Design Products - Kinnarps

Design Products - Kinnarps - Hi everyone - take a look at this link. Kinnarps are a great client of mine and they are such a friendly company to deal with. Great design and quality too with top green credentials!.

Just a very quick mini update to say please follow me on Google+ - here's the link :-

https://plus.google.com/i/-4RBs3uIiMs:s2oFkFlH43Q

Thanks!.

Dave

My feet are aching after a long week and I'm glad it's Friday although it's been an interesting week.



I had a shoot in London on Monday for BUPA at a care home in Battersea and that went very well. I always catch the train down to London and after the shoot I caught a bus back across town with Amy from BUPA and had a very late lunch (more tea really) at Euston.



Silky Chain - Olympus EPL1



Tuesday and Wednesday were spent in the office working on post shoot processing as well as designing the albums for the Philips Chairmans Awards lunch that I photographed at the Ritz a couple of weeks ago. It's the only event that I cover that requires albums (I don't do weddings etc) and it's really good to put the pictures in to the design software and create something that people are going to really enjoy looking at.

I use a really helpful and friendly company called MTA in Haddenham near Thame (http://www.mtauk.co.uk/index.html). They provide a free program called Mosaic that gives you various album templates and you simply drop in the pictures and move them around until your happy.



Cool graffiti on concrete blocks EPL1



Yesterday I was back in London doing a shoot at Smithfield Meat Market where I had to photograph a couple of refurbished office units for a large fitout contractor.I took my little Olympus EPL-1 fitted with a 17mm pancake lens along with me to London and kept it in my pocket. I snapped a few nice detail shots around the outside of Smithfield after my shoot and they're here in the blog. This little camera is perfect for candid street shots especially when fitted with the super slim pancake lens and I'd highly recommend one if you're in the market for a point and shoot camera.



Beautiful glass bricks Olympus EPL1



I was in Ashford today photographing a beautiful church for Havells Sylvania which looked superb. It's a long drive down to Kent so I decided to catch a train from Milton Keynes to London then caught a really cool super fast commuter train to Ashford from St Pancras. I made it home to Milton Keynes in around 2 1/4 hours which is pretty impressive. Next week I'm mainly shooting video rather than stills so I'm looking forward to that and the best thing about shooting video is that I don't have to edit it!.

To celebrate my busy week I've just popped in to the lovely deli across the road from our office in Winslow and bought a nice bottle of red wine which will all go tonight for sure.Cheers!.

PS Just remembered something - you'll know from my blog that my favourite camera shop in the world is Aperture Photographic in Museum Street London (there's a link on the right of my blog but the web address is http://www.apertureuk.com/). I popped in there yesterday for a coffee (it's a cafe as well - perfect!) and the guys told me that they are opening a new shop in January in London where they offer medium format processing a great prices. They are looking at around £15 to process a 120 roll film including a set of prints and a CD of the pictures - great news. I still love shooting medium format but getting prints etc has been tricky until now.









Huge panic just broke out in the office (luckily there's only me here today because some bad language followed) as I thought I'd lost some of the RAW files from my shoot in London for BUPA Care homes yesterday. Luckily it was just Lightroom playing a hilarious trick whereby it only loaded in 70% of the pictures for no apparent reason and they were there safe and sound on the desktop.


Radha



My workflow is pretty basic but effective and it works like this :-

Download all the RAW files and back up to DVD and external drive

Convert RAW files to Tiff in either Lightroom or DXO (now Lightroom 99% of the time)

Retouch the Tiffs in Photoshop CS5 (basically straighten up vertical lines etc and remove dusk marks)

Back into Lightroom for final colour tweaking then convert to Jpeg and lastly to 72 dpi for the final CD to the client.

We always issue full size Jpegs and 72 dpi versions to make it easier for people to browse the CD when it arrives.



Callum



I also do a lot of HDR work and I use Photomatix to get a basic HDR image from between 3 and 8 differently exposed pictures and this is then worked on in Photoshop and Lightroom as pictures straight out of HDR software look very odd. I've seen pictures printed in magazines that are straight out of these HDR programs and I always think it's really lazy and bad technique for photographers to do this.

A couple of weeks ago I did a portrait shoot at Philips Electronics where I set up a small portrait kit comprising one Bowens flash head and a brolly with a white backdrop that I left unlit which means it fades to grey. I used my 24-105mm F4 L lens at the 105mm end for the portraits and shot the lens wide open at f4 to give a shallow depth of field and a softer look to the pictures. I've done a few shoots at the Philips Guildford HQ before and it's always great fun to work with the guys there and I've added a couple of the pictures in the blog. Even though digital cameras give us a preview on the LCD screen on the back I always use my Minolta light meter when I'm shooting portraits to make sure I get an accurate exposure first time around and to avoid having to post process the pictures too much afterwards.

