I'm working 16 hours a day at the moment (during the week at least) to try to keep up with my workload. Over the past couple of weeks since my last blog entry I've had 9 commissions including a night shoot at Selfridges in Oxford Street where the store was floodlit with beautiful colour change LED's, an event at The Ritz hotel in London (I had to wear a suit and tie - not cool!) two days working with models on a photo shoot for the NHBC and a night shoot at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford.I've also photographed another couple of care homes for BUPA which is great work for me as everyone there is so nice to work with and the homes are always friendly and well run and I've also photographed a dual carriageway at night in Bristol!.


Sheldonian Theatre Oxford



The post shoot processing for all this takes me ages and when I finally manage to lease an office (hopefully within the next two months) I'll find someone to take over the post shoot processing which will mean I can have less stress and a bit of free time!.

I've just been commissioned to work on two new video productions too - one for a lighting project and another for a company that supply a teeth whitening kit to beauty salons. I did some stills photography for these guys a while ago and they've asked me to film and produce a short video clip for YouTube to promote their products further.Video is a great way to promote products and raise awareness of a brand etc and with iPads and iPhones being used so widely now it makes sense to have video content on your website as well as still pictures.



Selfridges Oxford Street



I'm very conscious of the fact that I've spent the past 8 years or so building up Redshift Photography as a company and hopefully as a brand but I've never had time to sit back and try to look at the way that we do things from an outsiders perspective. To remedy this I've asked a management consultant called David Tighe to take a look at the way my business is working and he's been with me for the past few days both out on photo shoots and visiting some of our best clients. It's been a real eye opener to get some feedback from someone neutral and it was great to introduce David to some of our top customers. We had some great feedback and identified some areas where we can offer extra services which can only be a good thing. If you need any business coaching or advice please let me know and I'll put you in touch with David.

The next couple of months are looking very busy and it's great to know that I've got lots of work already in the diary - that takes the pressure off no end and and means I can relax a bit and just focus on producing good work.The one thing I've learned above all else is that you're only as good as your last job and that standards have to be high at all times.



NHBC Lifestyle Shoot



I'm still feeling in Bank Holiday mode after the lovely long weekend we've just had. For anyone reading this from overseas British Bank Holiday's in April and May are traditionally wet and cold but at the moment we're having lovely sunny weather.

I missed the Royal Wedding as I had a shoot up in Sheffield at a new Marks and Spencer Simply Food store last Friday. The store is very green and utilises lots of sustainable wood panelling and features lots of glazing to increase the amount of natural light hence reducing the need to use high levels of artificial lighting. My client (LAPD Lighting Design - http://www.lapdconsultants.com/) have designed a highly efficient lighting scheme for both the store and back of house areas and every light fitting through-out uses LED's instead of traditional lamps. LED's are the future and they now provide a viable alternative to fluorescent lamps and low voltage spotlights etc. The store felt very well lit and the luminaires looked very cool and well designed. I'll post a couple of pictures in the next blog entry once I've processed them.

I started my photography career around 25 years ago when I began working for a good family friend called Roger Parker who is a top sports photographer and owner of an agency called Fotosports International (http://www.fotosports.com/). Being an Arsenal fan it was a great honour to be able to work on the touchline at Highbury and I learned a tremendous amount about photography at that time. In those days it was all black and white film and manual focus cameras and we'd develop the film in the darkroom after the game. Now pictures are sent from the touchline as the game is in progress so technology has changed sports photography more than most other types of work.

Roger called me on Friday and asked me if I'd cover the Northampton Saints v Perpignan Heineken Cup Semi Final at the MK Dons stadium which was played on Sunday. I'm not a huge rugby fan but I have to say I really enjoyed the game and the atmosphere was brilliant. I used my Canon EOS 5D MK2 with my 70-200L 2.8 IS lens for the action close in front of me and I used one of Fotosport's Nikon D2X's with a 300mm 2.8 lens for the action further down the field. I took far too many pictures and was way too snap happy but I did end up with some decent shots which you can see on the Fotospots site in the rugby section. I've posted a few action shots in the blog today along with a picture of a very cheeky cheerleader!(tough work but someone has to do it). I haven't photographed anything that moves quickly for years and it was good to try something different. I can confirm that even though autofocus lenses and digital cameras have made things a bit easier there is still a tremendous amount of skill involved in sports photography and I take my hat off to the guys at Fotosports who are very good at it.

