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.

I tried to upload a picture from my Flickr account directly to the blog earlier today and it worked perfectly but I couldn't add any text!.The picture shows a superb new bollard that I photographed for Holophane last year and I can now show the pictures as the product has been released to the market.
I've linked all my online bits and pieces together so my blog,Linked In, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr are all in some way linked together.Now I can add pictures directly to the blog from Flickr I can update the blog a bit more regularly. This is great as I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to really do justice to the blog which is a shame as I really love updating it and keeping an online diary to look back on.
I've done some interesting commissions since the last entry including a day shooting the BUPA's Best campaign (more info in the next entry), the new crematorium in Milton Keynes for AJM Architects, a week in Scotland for Zumtobel lighting, the new LED test lab at Holophane in Milton Keynes and the new Severn Trent Water HQ in Coventry.I've also photographed another couple of BUPA care homes so I've been really busy and covering some miles in my trusty Ford Modeo (or my Capri Gear as I like to call it!).
The new office in Winslow is working out really well and most evenings after a shoot I head back there and do the post shoot processing meaning that I keep up to date with that part of the job which really relieves the pressure. Having the business outside of our home is the best thing we've done in the 9 years that we've been operating and I've found that I can really focus on work whilst I'm there and switch off more easily when I'm at home.


Taken with an Olympus ELP-1 and old Nikon 28mm MF lens



I like to review kit on the blog whenever I can and I recently decided to buy a new small SLR camera for my non work photography. I've always been a strong advocate of second hand kit but this time I picked up a bargain in PC World and bought new. The camera I bought is an Olympus EPL-1 which has now been replaced by the EPL-2 and EPL-3. They were over £600 a couple of years ago but PC World were selling off the old stock for £279 including a kit lens!. This deal is still available online and I can recommend this great little camera 100%. I've bought an adaptor to allow me to use my old Canon FD lenses and another to allow me to fit Nikon lenses to it.Today I took some pictures with an old manual focus Nikon 28mm lens mounted to the camera and the results were really good!.I've posted a picture in the blog that I took at the Bucks Railway Centre at Quainton today with the Olympus and Nikon 28mm lens.Because the Olympus has a small micro 4/3rds sensor the 28mm lens is effectively cropped in half and becomes a 56mm lens which is a great focal length for everyday photography.

We've just had a scarily large VAT bill and we should know the final Corporation Tax bill soon which we'll need to pay in December so I really hope the current busy workload carries on for a while yet although the economists seem intent on talking us into another recession!. Lets try and keep positive and hopefully we'll all be OK!.

Denver Elite

Denver Elite , a photo by David at Redshift Photography on Flickr.

Here's another quick video update. This time it's another Kinnarps job - this one filmed at two schools in Manchester.As always the video is filmed on my Canon EOS 5D MK2.

I've just had my annual week off and we headed off for a few days camping in the Cotswolds where we camped at The Cotswold Farm Park owned by the bloke off Countryfile. We did the same last year and although it's not exactly a glamorous break we did have a good time. I took my old Canon FD cameras along and shots a few rolls of colour film which I picked up from Morrisons in Bletchley for £1.99 per roll as it was a year out of date!!.

Club Helsinki

Now it's back to work and I did a BUPA shoot on Monday in Enfield, a shoot for Collingwood Lighting at Club Helsinki in Leicester where there was some cool blue LED products installed (see picture) and a shoot at the new Museum of Liverpool yesterday. This is a really stunning new building and I've attached a picture of the exterior in the blog. The spotlights were supplied by a very innovative British lighting company called Precision Lighting. Their products are made to a very high quality and the design of the fittings is superb.I met Andy Molyneux (Precision Lighting Design Manager) up on site and we spent a very enjoyable day photographing the building. The museum has just opened and in the first couple of weeks they've had 120,000 visitors!. The exhibits are all things made in Liverpool (including a Ford Anglia!) or things to do with Liverpool. The sheer number of visitors made it very hard to photograph the interior and I was only allowed a short time to use a tripod, the rest of the shoot was taken hand held. Luckily the Canon EOS 5D MK2 is superb at high ISO settings so grain wasn't an issue in the final shots. I used Lightroom and Neat Image to reduce any grain that was visible but it wasn't a problem. After the shoot we took a walk around the Tate Liverpool and the waterfront. The waterfront area and docks are just superb and I'd recommend a visit if you ever get the chance.

I was supposed to be on a shoot for BUPA today up in Derby but the rain has beaten us so we've had to re arrange but that has given me a chance to catch up with myself and tomorrow I'm shooting some portraits at DW Windsor lighting over in Ware.

Museum of Liverpool

Inverse Square Media has really taken off and here's a link to a lamp demo which Pete has created from a series of 16 product shots http://www.inversesquaremedia.com/lampdemo/ . To make it spin around just hold down the left mouse button and move the mouse left or right. We're looking to enhance this idea further with a moving background image too and maybe the option  of changing the product colour etc at the click of a button as it spins around.We think these VR product video clips are a great way to show off products on a website and because they count as video content they're great for optimising a website too.