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.