I finally caught up with all the post processing today - hooray!.

The Compton Street Sports Centre project (Little Venice Sports Centre) took longer than I thought and many of the final pictures were blended together to capture the full range of brightness (HDR imaging) which always takes a lot longer than processing standard pictures.

The Canon 5D MK2 does hold a lot of detail in the shadow areas so in some cases I can underexpose the overall picture and then pull out extra detail in the darker areas during post processing but in extreme cases I still use HDR or layer blending to put back any lost highlights. In the case of the Compton Street project the ceiling in the gym was very bright in the correctly exposed picture so I took a much darker shot and put that detail back to make the photograph look as the eye would see the scene. I've attached one of the gym shots to today's blog to show the effect I'm talking about.

I've been looking through the raw video footage I shot last week at the furniture installation job in Wrotham and the 5D MK2 produces stunning video output when shot in full HD mode. The picture is so sharp and clear and this opens up so many opportunities for photographers and videographers alike. If anyone is reading this and is thinking of buying the 5D MK2 or 7D with a view to video production I would recommend it without any hesitation.

After finishing my post production work I spent the rest of the day researching some potential new clients that I want to approach - mainly architectural practices in and around London. The competition is pretty intense when you start to approach the big practices like Richard Rogers (now Rogers Stirk Harbour) but you just have to keep chipping away. I'm lucky in that I've worked with Richard Rogers Architects before so that does help but it's still hard work to gain new clients. Marketing is the downfall of many photographers and it's hard to find time to really sit down and focus on new potential clients but I do try whenever I get a spare afternoon to come up with new companies to approach.

On the topic of new customers I'm looking to get a new printed book portfolio sorted out but in the meantime I'm looking to buy a new A3 printer so I can update my current portfolio. My Canon i9100 seems to be working OK but it's a few years old and the new Epson A3 printers are supposed to be very sharp and able to produce exhibition quality prints. I just need to get Melanie to sign off the £650 I need to buy one!.

I've attached an HDR shot of the gym as mentioned earlier in the blog.

I've almost finished the post processing on the Little Venice Sports Centre project from last week - it's taken me a while because there's quite a few HDR (high dynamic range) pictures involved and those take a long time to process and tweak properly.

A couple of interesting enquiries came in today - one for a commercial property agency and one from a cake making company looking for shots of their cakes for their website. I don't specialise in food photography but I have done some before so was happy to quote for the job.

I've learned over the years to stick to what I'm good at and sometimes I will turn down a job if I think it's something I can't do really well.

I'm on the lookout for a ladies clothing boutique to work with at the moment as I've got a lot of ideas for fashion pictures but need someone to supply the clothing. Getting models and make up artists is pretty straightforward but I need someone with a flair for clothing to help me out with the wardrobe side of things. If anyone has any ideas please let me know.

I've attached a simple shot from the studio shoot on Monday - it's a montage of colour swatches for the chair that I photographed and was a grab shot right at the end of the session. Katie my client loved the shot and it's going to be used in their catalogues and in their furniture showrooms around the country.

One of my best clients is a manufacturer of high quality furniture and today Katie and Tom came along to my studio with one of their high tech office chairs. We photographed the chair from every angle with a view to putting together a video clip made up of stills (a bit like the old fashioned flick books) to show all the movements and functions available. These chairs can be altered a lot via several different movements and the video is a trial run which will be rolled out across the range and used worldwide if we get the nod from the HQ in Sweden. We did think about shooting full HD movie footage but this doesn't allow for any error and the chair would need to be operated very smoothly and in a slick way (difficult when you're being filmed) so we decided a series of stills would be the way to go. It was a challenge but I'm pleased with the stills we got so the video should come together well. I bounced a flash head off the back wall and used a large softbox to camera right as fill for the wide shots (as per the one attached to today's blog) and I used a ringflash with a second flash bounced off the rear wall for the close up detail shots to provide a flat shadow free illumination.

I did have two of my other clients coming in for a portrait session later today but one of the guys has come down with this nasty sickness bug so that's been postponed.

I'm finishing off the mountain of post processing work tomorrow then I'm scheduled to have a shoot in London on Wednesday at a community centre but we're still waiting for the final permission from the council to go ahead.

We had a new commission in today to photograph a store called Ozwald on Saville Row in London in mid May and I'm looking forward to that already.

I also offered to photograph a charity fashion show in Newport Pagnell on May 6th in aid of a charity shop in Winslow and I'm also giving away a free studio shoot with prints (ie no hidden costs unlike some so called freebies!) as a prize in the auction.

