October 2018,
A month of product and event work.
The start of my 11th year in business saw me trapped in the photography studio shooting product work! Studio product photography always requires patience and a good helping of trail and error. The day’s work for Endomag was no different and I shot their device on white and on black.
The next job was also product work, but photographed on location. My brief was to photograph a number of ‘smart home’ electronic devices in an almost life-style look. The brief also included shooting some video. I used the very photographic surroundings of my client’s home and mixed natural daylight with my studio strobes.
The rest of the month was spent out of the studio shooting a number of conferences, gala dinners and corporate events. I shot a few portrait sessions along the way, but I won’t share those ones. First up was the annual IESO Digital Health conference at the Royal Institution in London. I shot this event last year and I absolutely love the venue. I’m not sure there are many other conference venues with quite so much history! It was also quite nice to see a commissioned image of mine as part of a presentation.
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The next event was a little closer to home, at the University of Cambridge. I was booked to shoot stills and create a highlights film for a business event about disruption. There were some fantastic talks from the likes of Amazon Alexa, Cisco Systems and Canon. I do get to go to some interesting events as part of my job as a photographer!
Another corporate booking this month was to shoot a gala dinner at Hinchingbrooke House near Huntington. It was not a venue I had been to before, but on what was a gorgeous late summer evening, I was blown away by how stunning it was! I shot informal event coverage and posed couple/group shots after dinner. Often, the most challenging part of a job is to shoot what the client requests, while having to improvise. The space assigned to me for the after dinner portraits was not ideal. The ambient light was low and I had no room for a reflector. Luckily, a nearby window had a white blind! I set up a second strobe and used the white blind as a fill light for my key light. You know what? The light quality of the setup was super (see below my portrait of the evening’s toastmaster)!
The University of Cambridge was, once again, location for my final event of the month. Baroness Valerie Amos was the key-note speaker at the annual race equality lecture. It was an interesting evening of comment and discussion at St John’s College.
