Updated Flickr

We’ve just updated our Flickr stream!

It now contains images from some of our more recent sports shoots – do take a look through them, and let us know your thoughts if you care to.

You’ll find the stream here.

See you on there!

Alicia Stone

Fashion designer Alicia Stone has produced a brand new range of jersey dresses and tops for spring/summer 2012. As it was our pleasure recently to photograph them, I had a short chat with her about the ideas behind her range and behind the shoot.

"The clothes are designed for simplicity, edginess and quality", she enthused, "with the idea of openness to all. I wanted to create casual dresses and tops which could be worn either in the daytime, as a relaxed look, or in the evening, with a few accessories for a slightly more sophisticated feel." Such flexibility, it seems, has become necessary in the fashion world in recent years. "Given the economic situation, there is a tendency to buy fewer clothes at the moment, but of a higher quality - so my designs took this into consideration."

Simple, casual, edgy and sophisticated: our shoot was designed around these very ideas. Alicia suggested a casual, laid-back style, with neutral, clean, fresh make-up and effortless simple hair styling. She also selected her own model. "I looked around for a long time for a blonde model with a sophisticated look, and eventually settled on Frances, who was recommended by a friend. I also selected the shoes for the shoot myself, aiming to complement the colours and style of the garments."

With all the elements of the shoot in place, Alicia was happy to hand over responsibility to Mike Harrington. "I know next to nothing about posing models", she confessed, "so I left that side of things to Mike. He organised Frances' stances and poses excellently, showing off the draping and the shape of each dress." The poses were sometimes intimate, sometimes assertive, sometimes sophisticated, sometimes casual, but always very confident - complementing the ideas behind the garments perfectly. Alicia was delighted with the final photographs. We're very proud too. Have a look for yourself.



By Ryan Watts

Fuji Z90

The benefits of integrated photographic projects, in which we take responsibility for all aspects of a production, are clear to us. Recently, an advertising campaign for Fuji went live on their website, for which we organised the model casting and the hair and make-up artist, as well as the photography and the processing. The campaign consists of a web animation combining illustration with photography, and was designed to advertise Fuji's Z90 compact camera.

As you might imagine, this necessitated excellent teamwork on everyone's part. Photographer Mike liaised consistently and closely with the rest of the team around a storyboard drawn up by the illustrator, before designing a set of images which would accurately reflect the original drawings. The poses for Marta, the model, were designed to provide a vibrant feel to the eventual animation, so she posed in positions that would allow the artist to portray her riding a bicycle, calling shots in a director's chair, riding a merry-go-round, sitting in a cinema and - for a slightly more relaxed look - reclined in a garden chair.

All of these shots required meticulous attention to detail and a high level of concentration throughout the day. To make Marta's poses appear as natural as possible, we made use of various props. In place of the loudspeaker, for example, which is drawn in the actual animation, she held up a mug, and she sat on a stool, holding onto a pole to mimic the merry-go-round. Each pose was scrupulously refined until the ideal shots were achieved.

The results speak for themselves. The team succeeded in creating an atmosphere in which Marta's enjoyment shone through, and the whole production was put together to a very high standard, from concept to launch. We're very proud of it.

Fuji Z90

By Ryan Watts

Parkour

In recent years, Mike Harrington has produced a strong body of photographs around the themes of various outdoor activities, from cycling to swimming. One such activity, which has been developing a growing reputation in the UK, is parkour. Parkour, in short, is traversing locations filled with obstacles - largely urban - using a combination of running, climbing and jumping.

The popularity of parkour in the UK began to rise after the broadcast of a film called Jump London (click here for some superb highlights from it), which showcased the skills of three French practitioners, Sebastien Foucan, Jerome Ben Aoues and Johann Vigroux as they ran around the city, astonishing passers-by and television viewers alike with their athleticism.

Mike's shoot, for Canon, involved photographing three practitioners in urban locations in Norwich, including various streets and stairwells, as well as an underground car park. In addition to the communication of skill, the shoot aimed to convey the point that any location can be used, and so Mike chose locations which included elements of the mundane - bricks, stairs, concrete and bollards - and graffiti. The shoot used only natural light, which allowed Mike to shoot at ten frames per second. In his own words, an artificial lighting set-up would have slowed the shoot down, as flash set-ups do not allow for such quick shooting.

