[Note: A version of this post is now also live at PetaPixel.]
It’s standard practice for commercial photography clients to ask photographers their ‘day rate’. Most estimates that photographers provide start with a day rate before going on to production costs and expenses.
Now I used to think I could simply take it for granted that anyone involved in the industry would be able to appreciate this isn’t exactly what a photographer or for that matter any independent creative professional working on a short term project earns for every single day of the year.
I’ve realised that the world of photography is in so much flux that this isn’t a safe assumption and now I much prefer to provide a rate for each job. My reasons can be best illustrated with an example.
Here’s a fictitious estimate I’ve made up with arbitrary numbers, though its structure is one I actually might use for a similar brand photography shoot of medium complexity.
Yes there are numbers involved, but do stay with me and hopefully our eyes won’t glaze over:
Based on the above, what's my day rate?
Is it £10,000 / 3 days = £3,333? Does that mean in a year with 250 working days I could be making £3,333 x 250 = £833,250?
Or is it a third of the Creative Fees component i.e. £3,500 / 3 days = £1,167? Meaning I could pull in £291,750 a year?
Or is it somewhere in between?
The real answer is that my effective day rate here comes to just under £400 per day, and that still doesn’t equate to £400 x 250 = a hundred grand a year.
Please allow me to explain.
From the end client’s perspective, this estimate represents a total price of £286 per image (admittedly before some other costs such as models’ fees in this example) for 35 commercial images specially produced for their brand - which I’d say is excellent value, especially given the generous usage licence on offer.
For the sake of comparison, this is a small fraction of the licensing fees quoted by Getty Images for similar usage of images that haven't been storyboarded and produced specifically for the end client's brand.
From the photographer's perspective, the fees (i.e. excluding all expenses owed to third parties) in this example has three components:
Creative and Licensing fees: £3,500
Recce fees: £1,200
Retouching: £1,225
That’s £5,925 for 15 days’ work. Wait a second, how did we get to 15 days from a three day shoot? Let’s see how many days the photographer might spend working on this:
Pre-production: 2 days
Recce: 3 days
Travel: 1 day (not counting locations within 2-3 hours’ driving distance)
Shoot: 3 days
Post-production + review: 3 days (wider selection of images prepared for review)
Retouching: 2 days (assuming approx 30 min per final selected image)
Communicating about project: 1 day (cumulative)
Only some of these days will be directly billed. Do note that 15 working days means three calendar weeks.
£5,925 for 15 days’ work equates to £5,925 / 15 = £395 per day, which should be pretty good, correct?
Except that this isn’t the photographer’s net income; this is still the gross profit i.e. what’s left after deducting direct production costs from the invoiced total but not operating costs.
Let’s say the costs of running a photography business as a fairly tight ship amount to about £2,000 a month or £24,000 a year. This includes a number of components including marketing costs, office space, photography and IT equipment depreciation and replacement costs, vehicles and transport, training, insurance etc.
£24,000 a year / 250 working days amounts to £96 per working day.
If we deduct this from the £395 per day figure we had above, we end up with £395 - £96 = £299 which is the photographer’s 'salary’ for every working day of this assignment.
Now £299 per working day should result in an annual income of £299 x 250 days = £74,750, which isn’t too bad for an experienced professional living the dream even in one of the most expensive cities in the world, is it?
Maybe, though this assumes the photographer can consistently fill their diary with similar back-to-back assignments for 49 working weeks a year and find extra time during evenings and weekends to undertake the hundreds of other tasks required to run their own business, including wearing multiple hats ranging from web designer to financial director.
The reality of the availability of photography work (and client budgets) is far, far lumpier than that. It’s all less rock-n-roll, more almost-on-the-dole.
As I said, the figures in the example above are quite arbitrary and involve some rounding off. Some of you reading this might consider them either wildly optimistic or naively modest, but they aren't a million miles away at all from real commissioned commercial photography jobs.
On the other hand, the same hypothetical client could also likely obtain estimates from other photographers quoting a flat day rate of £300 for the project with no other line items.
What would their ‘take home’ pay look like? And can a commercial client afford to trust their brand in their hands?
This isn’t a question that I can answer for anyone, though hopefully with this post I’ve managed to shed some light on why I don’t really use the term ‘day rate’ much myself.
