups was interesting! Apparently the students afterwards used my photos as a learning tool. Let’s hope I got them right!

Greenfiled Community College 016Collingwood Media Arts College 063Collingwood Media Arts College 030Greenfiled Community College 104Greenfiled Community College 052Collingwood Media Arts College 126Collingwood Media Arts College 104Greenfiled Community College 065Ovingham Middle School 088Ovingham Middle School 118Greenfiled Community College 069Ovingham Middle School 024Ovingham Middle School 079Collingwood Media Arts College 051

Dylan Thomas, Love the Words

So here is another set of images recently captured for my London based client Studio hb who specialise environmental graphics for exhibition spaces. The exhibition is a recently refurbished permanent exhibition at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea. It is fully interactive with touch screens, spy holes, neon, sound and projections together with beautiful typefaces, a minimal colour palette and cartoon-like illustrations.

The designers have chosen to create a space that is low lit, playful and intriguing and so my environmental photography needed to capture this atmosphere and the design details. The photographic brief was to document the main elements of the environmental design, much like the David Bowie is and Olympic Journey 2012 exhibition where I photographed close ups on print finishes and materials, video projections, text and creative interactive elements.

Photography tips. How to!

How do you shoot correctly exposed images in low light exhibition spaces?

So to give advice on how to capture an exhibition in this type of a low light environment, because the subject matter is stationery you can take down your shutter speed really low without any risk of movement blur providing you use a tripod. So a tripod is a fundamental bit of kit for this type of shoot. The ISO can be anything up to 1600 and maybe higher to 2500 with a camera body that copes well in low light but mainly use a tripod so you can maximise light instead with a very slow shutter speed like 10 or under. This way you avoid the grain often present in a slightly under exposed image shot at a high ISO.

If you are creating atmosphere, be careful to note the level of light in the room and avoid over exposer as you will lose atmosphere with a brightly lit image. You may also like to use a remote to avoid any camera shake when pressing the shutter. Spot lights may cause issues with over exposure so keep an eye out for highlight warnings in your camera as you shoot. Below are samples of the various areas of the exhibition with many different lighting challenges with projections and spots.

Dylan Thomas 061

Dylan Thomas 090Dylan Thomas 075

Dylan Thomas 102Dylan Thomas 123Dylan Thomas 101Dylan Thomas 038Dylan Thomas 123Dylan Thomas 092Dylan Thomas 021

 

Dylan Thomas 055

Dylan Thomas 079