I've attached a shot of the office chair from the shoot today and will post a link the the video when it's done.

It's been a mega busy week and as a result I've missed a few blog entries - apologies to anyone out there who likes to keep up to date with the world of Redshift!!. Joking apart I like to keep the blog well up to date so I don't like missing too many entries.

I had a full day in the studio on Tuesday with two very contrasting jobs. Firstly an artist came in with a series of paintings she's done of teddy bears which I photographed for her for use on her website and in a brochure. We photographed them in their frames and the only problem I had to overcome was reflections in the glass. I bounced a single flash head off the rear wall of the studio and had a large black screen resting on my back which effectively reflected back in the glass removing any bright unwanted reflections. The results were very good and Louise the artist went home happy!.

Then in the afternoon I photographed some very high tech lighting bollards (the type of thing you see around footpaths and car parks). I had to photograph these with the light on and off which complicated things a bit. I lit these very differently to the paintings and used a large softbox mounted very close to the bollard with a black velvet backdrop and a large silver panel on the opposite side to the softbox. I then used a second reflector above the bollard to light the detail on the top. The pictures looked good and gave the impression the client wanted when we met to discuss the brief.

On Wednesday I was back in London again - this time photographing the new Little Venice Sports Centre. This is a beautiful modern building designed with very environmentally friendly materials and my brief was to photograph the interior through-out the building. I really love this kind of building with lots of unfinished concrete surfaces, natural pine cladding and loads of daylight. I enjoyed the shoot very much and I did try to upload a blog entry from site but my laptop wasn't having any of it.

Thursday began with an early morning shoot in Wrotham near Maidstone (7.30am early!) and I was back working for one of my regular clients who manufacture beautiful office furniture. We photographed and video'd the installation of their furniture in a small office which will be used as an online case study. We're going back again in a few weeks to photograph the finished office interior with people working in the space and to complete a couple of video interviews. That took us all morning then we drove into London to photograph a showroom very close to Oxford Street. The drive from Maidstone to Oxford Street took nearly two hours and it's only 20 miles...

I've been working from 7.00am this morning as I'm well behind with my post processing work and I needed to start early as I've got a St George's Day lunch in Milton Keynes which is part of a local business networking event.

I've posted a picture from a product shoot in the studio last week.

I caught the train down to London today for a shoot at Vauxhall Primary School near the Oval cricket ground in London. It was a big Victorian school that has been recently refurbished with some very modern and clean suspended fluorescent lighting fittings manufactured by one of my clients. The kids were away today so I had a free reign to snap away and I spent around 4 hours capturing the best classrooms and corridor areas. It was a challenge as I had to move lots of books and posters etc around to make sure each shot looked tidy but I'm pleased with the pictures and I'll post one later in the week.

London looked great today in the sunshine and everyone seemed pretty happy - people even smiled at each other on the tube!.

I popped in to Calumet (a large camera dealer in Drummond Street next to Euston station) and I bought a new fluid head for my tripod which is designed to make panning very smooth when shooting video. I also bought a proper microphone for my 5D MK2 as I'm shooting a big office on Thursday and we'll be doing some movie clips and interviews as well as the stills. I made the mistake of using the in-camera microphone last time and the sound was pretty poor so this time around things will be much better!.

It's all expense but video is really becoming important to my clients so I need to have the best kit I can get.

Tomorrow I'm shooting some products in the studio which will be fun - I'm really into product photography and I'm using a black velvet backdrop tomorrow and lighting the products like I would a glamour model to give a really moody feel to the pictures. I've already shot some for the same client in this way and I'll post some of the pictures up once the products are released and on sale - at the moment they are still under wraps.

I've attached one of my favourite pictures from last week's shoot at Middleton Circle Library.

Yesterday I had a shoot at a government building in Westminster for a commercial lighting company who had supplied new ultra efficient recessed office lights as part of an initiative to save energy. We did before and after shots on different floors of the building and the new lighting was not only more efficient but also far more attractive to look at. The only problem was that the new lights had a high surface brightness as they were basically opaque plastic diffusers and therefore the only way to show any detail in the fittings themselves was to shoot a range of exposures for each final picture and blend the lights back in to the shot in Photoshop. This is a long winded and tricky method but it works very well for pictures with a high contrast range.

Today I photographed a huge new comprehensive school in Cheshunt (just off J25 of the M25) and it took me nearly 5 hours to photograph. The job went well though and it was good to finish off the week with a busy couple of days.