To request a sensible estimate, please get in touch here!
Using lights, especially from hard lighting sources, in headshots often means that hair ends up getting highlighted in sharper relief than we'd otherwise be distracted by in a scene.
There are many ways around it, including shooting with a very wide aperture to simply blur hair (not always appropriate or possible) or having a stylist and lots of hair spray to hand (not always feasible). Most often I end up dealing with it in post production in Photoshop.
Last night while editing fresh personal work, I thought I’d try and deal with hair without opening Photoshop.
I found that Capture One 11 has become pretty intelligent with its healing and cloning tools. Still a lot slower than Photoshop but much smarter, with layer opacity being very valuable.
Of course it's still work and one still needs to apply both intelligence and restraint, but this means I can work directly with RAW files without having to cook them into PSDs or TIFs for opening in Photoshop after having made sure I’ve made all other edits to the RAW.
I therefore have far more freedom, quality and consistency in my workflow.
[I have been asked before, so I'd like to reiterate that I really do not work for Phase One or Capture One!]
When the bar manager who’d been very helpful throughout our shoot suggested one of their signature cocktails as having particular visual appeal, she also added that the most interesting thing about it was its transformation which might be better represented on video.
This wasn’t part of the plan but I decided to just go for it. I think she was right.
I’ll figure out audio as I go along, but one of the things I tried to do was to keep a bit of the ambient - which isn’t unlike how I think about flash.
This is a simple maiden attempt, so please judge accordingly, but I might be doing more moving image from time to time...
When my friend, award-winning editorial and commercial photographer John Robertson, invited me to contribute some thoughts to his regular column at the Manfrotto School of Xcellence, I was only too happy to oblige.
John's latest article addresses a question that gets asked very often but seldom answered in such detail. Interesting reading for amateurs, enthusiasts and pros alike:
Glass act - choosing the right lens
Of course, my bit in the piece is about the why behind the what.
By GAS I mean Gear Acquisition Syndrome. Even if you haven’t come across the term, you must have heard it referred to by now. How gear isn’t important, how the best camera is the one in your pocket, how the best photographic tool is the stuff between your ears, and so on.
But when clients sound impressed with my gear when all I’ve done is use a hotshoe flash off camera, I realise that this minimalism have might have been oversold a little.
I get where that comes from, I really do. About once a week someone asks me which DSLR they should buy, and I tend to suggest that they devote some time to the principles of photography and learn how to get the most out of their phone camera first. A bigger camera or more expensive lens isn’t going to make you a better photographer. This is so obvious that I’m not going to expand on it further.
The photos in my portfolio most likely to get me hired were made with one camera and one lens and nothing else but my grey matter - well that’s in addition to the people, places and things in the photos, of course. Gear does not art make.
Sometimes that’s what it takes on commissioned shoots (photo by Paul Blue):
When I step out the door for street photography I just have one camera with a prime lens bouncing off my hip. There’s something so pure about it being just you and your camera and one focal length. It’s sheer joy.
You simply do not need tons of gear to be a photographer.
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Things are a bit different if you’re a Photographer…
When you need to make things happen even when you often aren’t exactly sure until the last moment what those things are.
Gear is a vital part of my job. I have demanding clients who trust me to understand what they need, and leave it to me how I get there. Part of that trust includes being prepared so I don’t let them down.
I don’t carry spare fuses for my lights because it makes me look cool. I carry them because the probability of one blowing is inversely proportional to the time available for nailing the shot. One blew on me five minutes before Sir Richard Branson was due to arrive on set, and I had been told I had three minutes with him.
My new light meter - not the one in my profile pic - cost me more than my mobile phone (which has its own light metering apps, by the way) - not so I can pose with it in photos but because it can test and adjust the power on my lights one by one remotely and saves me time on set, which means subjects have less opportunity to get bored and everything proceeds smoothly.
I don’t show up with spare camera bodies and several lenses to impress clients. I’m terrified of my camera failing on the job, even when I know exactly what I will be shooting and how I will be shooting it. Some things in my kit rarely leave the bag, but the one time I need them there’s nothing else that would have done the job.
Often I have to hire things I don’t have. I’m a big believer in renting rather than owning, especially if you’re able to plan production in advance. But much of the time I need to show up with things I only have a feeling I might need.
