I'm sitting here in my office with a big mug of tea reflecting on the past week and I'm not sure how I managed to fit everything in as it was so busy.
On Monday I had a portrait shoot at the HQ of Philips in Guildford and the day was so busy that the time flew by. I took around 20 head shots using one Bowens flash head and a white backdrop and also took some candid portraits around the building as well as some shots of the very impressive Lighting Academy room.
The portrait shoot had been in the diary for a few weeks so when I got an emergency call from another of our top clients on the previous Friday asking me to photograph the newly refurbished London Palladium Theatre on Monday I had to call in my colleague Roger Parker to help out. He did the Palladium shoot for me and the pictures came out really well. I asked Roger to shoot all the pictures in RAW so that I could do the post shoot processing myself as I run DXO on my system and that program removes all the barrel distortion from wide angle lenses automatically. Roger shoots with Nikon cameras (I only use Canon) and the files were very impressive so I can now recommend the Nikon D3X fully having looked at the quality of the pictures one produces.
On Tuesday I had a shoot at a warehouse in Letchworth for Llumarlite who specialise in removing old inefficient lighting and replacing it with the latest high tech fluorescent lighting fittings running off individual movement sensors. I went to site with Tim Barber the Llumarlite Director (and an old mate of mine) and we photographed all the old lighting and shot the factory in general to show the poor illumination levels there at present. We'll be going back after the refurb to show how much brighter the space will be with the new lighting. We needed to get a very wide angle shot of the interior from a high viewpoint so I took three pictures with my 24mm tilt and shift lens (landscape shots) with increasing amounts of vertical shift and stitched them together in Photoshop one above the other to create a square format super wide photograph and I've attached the resulting picture in today's blog.
I had a shoot at Fitness First in St Albans on Wednesday where I took general shots of the interior as well as some reportage shots of a survey being carried out by a lighting specialist from Philips. The pictures are going to appear in a new trade magazine being launched by Philips sometime in the next month or so.
I headed up to Nottingham on Thursday for a shoot at a BUPA care home where the staff had arranged a party to celebrate the completion of a big refurb. The party was themed as a post war street party and I really enjoyed myself. The room was decorated with Union Flags and a really superb singer went through a routine of 1940's music. I ended up staying on longer than I needed to as the music was really good!.
Lastly I had another shoot for Philips at CP Lighting in Surbiton (a wholesaler that supplies lots of Philips kit) and I took general shots of the building and some portraits of the MD. The pictures will be in the new trade paper along with the shots from St Albans.
Next week is fully booked too and we've got some dates in the diary for March already so a busy few weeks to come!.
Here's the picture from Letchworth that was made from three landscape shots taken with different amounts of vertical shift on the lens.

Just a quick update re my little test of the £39 video camera I mentioned in the blog a couple of weeks ago. I bought this neat little Kodak mini video camera from Jessops and promised to put up a sample of the video from it but didn't get around to it. Well I tried it out last week on the London Underground and I've uploaded the output into this entry. Bearing in mind the fact that it only cost £39 and has a very small fixed focus lens with no white balance settings etc I think it's done a pretty good job. The output is only VGA quality but it's fine for uploading to YouTube etc.
Here's a link to the camera on the Jessops site - typically enough they've just put the price up to £45 but it's still a good fun product at a good price - http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/78704/show.html

I know the clips I've uploaded are pretty basic but I guess that's the point with these mini cameras - it's good fun and easy to use!.

Had a pretty quiet week with just two jobs so not great for the cash flow situation!. On the plus side I've had time to get right up to date and next week is mega busy anyway so it will balance out in the end.

I had a meeting with my colleague Pete at Goldmoor Television (the guy that edits my video work) http://www.goldmoor.co.uk/mainmenu.html and we're setting up a new company together focusing on creating video content for lighting manufacturers and lighting designers. The trend for colour change lighting really lends itself to video and although I've done a few videos so far I think a new website and brand aimed squarely at that market is the way to go. Now it's a case of thinking of a new name for the company and creating a logo and website.

