Like many other photographers as well as shooting with more Professional equipment I love the challenge of shooting with my iPhone.
This week after shooting a job in Rotterdam on Monday I had a few hours the following day before flying home to explore Rotterdam & Amsterdam.
Here are a few snaps from my wanderings with some more of the serious stuff to follow.
This week I got a call from a Creative Director and good friend I have worked closely with on and off for many years.
In the past we have worked together shooting cars,lifestyle images and even a few glamorous ladies for various promotions.
Now with a new company he called to ask about working on a new campaign together and a date was set to shoot this week.
For me this once again reinforces that business is built upon relationships not just that you can create good imagery or have a wonderful style of shooting.
Trust,reliability,passion,and good people skills are all strong points that go into a great working partnership and a no doubt a good sense of humour goes a long way too !
I’m off to finish packing for our next shoot in Holland on Monday once again for a client we have been fortunate to have worked with before.
Have a great weekend everyone.
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A few iPhone images from the day’s shoot and travels.
You might remember Rubus from a previous post I made about the fun shooting him for a campaign last year.
This particular image is an outtake from the same shoot which was not used so I decided to have some fun and place Rubus into a landscape fitting of his stature.
One of the great things about doing advertising work is you never know what’s going to come in with the next phone call or email.
Last Friday this week looked like being a fairly quiet and relaxed one but it proved far from it.
On Tuesday we found ourselves heading across the bridge to Cardiff for a couple of meetings regarding a potentially very large commission we had put a proposal in for the just the previous week.
Thursday we found ourselves on the road again this time heading for Central London at fairly short notice for a nice little shoot.
Now I love shooting in London but driving through the centre is not for the faint hearted especially when your idea of heavy traffic normally consists of 2 0r 3 horses or a tractor and trailer blocking the narrow country lanes.!
Glad to say I transformed into city driving survival mode and breezed (kind of) in and out without any problems.
As I said love working in London but it’s kind of nice to get home away from the crazy roads !
Have a great Whitsun everyone..
I’ve lived by the coast pretty much all my life and as a result it has featured in much of my work over the years and still inspires me to create new work.
This beach scene was captured during a visit to the Algarve in Portugal last October with the model being captured last week at the beach in the south west.
I was asked recently to help out a neighbour with some images for a new business venture she was setting up.
The main image needed to be a portrait of her with her dog Barney and I had the perfect location in mind that I had found only a week previously.
As with most shoots containing more than one person composition is key especially here where we have a person and a smallish animal that need equal attention in the frame. To do this I used a very large fallen tree that provided a great prop and worked perfectly for the main image required but also provided another unplanned opportunity when Barney decided to climb onto the very top of the trunk.
I very quickly spotted the potential of the scene unfolding and fired off half a dozen frames before he climbed down and the moment was gone.
I knew right there before previewing any images that I had a strong image that could be developed further in post.
I can’t explain what it is that that makes a potential image appear in front of me (when many people do not see it ) except to say it’s an unconscious thing perhaps developed (pardon the pun) over the 26 + years of looking through a camera.
The final photo retouching composite required a lot of retouching to remove the harness that Barney was wearing and to retain all the very fine details I’m obsessed with keeping and seamlessly blending with the background.
Retaining fine details like these takes a lot of work but knowing the image will stand up to the closest of scrutiny is important.
Next, I decided to scan through my archives to find the perfect background to compliment the image.
The image I decided to use is one of Exmoor that I had shot a couple of years ago but had never used and provided a perfect fit for the mood I wanted to create. The final image titled “Surveying The Moor” together with a close up of Barney is shown below.
It’s been a bit of a tough year both personally and for the area I live and love that is still recovering from the recent floods.
This week I took a break from a hefty amount of marketing to do some walking and take some therapeutic snaps while I was at it.
Pointing my camera without any plans to what I wanted to specifically capture is not something I do a lot of these days so it was a bit like yoga for the creative muscles to just follow my nose.
I decided to head a few miles from the Studio to the edge of the Somerset Levels at Hambridge where just a few months earlier was several feet underwater and the road totally unpassable at least by car.
I’m glad to say I found a drastic change to the area since my last visit and everything appears to be returning to some kind of normality.
That is not to say that the signs of the devastation where not evident in fact I came a cross everything from flattened rotting withy trees to dead Deer (although that was probably due to a car than the flooding).
Although many fields still looked saturated with water and mud a few did have some signs of growth in them along with hedges blooming with Blackthorn
Some composite images just fight you all the way then there are some that just go together effortlessly like they are meant to be that way like the image here.
The model for this shoot is Kate and I have been shooting her on and off for over a decade and for very good reason she is simply brilliant !
This goes beyond simply being great looking and being able to walk or pose correctly without much direction it’s her professionalism,enthusiasm and simply knowing she will turn up and I need not worry about anything model related.
On personal shoots I will often work alone but on this one Dean my good friend and manager of The Monks Yard where I’m based was on hand to assist me where needed which was a big help at times especially shooting a little video footage and ordering the coffee !
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Without doubt the post production work was helped enormously by the fact that we had just installed a brand new top of the range mac to replace our very decrepit existing system and it was like a hot knife through butter to use.
So all in all this was a great team effort helped along a little with some up to date computing power and I think it shows in the final image.
This week we finally finished another shoot for my personal project “Life In A Somerset Landscape“.
You may remember early October I went on a recee to PH Coate & Son “Willow & Wetlands Centre” with the plan to return and photograph the wicker harvest.
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