As a people photographer I shoot a lot of portraits against a clean background. I’ve done this using just one small hotshoe flash bouncing off a white wall, and I’ve done this in the studio with a four light setup and a couple of assistants and an art director supervising me, and I’ve done this with everything in between. Part of being a commercial photographer is scaling up and down constantly depending on what the assignment demands.
My gear isn’t the most expensive stuff out there. It’s what I find helps me get the job done with the least amount of sweating and swearing.
Sometimes it fits in a shoulder bag and sometimes it’s hard to fit in the boot. It might still be inadequate for for genres I don’t really cover, such as product photography. I work mostly on location so I have to be very efficient about what I lug around, and don’t have the luxury of taking along things I’m very unlikely to need. Besides, I live in a Central London apartment, and so every square inch of space it uses costs me a lot of money in rent.
The most recent item I’ve added to my location kit is…a mirror. Yup, not a £2,000 strobe. Not the flavour-of-the-month camera. Not the most Freudian lens out there. I bought a mirror. I shall see how well it survives my upcoming shoots and report back.
Just to close the loop on the photo of me at work above, and to somewhat contradict everything I’ve just said, here’s the photo I was shooting with just my camera and one lens and no other specialist gear:
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If anyone’s interested in a list of gear in my location shooting kit, click here. No affiliate links, promise, I don’t even mention brand names. This is just to give you an idea of what I’m prepared with at short notice and can fit in a car.
Much has been written about copyright, intellectual property and licensing, so I’m not going to repeat all that.
I’m often asked questions about licensing and I’m going to summarise my thoughts on the issue as succinctly as I can below:
Copyright remains mine. There’s no discussion to be had here, sorry.
I will always endeavour to license you images for all the usage that you require.
In general, the more you expect to use images I’ve made for you, the more I’d expect to be paid.
As a corollary, I will only charge you for usage you actually require, and be sensible about it.
Licensing can be arranged to provide for other parties, such as your clients or media partners, to also use the same images at the same time.
If you’re wondering why you should pay to license your images, here are some reasons:
Global, unrestricted usage is expensive. You don’t need to pay for usage that you don’t need.
Once you’ve exclusively licensed an image for a specific use, I won’t be able to license the same image to anyone else for the same use for the duration of your licence. This saves you the potential embarrassment, for example, of ending up with a competitor using the same images - as happens fairly often with certain types of stock photography.
I will have an interest in pursuing anyone who makes unauthorised usage of the images and will therefore be effectively monitoring infringement on your behalf and protecting your brand and reputation for you.
The good news is that a basic licence is typically included in my shoot fees. I’m always happy to discuss any further usage needs my clients have, and arrive at a mutually beneficial licensing arrangement.
For further reference, please visit these two excellent resources:
The ‘Copyright4Clients’ FAQ, courtesy of the Association of Photographers.
‘Why Use Rights Managed Photography?’ by Allen Murabayashi, co-founder of Photoshelter, on the Libris blog.
Recently, my good friend Joas asked me to shoot some portraits. I was looking forward to this because it’s fun to photograph someone who you have the benefit of knowing well already.
Brazilian-born Joas Souza is an architectural and aerial photographer, also based in London like me. Do check out his outstanding work at www.joasphotographer.com
We decided to shoot against a plain white background, because…well, sometimes there’s just nothing to beat a nice clean, white background. Joas gets more than his share of dealing with the vagaries of natural light on these isles while photographing beautiful buildings, so we were both also happy to exercise more control in the studio.
Because he’s my buddy I can take the liberty of sharing more photos from the shoot than I’d typically get to do with other clients.
We had a lot of fun: Joas was bursting with ideas and everything just worked. Photographers - myself included - are notorious for not being too pleased about being in front of a camera. Thankfully this doesn’t apply to Joas!
I know I’ve gone on about this before already, but once again Capture One was my best friend.
The reasons are simple. I’m just impressed with the ease and finesse with which I can get to my vision for the final image - with consistent colours and skin tones across all images. Just take a look at the screenshot above.
Of course, it does help to light and expose the scene properly to begin with and all that - I was working without an assistant and so had to be very quick to set up the lights (not even my own!) before Joas got bored - yet of late getting to the picture in my head using Lightroom had started to require far too much swearing at the computer for my taste.
