Another week has flown past and there's only 65 days to go until Christmas (I've just counted them on my wall planner but I've had a glass of red wine or two so I could be out by the odd day!). To really bring this home I popped in to Dobbies garden centre in Fenny Stratford last week and they had the full Christmas display up already including motorised Polar Bears - madness!.

In just doesn't feel like a year (almost) since I put up the new Sasco wall planner for 2010 - time has certainly flown past. I guess this is a good thing as it's been the hardest year I've had since I first started Redshift Photography back in 2003. Our turnover has been pretty good all things considered but it's been really hard work keeping the jobs coming in and I'm ready for a Christmas break!.

I'm hoping and praying that the severe cuts the ConDem alliance announced yesterday don't wipe out all the recovery we've felt these past few months. I'm still photographing new schools and MOD buildings but these are obviously a thing of the past now so I'm hoping we'll get some new office fit outs to photograph and new products to shoot in the studio but I guess I'm not going to hold my breath. I know we needed to tighten up on public spending but so many of my clients (big manufacturing companies) rely on supplying products to new build schools and hospitals etc that I'm really concerned that we're about to dip back into the R word - lets hope I'm wrong!.

On a positive note I'm still busy and in the past week since the last blog entry I've photographed another BUPA care home - this one a lovely home in East London with some really friendly staff, some high tech lighting control gear (product shots) and four projects up in Leeds. We've had a few jobs in for November already which is great news and I've got a few more jobs promised for November that will hopefully come off.

I've seen some of the pictures I took at the Havells Sylvania showroom launch event last week in the lighting press already - in particular in the edition of Light magazine that arrived today - so that was a boost as I really worked hard to get those out in double quick time. It's always great to see your work in print in a magazine.

I took some simple pack shot pictures for Venture Lamps last week as mentioned above and I've posted one of the shots in today's blog. It's a simple studio pack shot but I tried to choose a backdrop that showed the product clearly but that also had a similar colour to the control gear in the shot and that had a feeling of lighting and light about it. I lit the product with one flash head bounced off the ceiling for flat even lighting and I think it looks OK when put onto the cool blue backdrop.