In September I spent a day at the new crematorium in Milton Keynes shooting some stills and video for Adrian Morrow of AJM Architects who designed the building for Milton Keynes Council. The new crematorium is a beautiful piece of modern architecture and utilises some cutting edge technology such as heat recuperation and natural ventilation among many and I love the natural concrete finishes and flowing shapes of the structure. I posted some of the still images a few weeks ago in the blog and here is the finished video.




All the footage was taken on my EOS 5D MK2 with a 24-105mm F4L lens, 24mm T/S (Tilt and Shift) lens and 17-40mm F4L lens. My partner at Inverse Square Media (our video production company) edited the video footage with a program called Avid and the client was very pleased with the results!.

I'm working at the Lux Live event tomorrow and Thursday at Earls Court as the official photographer which should be fun as the show is going to be really busy and many of my clients will be there. I'm also shooting some video clips for the Lux website so if you're attending the show and want to be in the video give me a shout!. I'm hoping the show will really catch on as this is the first one and the signs are good as there's lots of talk on Twitter etc about it.

Speaking of Twitter you can find me there as redshiftphoto so give me a follow!.

All Saints Westfield Stratford

This week feels like it's been a bit more gentle although I've still been pretty busy. I did a shoot in Ipswich on Monday at the new Klick Fitness gym, a portrait shoot at Philips Electronics HQ in Guildford on Tuesday morning followed by a video interview with a landscape gardener called Tom Harfleet in the afternoon for a video we're producing for Philips Lighting. Then I headed off to Norwich on Wednesday for two retail photo shoots - one at a Jeweller's shop and another at a ski and surf shop (not what I'd expect to find in Norwich!).

Yesterday was spent in meetings with Pete my video partner at Inverse Square Media and with Jan Baldwin from VPL PR - a top lighting industry PR company (http://www.vastpublicity.com/) followed by an afternoon of post shoot processing mixed in with bouts of PC bashing as the computer is on the blink again!.

Today I'm working a half day as we're moving into our new house this afternoon so it's going to be a busy weekend!.



Gt Pulteney Street Reception



My poor car is suffering with all the travelling and it's currently in the garage being looked at because it keeps spluttering along as every few miles some orange warning light comes on - I hope it's not going to be a big bill!. We've just had to buy one new PC and I'll need one soon too (mine's heading for the window!) so I don't need a big garage bill on top.

I'm going to be the official photographer at the upcoming Lux Awards (http://www.luxawards.co.uk/) covering both days of the show and the evening event. If you're going you'll see me wondering around with my trusty EOS 5D MK2 photographing stands so give us a shout if you want a picture taking of you.



Following on from my last blog entry last month I nearly made it through a mad period of work unscathed but I ended up getting a bad chest infection which lasted three weeks and is still hanging around now. I've been so busy though that I could only take one night off and missed a job in Covent Garden but then I had to keep on going as I didn't want to let any of our clients down.


Finsbury Park Station



I'm feeling a lot better now but it's been a tough month and I've had both photography and video to shoot as well as writing a brochure for Llumarlite via my other company Inverse Square Media were we offer video and media services as well as blogging and brochure design etc.

I've had some nice work in though including a shoot at River Island HQ, one at All Saints Westfield in Stratford and another really nice shoot at Liberty in London. The video work has been fun too and I had a two day shoot down in Wales were I video'd a furniture installation for Kinnarps and also video'd some interviews with the client. Add to that two office interior shoots, a night shoot in Oxford at Queens College, a really cool shoot at the Tate Gallery and a day and night shoot at Finsbury Park Station and you can see I've been mega busy.



Tate Modern



Whilst I've been in London I've had a chance to pick up a new lens for my little Olympus ELP-1 which I use as my point and shoot camera. I bought the Olympus 20mm pancake lens which means the camera can fit into my pocket and so far it looks like a cracking lens. I'll be taking some candid shots next time I'm in London with it and I'll post some pictures in the blog once I've got some.



One of the big problems with shooting video on the EOS5D MK2 is the crap sound quality that the camera produces. I've tried putting a good microphone on it but it's still very noisy so I've invested in a Zoom H2 stand alone stereo mike and I have to say the sound quality is superb and it's really easy to use. The sound does have to be lip-synched back in to the video but it's worth the effort and I can recommend these little recorders very highly.

 

Liberty



I'm here working late tonight (Sunday) as I need to get up to date as next week I've got four days booked out with a shoot in Ipswich tomorrow and a portrait shoot in Guildford on Tuesday for Philips Electronics. Then I've got two shops to photograph in Norwich on Wednesday and a photoshoot in London for BUPA on Thursday. That's a lot of post shoot processing to take care of so I don't want to fall behind now!.



Finally I've just bought the latest Photoshop CS5 Extended and it's brilliant!. My previous version was CS3 and things have come on a lot since then. I'm not a fan of spending hundreds of pounds on software and in having the latest version of everything but I'm glad I splashed out on this and I can highly recommend it if you do a lot of retouching.