Learning to shoot video to proper broadcast standard is a skill that I'm learning and it's great to expand my skill set. Editing the footage is a whole new ballgame though and the software is so complex. That's why Pete is such a great asset and he really knows his stuff. It's not just the technical side of editing either, there's the creative element too and he's great at both those two parts.

The two jobs I had this week were both on the same day - one for BUPA in Peterborough then an event in London at the Hilton Doubletree Hotel near Oxford Circus. It was a mad day but I pulled it off and thankfully the week wasn't a financial disaster!. I drove over to Peterborough and did the shoot then zoomed back to Milton Keynes and caught the Virgin express train to Euston and got to the Hilton right on time. Those Virgin Pendelino trains are really good and you get from Milton Keynes to London Euston in around 40 minutes.

Next week I've got a portrait shoot at Philips Electronics in Guildford on Monday and my colleague Roger Parker is shooting a theatre for me on Monday too for another client so a good day for Redshift Photography!.

I've got a "before the refurb" shoot in Letchworth on Tuesday and a shoot in Kent on Wednesday where I'm photographing a new care home.

I'm working for BUPA again on Thursday in Nottingham covering an event and finally I'm down in Dorset on Friday photographing a trade stand for a company newspaper.



It will be a tiring week but just what I need to get things back on track after a fairly quiet start to February.

I've just added a Twitter feed to the blog which can be found right at the bottom of the page. I'm now an avid Tweeter and really enjoy following people and getting tweets from around the world. If you follow Twitter you can find me on there as redshiftphoto and I'd welcome any new followers. It's so cool to be able to take a photo on my phone and upload it to Twitter within a few seconds for everyone worldwide to see. I guess it's easy to see how these pro footballers and cricketers get into trouble so easily these days.

I've uploaded a couple of product shots to the blog today of some really beautiful spotlights made by Precision Lighting - a UK lighting manufacturer. Here's a link to their website - http://www.precisionlighting.co.uk/index.php. I took these ages ago but I found the archive disc of the RAW images last week and ran these two shots off to add to my Flickr page.

The pictures were taken using three 1000W Tungsten lights and the spotlights were placed inside a light tent to reduce the reflections in the aluminium finish.

I can't believe I've come down with Man Flu again!. That's twice in two months and joking apart I've felt pretty rough. Luckily it didn't come on until Saturday night as I had a busy end to the week last week.

On Thursday I photographed a forum for Lux magazine at a superb shopping centre next to St Paul's Cathedral called One New Change -http://www.onenewchange.com/ . The forum was a round the table discussion about retail lighting featuring some leading figures from the lighting design community. My brief was to capture the attendees in full flow using a very shallow depth of field to give a blurred background to the shots. I used my Canon EF 70-200 F2.8 L IS lens wide open at f2.8 for the entire shoot. I also shot some video during the forum so it was a busy couple of hours. That lens is really superb and even wide open the quality is very good indeed. I've posted one of the shots in today's blog to illustrate the shallow depth of field effect.
On Friday I post processed the Lux magazine still photo's and compressed the video down as the original HD files are huge. The quality of the 5D MK2 video is incredible but even short clips of say 10 seconds are around 50 megs or so hence the need to compress the video output to a more usable size.

I was in London at 8am on Saturday to photograph the set of a fashion show called Disruption which was held at the Barbican in London on Saturday night. I was commissioned by Overbury the main contractor who had built the stage and surrounding set overnight on Friday which was designed by TP Bennett architects. The set looked great as did the pieces of art (clouds on sticks) which were placed around the Barbican in the public spaces to promote the show. I tried to show the public interacting with the clouds and I enjoyed the challenge as it took me a while to work out how to approach the shoot.

Here's a couple of the shots from the Barbican that show the public area and the stage. Do they look like clouds?. I think the design of the clouds above the stage is very clever as they each contain an LED light source and integral battery. The health and safety restrictions meant that live electrics being fed the illuminated clouds would be out of the question so a battery was the answer.