Friday 19 January 2018

Food Photography and Trains in Norwich

British Bakels

We had a very enjoyable day photographing cakes and bread at the British Bakels baking center in Bicester. I used three Godox AD180 flashes with a special high speed flash trigger to capture the action as the flour and chocolate toppings were added. Toni my colleague kept a keen eye on the compositions spotting any background clutter that I might have missed through the viewfinder and helped to move the lighting around. The shoot lasted around 6 hours with a break for a lovely lunch kindly supplied by the guys from Bakels and the day was a great success. We are currently post processing the final selected images but I have dropped in a couple of my personal favourites here.

Crown Point Depot
I also photographed Crown Point railway depot this week which was a treat for me as I love trains (I am not a spotter by the way!) and the focus of the shoot was the new LED lighting supplied by UK lighting manufacturer Carbon8 http://carbon8lighting.co.uk/ who manufacture a range of industrial lighting products. The shoot was great fun and I even managed to get a shot on top of a scaffolding overlooking the engines in the repair shed.

Nest week we have some street lighting to photograph in Oxford and we are doing a food shoot for an artisan bakery so more nice food shots to come!.





Wednesday 10 January 2018

Bicester Scramble Car Meet

We are very luck to have had quite a few bookings for photography and video sincec we came back after the Christmas break so the new few weeks are looking very busy. I might have a couple of bookings for the drone too.

E Type Jaguar Rolleiflex T
In the meantime I've been out every day shooting medium format film with my Hasselblad 500C and Rolleiflex T cameras. I love Ilford HP5 Plus and FP4 for medium format and I process this at home. I don't have a full darkroom so develop the film using a darkbag to get it onto the spirals and then once the film is dry I photograph the negatives on a light box and use Photoshop to convert them to positive images. I find this to be a good compromise and a lot faster than using a flatbed scanner.

Porsche 911 Hasselblad 500C
I also have a Pentax 67 which I tend to use for studio work as it's so big and heavy but it is a lovely camera too. The Hasselblad is lovely but a little temperamental at times and occasionally jams and you have to remember to shoot it carefully and to follow a routine of winding on, darkslide out and firing the shutter without trying to remove the lens or back if the darkslide isn't in place and the shutter is wound on. Of them all the Rolleiflex is the easiest to use. It's light and easy to load and unload and the fixed 75mm Zeiss lens provides beautiful images.

I urge you all to shoot film. If you don't have a film camera you can still get bargains online (especially 35mm kit) but prices are on the increase as film makes a comeback.

I'm running another photography workshop in March (max 6 places) and I still have three places left so please get in touch if you would like to come along.



Jaguar XJ220 Rolleiflex T

Ferrari Dino Hasselblad 500C
The Bicester car scramble is a fab event which happens every 3 months at the very cool Bicester Heritage Aerodrome. It's only a few quid to get in and the cars on show are fab. There were literally hundreds of classic cars there and I took my own lovely Jaguar XJ6 along too. It's a great opportunity to photograph some very rare cars and there are plenty of great food and coffee stalls there too.

Here's a link to the website - http://bicesterheritage.co.uk/tickets/sunday-scramble-tickets/

Thursday 4 January 2018

Welcome back after Christmas!

Christmas flew past and here we are back at work again!.
We've already got a busy January with several booking in the diary and quite a few jobs about to be added too. A lot of our work comes in at the last minute but we have already got some dates in for February, March and April which is great news.

 We also had a busy December and I've included a couple of shots from one of my favourite shoots of the month - 111 Buckingham Palace Road in London. I photographed this same interior a few years ago and it was interesting to go back and photograph it again after an extensive refurbishment. The lighting has been very skillfully designed by Hoare Lea Lighting and the colour temperature over the escalators is a warm 3000K whilst the lighting in the main reception area is a cooler 4000K to accentuate the different areas.

I always think shots like these need a careful mix of balance and perspective. When we photography interiors we use tilt shift lenses to keep the walls of the buildings straight and vertical. I often see wide angle interior shots where the camera has been tilted up resulting in converging verticals which makes the space look distorted. I like to include blurred people movement too if at all possible to give a sense of scale to the interior and a human element to the pictures. It's a fact that we are all attracted to images that have people in rather than empty spaces.

It's time for me to power up the drone again too as I haven't flown it for a few weeks. We have a booking in February for aerial photography so I need to get all the firmware updated and spend a couple of days taking some new portfolio shots. We have had a steadily increasing demand for the drone which is great news as I haven't really promoted that heavily.