The location for the photography was a back room within a small industrial unit and it had an upstairs mezzanine storage area which allowed for a good viewpoint for this one minute time lapse sequence.

With me always travelling to the job, an inevitable consequence is that I often find myself setting up in unusual places. It’s easy if I’m visiting a factory or warehouse, plenty of room to use there. Othertimes I’m often shown a meeting room that’s full of furniture and the only solution is to take everything out and leave a corridor full of chairs while I work. Sometimes the space I work in might not at first be obviously suitable to set up a mobile photographic studio and the video below is one of those instances.

The first option I was given was the reception area. A low ceiling, pedestrian traffic, a staircase and too much furniture made it not an ideal choice. A quick walk through the warehouse revealed a space inbetween the fork lift truck and the American sedan that would be ideal. As much ceiling height as I could ever want, the ability to shoot from as far back as I needed and I wasn’t going to be in the way of the day to day operation of the company.

The company supplies stainless steel catering sinks. Plenty of reflections to deal with and two people required to move them onto and off the set. The final photographs are cut-outs but all of the clean reflections were produced in camera. They are currently being used on the company website and in product specification leaflets.

There are 69 cities in the UK and this is a personal project to photograph the skyline of each one. The photos are taken at dusk and include as many of the unique landmarks of each city as possible.

Product shots of large and small items for catalogues, exhibitions and advertising and also multiple file composites and creative lighting.

Art, paintings, sculpture, museum exhibitions and exhibits. Photography for artists, museums, art galleries and publishers.

Commercial photography throughout the UK of building sites, shops, factories, offices and education for company literature, exhibitions and prospectuses

Commercial, industrial and residential buildings of all shapes and sizes, both exteriors and interiors, for corporate brochures, architects and property developers.

The pre-production planning was fairly minimal and comprised a vague idea of an area of the North Wales coastline that would be a suitable location. Then a tide calendar was consulted and weather forecasts were studied until we came to a suitable day that would be sunny with blue sky and a tide that would give us plenty of beach to play on.

A car was loaded up with a clothes line, a spare clothes line, a couple of boxes of props to hang on the line plus other bits and pieces we thought might be needed, things like guy ropes to anchor the upright posts and a sledge hammer to bed them well into the ground. Fortunately, the North Wales coast road has plenty of side roads and junctions which allowed us to easily and quickly look at several possible locations until we found one that offered easy access from car to beach and was suitably positioned to give a very big open sky and landscape as a background.

After unloading the car and carrying everything to the sand dunes it was then a fairly straightforward job of setting up the vertical metal posts and anchoring them to a fence at one end and tied to some lumps of driftwood at the other. What we hadn’t anticipated was that once the props were pegged onto the line, the weight made the line sag so low that it was touching the sand in the middle but we had brought with us a lighter set of clothes line poles as spares and one was used in the middle of the line to help hold everything up. What can’t be seen in the final photo is that the coastal sea breeze was too strong against the coats and jackets which were acting like sails and the middle pole soon started to bend under the weight. In the final image, the client is actually lying as low as possible in the dunes holding the pole steady at arms length while I was photographing enough frames to know that there would be a good overall compositional balance of the items blowing in the wind.

The one last thing that isn’t shown in the final image is that all the while we had the clothes line set up, we were getting some very strange looks from the people walking along the beach. They could be seen looking at each other and then looking towards us and we just knew exactly the sort of conversation they were having!

As a means of showing a whole range of features and technical details of a new piece of laboratory equipment, discussions were made about the possibility of showing an exploded view of the product. The idea was to show the quality and design that goes into the individual components that make up the product but at the same time we could easily control how much ‘secret’ detail was revealed by careful positioning and overlapping of other components.

Typically, this sort of image is usually produced as a CAD illustration but it was decided that photographing for real would be more plausible. Several ways of producing the final image were discussed and the final photograph is a composite of several separate images however all of the major components were photographed as one shot. There was lots of string, fishing wire, a glue gun and pieces of tape, the challenge being waiting for items to stop gently swaying in the air currents caused by us walking around the studio.

Once the basic structure of the final image was photographed, we then started thinking in 3D to work out how certain elements would look if they were ‘floated’ away from the carcass and what would be revealed beneath. To keep perspective, all of the component elements were photographed from the same camera position and again various methods of hanging and holding were employed. Keeping the same camera position also meant that the lighting was consistent throughout and as a decision was made early on to use a black background, the post production work would be kept relatively simple.

Although the final image has over 20 elements that seem to be free floating, the photoshop file only required about 10 layers as many of the main elements were all contained in the base exposure. The final image was first used at an exhibition trade show as part of a product launch and it is continuing to be used in promotional material.

As with last year, a large number of both professional and serious amateur photographers were positioned on the outside of the tight turn at The Cross for the circuit to head up Northgate street towards the start & finish line. This was also the position for one of the TV cameras who tend to always get the best spots but this year I wanted to do something different.
The photos from the outside of the turn allowed for using a long lens looking towards the Eastgate Clock and again, most photographers in that area had lenses of the 200mm plus length. I arrived about one hour before the race was due to start and positioned myself on the inside of the corner with a wide angle 14mm lens. No other photographers joined me on my side of the circuit which meant I was bound to be getting something different to everyone else.

I used the warm up laps for the riders to get my panning technique warmed up and set everything on the camera to manual – focus set manually to about 1 meter in front, exposure set to manual and a small amount of fill in flash set to manual. When the race was underway, the riders would pass me so quickly that I soon realised that to actually be looking through the viewfinder while pressing the shutter was pointless and I was able to pan with the action much more accurately by just aiming in the approximate direction of one of the riders and panning with them as quickly as possible.

For something different, I then held the camera on the floor looking under the crash barrier and again panned in the cyclist’s general direction as they passed. In order to convey the speed of the event and also how close the cyclists are to the crowds on the corner, I then held the camera over my head as high as possible and as still as possible and let the action blur slightly as it passed beneath me.

For all four of these photographs I wasn’t looking through the viewfinder while any of them were being taken, I’d just pre-visualised the type of photograph I was after and let the camera do it’s job. In all four photographs the sense of speed, movement and proximity is achieved by being at a vantage point that no other photographer seemed to want to be.