Last week was very busy but mainly with client meetings. I did one photo shoot for Willmott Dixon at a newly refurbished Travelodge in St Swithens Lane right in the City of London and also I spent a day in the studio shooting some products for Llumarlite.

Llumarlite LED based AR111





The meetings were all regarding some interesting new projects for both Redshift and my other company Inverse Square Media and this week is the week when everything is going to happen!. I must admit I'm a bit anxious about getting everything finished but a bit of pressure is good I think!.

I had a shoot yesterday at the new cafe in the Cambridge Botanical Gardens which was great fun and the cafe is a beautiful piece of modern architecture. I was commissioned by the company that had supplied the ceiling mounted heating panels and the brief was to capture both the general interior and the panels close up. I also took some shots from the outside to show the modern design.

Today I'm working in the office but tomorrow the mayhem begins!. I've got two jobs in London for different clients - one at a retail company HQ and the other at the new Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford.



Travelodge City of London



Then on Thursday I spending the day in the studio shooting some street lighting products both for still images and also on a rotating turntable to create 360 degree rotating movie clips. Then I'm off to London for another two projects in the evening - one at Selfridges Oxford Street and another at an event. My colleague Chris is taking care of most of the event photography to enable me to focus on the Selfridges shoot.

On Friday I'm spending a day in Oxford photographing three university buildings by day and night for Hoare Lea Lighting and on Saturday I'm shooting the video at the new crematorium in Milton Keynes.

I'm hoping I can get through all that and have a nice peaceful Sunday to recover!.



I've spent the past couple of days working on some interesting stuff for my other company Inverse Square Media. We've been asked to design a brochure and video presentation for Llumarlite who specialise in the manufacture and installation of lighting products in industrial and commercial buildings. It's great to get involved in something different and I'll post the video clip here and on the Inverse Square Media blog (www.inverse-square-media.blogspot.com) once it's finished.



We've recently employed Ani Lansdown to be our office manager here at Redshift Photography and I have to say it's worked out really well!. Ani is really cheerful and full of energy and she's already an integral part of the team. Having someone come in with fresh ideas was just what we needed and Ani has already come up with some new ways of doing things.



Ani



Our new website is under development and I took a picture of Melanie a while back ready for the new site and posted her picture here in the blog. Yesterday I put a small studio lighting setup together in our office and took Ani's picture ready for the new site and I've posted it here.

I'm about to update our Flickr site with some new photographs which I've been meaning to do for ages so please click on the link to the right and take a look. Flickr is a great way to display photographs and I prefer it to our website as it's so easy to upload and delete pictures etc. Also by tagging the pictures Google Images can pick them up and we've had people contacting us over the past few months asking about purchasing pictures that they've found in this way so it obviously works.

Being a photographer I guess it's natural that I love cameras and I've just fallen in love with a big heavy old Pentax 67 camera that my camera repair tech has for sale in his workshop. Melanie isn't happy but I guess there's worse things in life than buying cameras so I'm off to pick it up tomorrow and I can't wait to shoot some medium format slide film through it. Once I've got to grips with it I'll post a couple of pictures up in the blog.

My PC has just flipped out again and spent the last 30 minutes trying to repair itself which is a pain. Last time this happened it took me all afternoon to get it working again. It might be wishful thinking but I'm sure if I could afford to upgrade to Mac's they'd be more reliable. Typically these things always seem to happen at the worst possible time and right now a new PC or Mac for that matter is out of the question as we've just had a £4.5K VAT bill and the Corporation Tax which is due at Christmas has just been calculated and we've got to find the money to pay that too!. On the plus side I've never been as busy as I have in the past 6 months and the diary is looking pretty full from now until mid October so I can't complain to be honest.

BUPA Chef

Here's a picture from the BUPA's Best shoot which I did last month. It's one of my favourite pictures from the day and I really hope the guys at BUPA put this one in the campaign. The shoot was great fun and the models were all real BUPA employees who had won an internal competition to appear in the ad's. I had to work fast on the day and be very flexible so I decided to shoot with 2-3 Canon Speedlite battery powered flashguns rather than my Bowens studio heads. I used a set of Calumet wireless pocket wizards to fire the flashguns which worked perfectly all day and they enabled me to set the flash power manually and use my hand held meter to get the right amount of light for each picture. I used a brolly, softbox and in some cases an opal flash diffuser with the lights bounced off the ceiling or walls for a soft and even light. To make sure the white balance was correct I used my Expodisc to get a neutral grey target and set the camera to custom white balance.

I've had a few fun photoshoots since I last blogged and another one was the Philips Employee Day last week at their HQ in Guildford. I photographed the events during the day and finished off with a portrait shoot where the guys from Philips could have their picture taken with Roger Black the famous 400m athlete. Once again the pocket wizards were fantastic and I used a simple stand mounted flashgun bounced off the ceiling to capture Roger and the Philips Employees in front of a Philips backdrop without any noticeable shadowing on the backdrop. We used a Canon Selphy 6x4 instant printer to run off prints as we went along and I was really impressed with the speed and quality of the prints. I had Canon 6x4 printer a few years ago and the print quality has really improved since then so my initial scepticism was proved to be wrong.

Onitsuka Tiger

Another shoot that I really enjoyed was for Illuma Lighting who commissioned me to photograph the Onitsuka Tiger store in Westfield Shopping Centre in West London. The store was quite small but very colourful and the merchandise looked very well lit under the Illuma spotlights. The spotlights themselves were black against a dark ceiling so I had to overexpose slightly and pull the main picture back a little to ensure the spotlights were visible in the pictures.