For this set, I ended up only needing to leave C1 and step into Photoshop to get to a pure white background. I didn’t intend to do any further skin retouching, but that’s another thing I’d still do in Photoshop.
My transition to C1 is now complete and it’s become the main port of call in my workflow on recent shoots. I’m really enjoying to be able to deliver consistency with minimum fuss. Shooting tethered directly into C1 also makes it so much easier to involve models and get client sign-off by being able to show images that are already a good approximation of the final look.
I didn’t save a screenshot of the initial previews that I showed Joas, I’ll have to do that with another shoot or project.
Here are some more from the same shoot:
Next time, maybe I’ll talk about why these days I’m less stressed about nailing white balance when lighting isn’t under my control.
Following a demo I received last week, I decided to try Capture One as my raw conversion and processing application rather than my old friend, Adobe Lightroom.
I have a feeling I might not be looking back. Everything I can do in Lightroom - and some things I do in Photoshop - Capture One does better, faster, and more intuitively.
C1 was developed as a tool for tethered photography, but I’m finding it to be wonderfully suited to my post-production workflow as well.
The starting point C1 gives me with the images I’ve shot is already much closer to what I have in mind as the final image. And the process of getting to the latter feels more joyful.
Lightroom does think like me and I can usually do everything I want to do, but I was starting to get the feeling that we weren’t working together. More than anything, waiting forever for Lightroom to do things even on my fairly zippy system was starting to really get in the way of my love of photography.
I’ve already figured out my workflow with Capture One, even worked on a recent shoot (that I’d already worked on and delivered) from scratch and got to where I wanted much quicker and while having more fun than in Lightroom.
I like colour grading my work according to the needs and mood of the project, though not at the cost of consistency. The kind of control C1 offers for colour editing and grading is a real treat.
I’ve been called a right- and left-brain person, and while I’m not entirely sure there is a such a thing, I’m really loving how all the heavily mathematical work behind the scenes can be controlled with colour wheels on the screen that show me which colours I’m working on while I scroll the wheels with two fingers on my trackpad. That’s cool, that’s pretty cool, so gestalt.
My ultimate aim is to get my tools out of the way of the job at hand. Few clients have ever asked me what cameras I shoot with or where I edit my work, and it’s rare for me to gush about a particular product I work with.
I'm still fond of Lightroom and will need Photoshop for things like advanced retouching, but once I found myself doing things in C1 without having to think about how I was going to do them or having to wait for C1 to actually do them, I knew this could be the start of a fruitful new relationship.
After one too many debates lately with other photographers on shooting with natural light vs. using flash, I thought I’d quickly put together a diagram on how I think about light.
Like many photographers, I prefer shooting in natural light - when it’s good.
Quite often, on these isles, it isn’t. Therefore I’ve made my peace with artificial light. But the artificial light available isn’t always good either.
That’s why I tend to keep my own sources of artificial light close at hand. Continuous lighting sources for photography tend to be too weak, too hot or too expensive - though this is rapidly changing.
Meanwhile, I do my best to learn how to use flash and strobe lights in a way that helps me maintain consistency in my work - which has been described to me as “editorial in style and commercial in nature”.
I don’t insist on using lots of lighting equipment just to impress clients. Some photographers manage to use reflectors, mirrors and other modifiers to great effect without the use of any specialist lighting equipment at all. To the best of my knowledge, even the most demanding commercial clients in the UK and the rest of Europe don’t expect a multitude of lights to be deployed on every set unless strictly necessary.
Equally, I’m not one to let clients down due to bad light. “I’m an available light photographer” isn’t an excuse that I make, er, available.
My way is to try and expand the sources of light available to me, and use them together effectively as required.
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I’ll leave you with a photograph from my Twins project. How would you describe the light?
Whenever you look at something in the mirror, you experience a phenomenon called lateral inversion: the apparent reversal of the mirror image's left and right when compared with the object itself.
I’m not going to go into details of the physics behind it, as this is a concept we’re familiar enough with to take for granted and process subconsciously. We manage to use mirrors every day without experiencing too much cognitive dissonance.
But what does this have to do with photography?
Look at the following two versions of the same photo of my friend Axe. Which of them is laterally inverted?
Hint: Axe's husband's and daughter’s names are Raghu and Kimaya respectively. I thought her tattoos might make this too easy, so I laterally inverted my logo to try and confuse you.