Next week is very busy too with three shoots in London and a day in the studio. I've now gone from being pretty quiet (last week) to being mad busy again - if only I could spread jobs out a bit more!.

I shot a load of Chromogenic film (black and white film that is developed in the standard colour process) last week and picked up the results today from Costco. They are only family snaps but the results were good and it's reminded me to shoot more film. I used my old Canon FD kit and the quality is really nice plus they put the pictures onto CD as well as developing and printing them so that means I don't have to spend ages fiddling around in Photoshop to get the best out of the pictures. If I'm taking pictures to print for albums etc I still prefer film as digital capture always needs to be tweaked in Photoshop to get the best results for printing and for me that's time and hassle I don't need.

I've attached another picture of Emma from last Saturday's session in the studio.

It's 10.40pm and nearly finished for the day. I managed to complete all the remaining post processing on the library job and sent the pictures over to the architect via Yousendit.com a really useful FTP site. Then I arranged Thursday's shoot in London and I'm really pleased that my mate and assistant Kirsty is coming along to help. She's very organised and gets me to places in one piece and she's a very good photographer in her own right too so she's a handy kind of person all round!!.

Tonight I've edited down the studio shoot from Saturday from 500+ pictures to around 130 or so. That's still way too many but not bad for a first and second edit. I'll look again in the morning with fresh eyes and will narrow it down to 50 or so to send to Emma to choose from.

Tomorrow I'm back in the studio again working on some more product photography and then I need to practice lighting an office chair for a demo video clip I'm starting work on next week. I want to make sure I know how to light a sample chair properly before my client comes in next week with the real thing.

I've uploaded a picture today that I've entered in to this year's Masters Cup. The nominees and winners are being announced live online this Sunday and after being nominated last year I'm really hoping for the same again or maybe even a win but the competition is fierce and a lot of very good photographers from around the world enter. I don't go in for competitions much because I don't get time to enter them but I do like the format for the Masters Cup. Check out the website at http://www.thecolorawards.com/

I spent today working through the pictures from the shoot at Middleton Circle Library in Sutton which I took for the architect. I've attached one of the finished pictures to the blog today and it looks like a very straight forward shot. In fact it took a lot of work to achieve this final picture as the contrast between the daylight outside and the interior is very high and impossible to capture in one shot - even on large format print film. The picture shown is the result of blending three different pictures exposed about 1 1/2 stops apart together to achieve a high dynamic range picture. The trick is to use this technology without overdoing it and making the final picture look like a painting or photoshop rendering.

The picture attached was taken at the 17mm end of my 17-40mm L series zoom and the distortion has been removed by DXO (my RAW software conversion package).

I had a new job in today which I'm doing on Thursday at a government building in London. This is a building that has been fitted out with very efficient new lighting and I'm taking before and after pictures of the offices to show the benefit of the new lighting. It also gives me the chance to pop in to the Camera Cafe in Museum Street whilst I'm in town.

I also took a booking for the studio today to photograph some paintings of teddy bears for an artist which will be fun.

The studio shoot today went really well and I had loads of fun. Emma and Mark came along to the studio for a shoot which Mark had bought Emma for Christmas. Emma did really well and looked very natural in front of the camera - especially considering it was her first time in a studio.

For most of the shoot I used a single 500W/s flash head bounced off the back wall of the studio to simulate the softness of daylight. Then we moved on to some classic hollywood lighting with a single head on a boom directly above Emma with a large softbox to diffuse the light. Then we finished off with a few shots in front of the metal roller shutter door to give a more industrial edgy feel to the pictures which I shot with the beauty dish attached to the flash head.

Now for today's non photography based rant...

Anyone who reads my blog will know that I can't bloody stand the awful celebrity culture we have been saddled with in this country. When everyone is struggling so much just to keep going I just don't understand why people are so mesmerised by these overpaid talentless twats on the TV. Take the latest pile of shite to hit the TV screens - The Door. Basically it's "I'm a celebrity got me out of here" (which is shit anyway) but in a TV studio in London instead of in the so called jungle. I haven't actually watched it but the trailer was bad enough to put me off anyway.

Now for today's point...I just saw Richard Hammond in a trailer for a new TV program - can someone please tell him he's too old to wear a stupid hippy necklace and that he looks like a prick!.

Thank you - that's a lot better.

Here's a picture from today's shoot which had been converted to faded colour in Lightroom.