Had a long day today post shoot processing pictures from this past week and I'll be working late into the night tonight before I'm anywhere near to catching up on myself. For every four hours of shooting time on location there's at least that again (usually more) in post production and for the HDR shoots that I do often three times as much time spent in post production. Unfortunately the client doesn't see this and it's important to let people know how much time is spent behind the scene's. I'd love to take someone on to do this work but every time I work out the costs involved it just doesn't add up. I do use freelance Photoshop people to help me sometimes but what I do is very specialised (when it comes to shooting interior lighting installations) and by the time I've explained how to do the various stages of processing I could have done it myself. It's a real dilemma as I'm finding that I get bogged down with the post shoot work more and more so I will have to sort it out soon!.
Shooting video is more demanding at the time of the shoot but once it's in the can I pass all the editing over to Pete (my freelance video editor) and that is quite a relief to be honest.
It's a bit like in the old days of shooting on transparency (slide film) which was more difficult at the time of taking the photographs but once the pictures were taken it was over to the lab to sort out the processing and scanning. Many people say that digital photography is way easier than traditional photography BUT if you want to get the best results from digital cameras there is a lot of work to be done on the RAW files and in Photoshop so I don't agree that digital photography is quick and easy!.

Victoria Station

I'm sure this is a dilemma that faces many interior and commercial photographers in terms of time spent in post production. With fashion photography I think it's much more accepted by the client that a great deal of retouching is needed and the extra cost is more readily accepted.

Right no more moaning for today - I'd still rather be a photographer than anything else so I guess the retouching is the rough side of the deal.The smooth side is getting out nearly every day and going somewhere different to take pictures for a living and also working for some really nice people (you know who you are!).

I had a great shoot last Friday (yes I know it was a bank holiday!) where I photographed Victoria Station and Kings Cross Station for an industrial lighting company. I spent the afternoon at Victoria and captured some nice shots of the busy station thoroughfare and then photographed the platforms at Kings Cross at night. I've posted a picture from Victoria Station in today's blog (see above) - I love the feeling of hustle and bustle when I'm working in these environments and I tried to capture that in the pictures. I've also posted a night shot from Kings Cross Station where I used a 2 second exposure to show some blur on the train leaving the station.

I had a photo shoot for BUPA carehomes on Tuesday at a lovely retirement home in Battersea, one of the largest BUPA carehomes in the country. Their garden was transported from the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago - that's pretty cool!.

Yesterday I had a shoot at the University of West England in Bristol where I shot lots of refurbished interior areas for another large lighting company and tomorrow I'm heading up to Sheffield to photograph a Marks and Spencer store which means that I'll happily miss the Royal Wedding!.

Kings Cross Station

Wow another two weeks has flown past since my last blog entry - so much for updating the blog twice a week!.
It's a very busy time for me right now and since my last entry I've been to Southern Ireland, Belfast, Bristol, Glasgow and....Letchworth.
Back on the 6th April I did a few extra shots for Perry Scott Nash (a training and CDM consultancy) who I've been working with on the concept and photography for a new brochure.This shoot was basically to tie up a few loose ends and included a couple of portraits and a couple of people shots that will be cut out and pasted into a shot of a building site to simulate the handing over of a CDM manual to a client.
Then we had a long weekend break in Ireland which came as a welcome break for us all as we have had very little time off as a family over the past few years. Being a self employed photographer is a great life but it does mean that I have to be available to work at all times.If I take a few days off and miss a couple of commissioned jobs that really hurts and I'm always worried that another photographer will step in and I'll lose a client. I know this is a little paranoid and in fact we don't lose clients as we put customer service at the very top of our list of priorities but I guess it's human nature to be protective of our source of income!.
The day after flying home from Ireland I flew back out to Belfast and spent three days working out there for Zumtobel Staff Lighting taking photographs of some very cool projects. The picture below was taken at the Northern Bank in Belfast and shows some beautiful colour changing light panels supplied by Zumtobel that utilise the latest LED colour change technology. The people in Northern Ireland are very warm and friendly and although the trip was hard work it was also great fun.

I spent the following Friday and Monday on post shoot processing and then headed down to Bristol for a shoot at the Airbus factory at Filton for Philips Lighting last Tuesday. Philips have supplied some street lighting around the site and the product utilises LED technology instead of a traditional discharge lamp and the lit effect was really impressive.

Yesterday I caught the train to Glasgow for a shoot at the House of Fraser store on Buchanan street. I was lucky to get a cheap upgrade to first class on the Virgin trian and the whole experience was very pleasant. Usually I travel standard class and often end up standing for much of the journey but first class on Virgin is fab and I was given lovely food and a few glasses of red wine on the way home!.

Today I photographed a recently re-lit factory in Letchworth (I did the "before" shots a couple of months ago) where Llumarlite (my client) has gone in and supplied and installed highly energy efficient lighting fittings that work with daylight sensors and movement detectors to save energy and at the same time provide better lighting levels.

I'm very busy right now and May and June are filling up fast so at the moment I'm working my socks off to keep up with everything whilst making sure that my post shoot processing work is still of the highest standard. It's tempting to cut corners with the post shoot processing but it really doesn't pay as the quality of a shoot can be lost in the post production stage very easily.

Perry Scott Nash brochure image - Stand Out from the Crowd!