Most of us have a mental image of our own appearance, largely influenced by what we see in the mirror every day: a laterally inverted likeness. Unless you’re accustomed to looking at dozens of photographs of yourself on a daily basis, your mental image of yourself is most likely determined by your mirror image.
This would be fine if we were all perfectly symmetrical in appearance. As many photographers - including Alex John Beck with his Both Sides Of project - have demonstrated, this is seldom the case.
One’s expectations regarding own likeness are of course deeply personal, but I’ve come to think that physics has something to do with this.
Something tells me that lateral inversion is at least part of the reason that so many of us think we look different in our photographs. The images produced by cameras are not laterally inverted, unlike our reflections in the mirror, and appear somewhat different from what we might expect.
During a portrait session I tend to show my subject the (unedited) results as we go along, just so we’re both comfortable with how the shoot is progressing. Some subjects tell me that even though they really like the photographs, they feel they look like a little different in their photographs compared to what they they think they look like.
The good news is that other people looking at us are not accustomed to looking at laterally inverted images of our faces and bodies, and don’t expect photographs of us to comply with our reflections in the mirror.
Let’s take a look at another portrait:
Which of these is laterally inverted? Is it the one with the inverted logo? Do I tend to light most portraits from one side? Does all this even matter?
Sometimes I wonder if I should be laterally inverting all portraits I make, so that they might seem more familiar to the subjects.
Things, I suspect, might be a bit more complex than that.
Still, I find lateral inversion to be a useful concept to be aware of: one that I’ve started to discuss with my portrait subjects while photographing them, to try and bridge the perceptual gap between what the mirror shows and what the camera sees.
It’s Sunday morning - well morning by my standards anyway - so please allow me to be a little philosophical and talk about how what you consume becomes what you produce.
We’re all a product of our experiences. What we eat, what we look at, what we listen to, who we spend time with, what we read, where we choose to live, where we go, what lifestyle we (aspire to) lead - all ultimately become part of who we are and what we create.
The music I grew up on - including significant doses of classic British rock and Seattle grunge - has had some impact on my values as an adult. My diet is now more varied and includes Indie pop, Baroque, jazz, Hindustani classical, Sufi qawwalis, some Bollywood hits and even some reggaeton and K-pop. I’m certain this registers somewhere.
In any given week, my wife and I are likely to have indulged in an array of cuisines - Indian, Korean, British, American, Italian, French, Chinese - and that’s just what we make at home. By the way, it’s all very good but it’s very hard to deal with leftovers.
I’m convinced that all the Sherlock Holmes stories I’ve devoured have affected how I analyse any scene I’m about to shoot, and the mental pictures I quickly draw of people I’m about to photograph. Whether or not the expressions following my analysis and impressions are accurate, they are certainly not random. They’re coloured to some degree by the distilled impact of my very wide tastes in reading.
As you can see, I’m not too shy to admit that my practice has been informed by popular culture and not just the great masters.
Not all influences are positive though. Dark emotions easily find their way into expression, and I believe every artist creates not just to voice what’s inside but also to overcome some of what lurks within.
I hope all the bad photography I had inside me has already come out!
That’s why I make a conscious effort to look at good photography and minimise exposure to what I don’t like. It’s very tempting to look at bad work and feel superior. I confess to looking for tweets like “Wow! Look at this photo I just took! I should be a professional photographer!” accompanying blurry snapshots of the London Eye / Tower Bridge / Big Ben, just to laugh at them, but I try not to get carried away. I spend far more time with the dozens of photobooks that surround me and let others’ excellent work sink in.
I don’t consider ‘commercial’ to be a dirty word, but everything I produce - whether for myself or commissioned by a client - is an expression of who I am, which in turn is a outcome of the countless influences I allow myself daily.
For example, who I am shapes what I see when I meet someone, what I find interesting about them, the manner in which I engage with them and ultimately the portrait I make of them.
Let’s take another look at the photo accompanying this post. I met Kimay when walking around, and decided to photograph her at this spot. To me this photograph represents a slice of my London, which I realise might not be the same as nine million other Londons.
This is also why I’m always happy to share photography techniques. Someone I teach could conceivably become a better photographer than me, but I wouldn’t be able to teach them to be me.
