Another early start today as I headed up to London for a couple of jobs with my super duper assistant Kirsty. The first job was a corporate headshot which the client wanted on a bright white backdrop. As we were travelling by train I tried to keep all the kit to a minimum but I still needed two camera bags, a tripod bag, a large softbox bag and a very heavy case containing two Bowens flash heads. For the first job I set up the large 6ft x 4ft softbox to act as an illuminated background and used the second flash head as the main light with a silver brolly. I haven't used a brolly for years but it fitted into the tripod bag along with the two lighting stands very well and in fact the lighting looked really crisp so I was very pleased with the setup. I metered the main light source to F8 and metered the large softbox (illuminated background) to F13 giving me a two stop difference between the subject and backdrop which made the rear softbox appear to be perfect white behind the guy I was photographing.

The second job was in the Zetter Hotel in Clerkenwell and the client wanted candid action shots of a meeting of architects and designers discussing lighting design in buildings. The pictures will appear in Lighting magazine alongside some transcripts of the discussion that took place.

The meeting was in the basement and the lighting was very dim and dark (rather unfortunate considering the topic of discussion!) in the room so we needed to use some fill flash (via a Speedlight mounted on the camera hotshoe) which we fitted with diffusers and bounced off the ceiling to minimise shadows. The ISO still needed to be set to 800 and the shutter dragged a bit at 1/30th sec to allow enough of the room behind the subjects to read through which avoids that horrible look you sometimes see in Hello magazine etc where the subject is lit with harsh flash and the background is pure black!.

The third job that was pencilled in for tonight has been postponed until next week which was probably a good thing considering how much gear we had to carry around in all that heat.

Tomorrow I'm going to make a start on the mountain of post shoot processing that I have to do and I'm really keen to get at least two jobs out before the close of play.

I've attached a picture of me from the shoot in East London yesterday in an inspection cage hanging below a crane 80m above a building site - I'm not great at heights but I actually enjoyed this strangely enough!.