Here's a short video clip that we put together for Kinnarps based on a very quick shoot that we did at One Central Park in Manchester a few weeks ago. We had a couple of hours left at the end of a two day shoot so we arranged to call in at One Central Park where Kinnarps had provided some furniture for the reception area to create a kind of informal meeting space. I took a few still pictures of the reception area and then we set up a video interview with Marj the CEO (all shot with the Canon EOS 5D MK2) to give a brief voiceover to the clip. These little video clips are great for posting to YouTube etc and if you can embed the video into your site it will help to boost your ranking with Google. One of the main ways to optimise any website is to make it media rich and video is a great way to achieve that.

The great thing about the Canon EOS 5D MK2 is that it's ready to shoot HD video with the flick of a switch and it means that I can offer both stills and video on the same shoot without bringing loads of kit!.

There's been another big gap in the blog (about two weeks since the last entry!) because I've been so busy and I've literally been working all hours just to keep up with the workload - great!. It's finally back to being mega busy as we were a couple of years ago before the big R took hold and long may it continue.
Since my last posting I've been away in Holland for a three day shoot for Megaman lamps, I've done a House of Fraser "before the re-light" shoot in Newcastle for Philips, a beautiful private house for DPA Lighting Consultants and photographed two campuses of the London Met University that have been recently refurbished.I've therefore spent the past three working days solidly post shoot processing loads of pictures and I'm now finally up to date (almost!).
Added to this I've had a couple of client meetings to discuss some video production work and also a day of script writing and pre production meetings for a couple of videos for Kinnarps (a top office furniture manufacturer and all round great client!).
I must admit the trip to Holland was intense (we squeezed in lots of different locations) but great fun and I went with Louise Ball the European Marketing Manager for Neonlight the owner of Megaman. Louise is great company and the time flew past and I've posted a night shot in today's blog of a superb house that we photographed which is lit entirely with Megaman LED lamps.

The best time to capture shots like this is between dusk and dark and there's usually about 30-40 minutes of deep blue sky before the light fades totally and the sky goes inky black (or in fact orange if you're near a big city).

The London Met University shoots were great fun too and I wanted to include blurred figures to give the space a sense of energy and liveliness that you'd expect to find in a college full of bright young people.

Here's a couple of shots - the one to the right from the Whitechapel

campus and the one to the left from

Holloway Road campus.

I've got a shoot with a local indie

band tomorrow where we're hoping to shoot something cool for a promotional poster and I'm doing some more pictures on Wednesday for Perry Scott Nash (a training and CDM consultancy) in Stevenage for their new corporate brochure.

Next week I've got some work in Northern Ireland (not a great time to go unfortunately due to the sad news about the young policeman who was killed) and the next few weeks are beginning to fill up with jobs in Glasgow, Newcastle, The Olympic Site in London and some work at Victoria and Kings Cross stations to name but a few!.

After years of great service my EOS 5D MK2 has started to do some really odd things. Twice this week the LCD screen has gone mad basically turning itself into a flashing mess of lines and colour!. After a quick off and on manouvre it's reset itself but I think it might be time to send her back to Canon for a service.
My camera kit is used pretty much every day and although I'm careful with it all there are the unavoidable bumps and dings but I have to say that the Canon kit seems to be unbelievably reliable. My L series lenses are now about 8 years old and they have never missed a beat and my original EOS5D body (that I use as a backup or for jobs when I don't need really high res files) has taken hundreds of thousands of pictures.
My biggest advice for anyone buying camera kit is to get the best you can afford even if it means buying fewer lenses etc. Often people buy several cheap lenses when in reality one or two top quality ones would be a far better bet. Also buy second hand - my Canon 70-200 f2.8 L IS lens was bought used from Aperture Photographic (http://apertureuk.com/)  in London and I saved around £600 on a new lens!.
I still use my 1976 Canon F1N too when I need to shoot black and white film and it still works perfectly to this day.

I started to write this entry last Sunday so my timeline has gone a bit mad but to bring my diary up to date on line I had a shoot on Tuesday 15th at the National Physical Laboratory in Shepperton.This is a very cool place and I took a few shots of the newly refurbished offices where Philips Lighting have supplied some very state of the art LED recessed office lights. I was very impressed to find out that they have a mini Hadron Collider at the NPL although unfortunatley I didn't get to see it!.

On Wednesday 16th I had the "after" shoot at a warehouse in Birmingham where Dialight (http://www.dialight.com/) have supplied LED highbay luminaires to replace the existing SON lowbay fittings. Not only has the lighting level improved dramatically but the colour is also far better. I was very impressed with the result and I've posted a before and after picture in today's blog to show the effect. They've even managed to reduce the quantity of fittings substantially too so it's a great lighting solution all round. I was commissioned by Christine Gupta of The Gupta Partnership (http://http://www.guptapartnership.co.uk/) who specialise in high impact marketing and PR to take the pictures.