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While writing this, I’ve been nibbling on a croissant from our local French patisserie and sipping a homemade flat white while listening to I Am Kloot and smelling the flavours of the traditional food my wife is preparing for Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival.
How is this going to colour the photos I make? I have no idea: I just know that it will.
This portrait is from a series commissioned by one of my corporate clients, for a range of uses within and outside the company. They felt that a plain background was ideal for keeping their options open.
White / plain background portraits can seem deceptively simple, but I find shooting them to be as challenging as it is rewarding. There aren’t any other elements in the scene or the background, and the image becomes entirely about the subject, with no supporting cast.
My main tool for rising to this challenge is to quickly establish a relationship of mutual trust and respect with the subject, but this will have to be the topic of another post.
The other major tool is light. With clever use of light, a white background becomes very versatile and lends itself to a range of looks.
Softboxes tend to be the go-to lighting modifiers for corporate portraits, but I simply wanted to do something different. Despite the obvious association with fashion and beauty, I thought as my key light I’d use my beauty dish.
I knew I’d wouldn’t be shooting any full-length shots. This suits beauty dishes as they’re best used really close to the subject rather than moved back to light the whole body.
In addition to the nice contrast without harsh shadows or a hot spot, there is something intangible about the not-hard-and-not-soft quality of light from a beauty dish that I just like a lot.
I’m also partial to the round catchlights that beauty dishes create, as distinct from the square or rectangular catchlights from conventional softboxes. Let’s zoom in to see what I’m talking about:
There’s nothing wrong with rectangular catchlights - after all, using available light coming in from a window would usually yield them - it’s just that currently I happen to favour round catchlights.
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So we have beautiful light and nice catchlights, but what’s the catch?
Beauty dishes can really highlight the texture of the skin. This isn’t ideal for subjects who are conscious about their skin, unless there’s a make-up artist close at hand. I was happy to live with this, and deal with any glaring issues by spending a little extra time on post-production if needed. Fortunately you can also soften the light from a beauty dish by bringing it closer to the subject.
They are also notoriously hard to stow and transport, unlike say a folding softbox. To place my beauty dish high and very close to the subject without the light stand being in my way I decided I needed a big and heavy C-stand rather than one of my folding light stands. This presented more logistical difficulties, as I’m quite likely to work alone and use public transport.
I was grateful that my clients understood my need for an assistant, who helped me transport and set up the gear, and also to make minor adjustments as per my direction, freeing me to talk to the subjects and think about what I’ll be doing next. In this style of photography, subtle differences in lighting and the subject’s expression can make a dramatic difference to the result.
Of course, in case a beauty dish just didn’t work for some reason, I had other modifiers with me: such as my octagonal softbox which can create big, soft light but still with round(-ish) catchlights.
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There’s no telling how I’d feel about beauty dishes if you asked me in a couple of months’ time but hopefully after reading this you wouldn’t be surprised to see me pulling out a beauty dish in your boardroom.
This time I thought I’d use personal work. I do a lot of street photography whenever I can, because I enjoy responding instantaneously to the drama around me as it unfolds, and it keeps me sharp. I particularly like to step outside my comfort zone of the streets of London and Mumbai.
I was walking around downtown Washington DC when this location caught my attention. The smoke generated by the roadworks and the warm street lights just after the start of the blue hour made for a very interesting mood.
It occurred to me that the stretch of pavement in front of me was a great spot for photographing people. They would be lit from above from camera right by a street light, while the smoke would provide good separation, backlit by other street lights and car headlights, but without obscuring the background entirely. About 50% opacity, in the language of Photoshop layers.
There was another facet to getting out of my comfort zone: I confess to a fervent dislike of high-visibility jackets. Not that I don’t believe in health and safety, but they tend to boldly stand out in photos at the cost of everything else. In this scene, thanks to the the warm light in the blue hour, the workmen’s hi-vis jackets played a courteous supporting role instead. I decided to use this opportunity to make my peace with them and keep them in the frame.
I spent a few moments working on the composition. Of course, many of the elements were providential: the woman conveniently standing in the middle of the forecourt of the building across the street so that I didn’t end up with a big, bright empty spot; the flag as a reminder of where we were; and the relaxed positions of the workmen and the bins. I tried to make sure that the subject would step off the crossing along the edge of the right one-third of the frame. I am not averse to judicious cropping in post-production, but I promise you I barely got rid of 5% of the original composition afterwards.