I edited down yesterday's shoot at Middleton Circle Library this morning which took the best part of an hour. I use DXO to process the RAW files on every architectural shoot because DXO removes all lens distortion automatically and also has a really useful and good highlight recovery feature. It falls down though when it comes to the initial edit (where I chop out all the unwanted pictures). Once you open up DXO the thumbnail preview is too small to properly assess the picture so I use Lightroom to run through each RAW picture full screen and then delete the unwanted ones as I go (after backing everything up twice before hand).

The job went pretty well although it's going to be a time consuming one post processing wise as I need to use some layer blending via a program called Photomatix because of the huge contrast in most of the shots. This is effectively high dynamic range imaging and that's the only practical way to cope with a dark interior lit by large windows with bright sunshine outside. In the days of film I would have used colour print film to get as much latitude as possible but with digital imaging I can get a more accurate result.

We had some good enquiries in today too which was great news. One of our regular clients has a school for me to photograph next week and another regular has asked us to photograph an office interior at the end of April then go back and shoot some video clips and interviews in May. Another good client has also asked me to come up with a location for some product photography which will be great fun to do.

Tomorrow I'm doing a portrait shoot in the studio for a lady whose boyfriend bought the session for her for Christmas and I'm looking forward to it as I haven't done many portraits in the past few weeks because of all the location work we've had.

Usually I upload a picture to the blog from a recent commission but today I'm uploading a few pictures that I took last Sunday at Quainton Railway Centre where we had a family day out. I took the shots on my Panasonic G1 and as I mentioned before I really like this little camera.

I love the pictures of the old flaky paint on the side of one of the old railway carriages - my wife always says I'm odd for taking these kind of pictures but I just love texture and colour.

The weather played a blinder today for my shoot in Sutton at the new Middleton Circle Library.

The external shots look good although the direct sunshine made the interior a bit tricky as the library has lots a glass facade. I guess the weather is never 100% right when you're a photographer - in fact I feel a bit like a gardener (always moaning about the weather).

I'm back in the office and downloading today's pictures and I'm hoping to get the post shoot processing done tomorrow as the architect needs the pictures back for a competition entry next week. I picked up a new commission from the same architects practice today for another building in Sutton and that's always great when clients come back again and again.

We had an email from Oxfam HQ regarding the pictures I did at the Oxfam store in Bath last month which I took on behalf of the lighting company that supplied the spotlights to the shop. The guys at Oxfam liked the pictures and have asked us to quote for photographing two more of their new stores so we gave them a special price and hopefully that will come off. We gave them a very special rate and hopefully that will come off as it will be good fun to do. We do some charity work every year and also donate to several charities through the company which is only right especially in these troubles times.

We had another studio booking in today for a couple of portraits so this month is a good one for studio based work. We really haven't promoted it enough locally but I'm getting ready to send out some of our flickbooks to local manufacturers to try to get some more product photography.

It's difficult to balance the time at the moment between actual work and looking for new clients but marketing is vital and I need to pay more attention to it. It's always best to have too much work after all!.

I've attached a picture from the shoot at South Gloucester Council last week.

After a great family weekend I'm back in the swing of things this morning. I'm just running through the RAW files from the product shoot I did in the studio last Thursday then once I've edited them down and processed them I'll move on to the pictures from the South Gloucester Council shoot. That's going to fill most of today but at least I'll be up to date and can then spend tomorrow calling a few clients up about some work we've been promised for April then head over to the studio for some prep work on some upcoming product photography.

I'm photographing a new library in Sutton on Thursday for an architect but that's weather permitting as we really need a sunny clear day to show the building to it's best effect. It is possible to paste in a blue sky in Photoshop but I avoid this at all costs as it never looks totally convincing and it takes ages to do.

I had a chance over the weekend to shoot some black and white film through my Canon T90 and F1 which was great. I normally use Kodak BW400CN which is a black and white film that is processed in normal colour lab so you can get the pictures developed and printed in an hour at Tesco or Asda etc. Traditional black and white film needs to be sent away these days as there aren't any high street chains that can handle it. I used to develop black and white film at home but to be honest it's easier to post it off.

I also took some pictures with my Panasonic Lumix G1 and I'm really impressed with this little camera. The more I use it the more I appreciate the speed and ease of use especially for taking snaps of the family. Anyone looking for a good quality point and shoot with the option of changing the lens like an SLR camera should give this camera a look.

I've attached a picture of one of the lamps that I took in the studio.