A flock of new advertising digital photography business has come our way over the last few months. So we’ve been busy doing lots of interesting commercial photography shoots, each commission being very different from the next, for 3 clients: Fuji, Aviva (formerly Norwich Union) and Greene King.

First up: Fuji. The shoot was part of an animated digital campaign to promote the new Fuji Finepix Z30 camera, and was aimed at a young female market. We were provided with a layout to work to, requiring four female portraits. Once we’d provided the photos, the project was then handed over to the illustrator, who worked over the top of the images. The illustrations were then sent to design agency Cluster, where they pulled the animation together using all components. I think you’ll agree that the cocktail of different mediums created a rather unique campaign, which you can view via the link below.

Second was the Aviva commercial photography shoot, which involved a lot of production shooting time and post-production time; great for us as it’s nice to work on every aspect of the shoot, enabling us to consider everything before we started shooting. Our brief was to produce a single image for each of Aviva’s services, of which there are 30 in total. The images will run at the top of each page when the new Aviva site launches this June (so I’m afraid I won’t be able to upload any of the images until then). We covered eight locations, hired five vehicles and 19 models and at times four assistants were required all at once; so a rather involved but immensely enjoyable assignment.

The brief from pub retailer and brewer, Greene King, was to produce an old fashioned image of a man at the beach dressed in a Victorian style swimsuit, holding a beach ball and pint of Speckled Hen ale. The challenge here was to find a suitable model with a moustache (not your typical model, thankfully I had a mate who obliged!), a beach ball (which I sourced online) and the old fashioned swimsuit was custom made by a dressmaker (the stripes were added in post production). We used a great make-up artist, Sam Chapman, and 032 Design created the advert. Look out for the advert in a pub near you soon!

Finally, this month sees the launch of The Commercial Photographers Network /, of which I am one of the board members. Glaswegian photographer Richard Campbell set up the network when he discovered that his big name clients such as Volvo, while pleased with the work he did in Scotland had insufficient budget to send him elsewhere in the UK. When the client inevitably used a local photographer to do the work, this sometimes led to inconsistencies throughout their marketing material. So Richard’s aim was to set up a network of photographers that covered the whole of the UK, all of a similar standard to himself. He chose fifteen photographers in total, one from each major city. The website allows companies such as Volvo with photography requirements within the UK to quickly access a quality photographer through the site. I agree that there are other sites such as that represent thousands of UK photographers, however I feel that The Commercial Photographers Network offers a consistently high standard of commercial photography from a select and limited number of photographers, hopefully making life a whole lot easier for our clients. Do have a look at the site and let us know what you think.