Once I was satisfied with the composition, I shot a couple of test frames to make sure that my camera’s light meter was interpreting the scene the same as my eyes and brain were, and accordingly to think about whether or not I needed to adjust my exposure. My camera was completely at one with me.
Then I just waited for the right person to walk across the street towards me.
Maybe because I had put in some effort to think about what I was doing, the universe decided to reward me with not just one but two interesting subjects - that too walking perfectly in step, dressed in dark colours for good contrast.
I resisted the urge to shoot and waited a little more for the perfect moment. Lo! both of them turned away from the camera in unison mid-stride, letting the street light on camera right light their faces nicely, and I shot this single frame.
Zen.
It takes me some time to articulate my thought process, but looking at the timestamps on my photos, I spent all of fifty seconds at this spot.
While I’m not always able to finesse a street scene to my taste, the practice I get from trying enables me to achieve much more when things are a little more under my control - though often not by much - on a commissioned shoot.
Many of my clients are large businesses who usually have a very clear idea of what they’re trying to say about their business through portraits of the key people that represent them.
The subject in this photo is the Group Managing Director and Funding Director of a leading British property and investment group. The worlds of property and finance can be quite reserved, and my clients were keen to distinguish their MD as the confident yet warm and friendly face of their dynamic, design-led group.
I had the opportunity to chat with Melanie for a few minutes as we walked to their new offices. She had followed my little list of do’s and don’ts, and I also got to understand her own thoughts about the shoot in addition to the brief her colleagues had given me.
The new offices were just being given the final touches before being occupied and so we were able to shoot a range of photos of her incorporating some very cool design elements, without any disruption. But as we had walked in, both Melanie and I had been drawn to this staircase with its stylish bannister and exposed concrete, and so after getting in the safe shots in the office we decided to put this location to use.
I chose to light the scene with a single light bounced into the top right corner of the scene, to create big, soft light that was still somewhat directional, supplementing the natural light coming in from a skylight. We discussed the use of her handbag in the shot and how to position it without making the brand name too obvious (except to the dedicated enthusiast!)
Then I placed myself lower than her to confer a certain degree of authority, while I tried to balance this by talking to her to get an engaged expression.
Melanie and I agreed that all the elements in the photo had come together to convey the contrast and achieve the fine balance that we had been aiming for.
I’m not particularly religious about using available light vs. lighting a scene. Everything depends on what the brief and the situation warrant.
I shoot regularly with Nathan Lewis, who hosts a popular fashion blog. We usually shoot in an informal editorial style with a nod to fashion streetstyle photography, working very quickly and making the most of what various locations around London have to offer.
For this set, we found ourselves in a building that should be instantly recognisable to at least some Londoners and visitors to the capital. The shots were going to be used for an outfit post and in this particular shot we wanted to subtly emphasise Nathan’s socks.
On a previous visit I had made a mental note of this bench and thought it would make a perfect perch for Nathan, particularly with the framing provided by the windows and the view of the courtyard. I didn’t mind the people outside, as this supported the relaxed feel we were after; besides the woman’s choice of clothing broadly matched the rest of the colours without being too distracting.
I wanted to ensure that all the elements of Nathan’s outfit - including his pocket square and his bag - casually featured in the shot. I didn’t need to show too much detail in them as they were going to be highlighted in other shots. At the same time, I didn’t want him looking at the camera as that would draw attention to his face and away from his ankle. I still needed a little more light on his face, but using lighting equipment was not going to be an option at this venue.
That’s why I decided to use Nathan’s magazine as a little reflector - having turned to a spread with few photographs and maximum white space - to get just enough light on his face, while also giving him something to look at. I wasn’t too concerned about shooting against a brighter background, as I had enough faith in the dynamic range offered by my camera to know that I’d be able to pull in the highlights and bump up the shadows a little in post-production to achieve even tones in the final image.
Next, I carefully composed the shot, set the focus, and then waited a few seconds for a clean shot between the dozens of visitors streaming past.
This might sound like a lot of thinking, but the whole process took barely a few minutes, and we could move on quickly to the next shot.
To see some more of my work with Nathan Lewis, please take a look at the Man Meets Fashion gallery on my website.