The results of the shoot, as you can see, were excellent - capturing the urban spirit of parkour and freezing the runners in motion perfectly.

Integrated Production Shoots

Whenever we get the opportunity, we enjoy organising integrated productions with clients, in which we take responsibility for the entire production process from start to finish.

Working from a brief, by working in this way we are able to draw upon our wealth of experience in arranging the best shooting locations and organising the most effective lighting set-ups, as well as recommending and finding models as desired and drafting a fully integrated production schedule, the aim of which is to keep clients fully informed of what is happening at each stage of the process.

We find that integrated projects such as these afford us the advantage of greater awareness of technical issues throughout the process, allowing us to anticipate, avoid and resolve any difficulties that might arise with greater speed than might otherwise be possible. A further benefit of our years of experience in advertising photography is that we have developed a firm idea of how long each particular shot takes to set up, which allows us to time our projects accurately - minimising the cost to our clients in the process.

For achieving maximum efficiency, this way of working is superb. Our current fully integrated production shoot is with Fuji, and we have also recently worked on an advertising shoot in the same manner with Aviva, of which we are very proud. Have a look for yourself.

Getty Images: Skiing in Bansko

Successfully fusing professional assignments with personal hobbies is a pleasure afforded to few of us. When a window of opportunity arose, then, for Mike Harrington to travel out to Bulgaria to produce a set of lifestyle photographs around his favoured theme of skiing, he made sure, upon his return, to emphasise his appreciation of his experience as he asked me to share some of it with you.

Mike has just arrived back in the UK from a week at the Bansko Ski Resort, in the south-west of Bulgaria, which, in addition to its increasing popularity and excellent value for money, also boasts the most modern facilities of all the skiing resorts in the country, with a recent investment of millions of euros to create a new skiing area, alongside current investments in hotels and other facilities to cement the resort’s claim to be Bulgaria’s top skiing resort.

Mike’s clear enthusiasm for skiing did not distract him from his task, however: to produce fifty images showcasing skiing as a lifestyle choice, for sale worldwide through Getty Images. The project was self-initiated, with a firm focus upon producing photographs of the highest quality, along with developing Mike’s own capabilities and his expertise in photographing in extreme locations.

With these aims in mind, he teamed up with a former member of the England junior skiing team who now teaches there, who possessed precisely the degree of skill that Mike wished to showcase in his images. The importance of working with models sufficiently competent to perform the tasks required of them cannot be overemphasised – and Mike was enormously appreciative of the ease with which he was able to produce photographs such as this, time and time again:

The images we produced for the Aviva commercial photography shoot (that we mentioned in our previous post) can now be viewed on Aviva’s new website: http://www.aviva.com, which launched on 1st July. Aviva, previously known as Norwich Union, has just completed a rebrand across its entire range of products and services with the aim of moving the company to a single global brand.

To achieve a common identity across the board, our professional commercial photographer was given strict brand guidelines to adhere to. The style of the scenarios on our shot list closely followed the Aviva photography guidelines; informal, naturalistic and un-posed, with a light, airy mood. They were shot in a way that makes the viewer feel involved in the unfolding scene and not merely looking at models posing in contrived setups.

As well as being a very large shoot, the tricky aspect was implying that we were shooting into the sun to add lens flair to the images. The good old unpredictable British weather meant that we had to create our own sun with our lighting on location using our Elinchrome Ranger kit. The lighting stands were then ‘Photoshopped’ out afterwards and the lighting effects were enhanced using the highly effective Photoshop lighting effects plug-in, Knoll Light Factory.

We’ve also introduced a new service to our professional digital photography services – 360 Interior Rotations. The ability to create 360-degree panoramas of interior locations is an excellent way for clients to illustrate their resources and facilities. Here’s an example of a 360 shot we did for Microsoft, which involves 36 images being stitched together before being turned into a flash animation.