Refining the New Lighting Set-up
Refining the New Lighting Set-up I have been tinkering with the new lighting set-up when work allows it. I started by trying to use my giant soft box in my living room. This resulted in me having to position it left of the camera which just felt wrong to begin with. God knows why. I…
New Headshots
New Headshots First job after a soporific summer break. August seemed to last forever. I needed to do something to wake myself. When I was contacted by an old client and heard the brief I thought ‘perfect.’ I have several basic go-to set-ups for headshots which I customise depending on the person, location and available…
The Office
The Office This might well be the last proper job of the summer. Lugging my equipment out to the taxi I felt the heatwave had arrived. Everything was going to feel like a slog from now on. I was glad to know I would be in Greece within the week. The office was on Aribau.…
La Zaida and Evonik
La Zaida and Evonik Ahhhh… La Zaida… Many years ago, on a train in Portugal, we passed a place without stopping and I quipped; “It was a one horse town… and then they ate the horse.” La Zaida has that feel; a place with a population of 500 that might easily be called nondescript… except…
Emerald Travel; almost a naturally lit photo shoot
Emerald Stay; almost a naturally lit photo shoot The brief: 2 headshots and a group shot, well, 2 guys. The location turned out to work quite well. I was even worried I would have no excuse to use all the lighting I had brought with me. I had even dug out the really…
Rejuversen Revisited
Rejuversen Revisited I have done a few jobs for Rejuversen now. This is the second time I visited their research lab at Parc Scientific Barcelona. Things have improved a lot there! The last time I visited I ended up having to clean up the images because the lab looked like a bomb had hit a…
Ivan The Mysterious
Ivan The Mysterious A couple of months ago I rejoined Soho House and fairly quickly met Ivan in the exercise classes they have. Soho House was always good for meeting new people and potentially new clients. Ivan became a Soho House friend and then a client. Result. He was keen to do shots…
Ariadne KIng Photo Shoot
Ariadne King Photo Shoot I have a client for whom I shoot interiors, his daughter Ariadne is a budding actress. He decided it was time she got some professional images for her book. We decided to start at sunrise… yippee… plus the clocks had just gone back so that was an hour less. I woke…
Home Studio With Siphokazi Oranuba
Home Studio Siphokazi Oranuba I got back from holiday and the day after had a home studio shoot. It has been a while and still being in holiday mode I was not looking forward to it as much as usual. Plus, these days I kind of prefer to find outdoor locations where I can fake…
Home Studio Shoot – Hugo
Another home studio shoot. Photographing people in a home studio can be a rewarding and challenging endeavor, Hugo arrived and was nervous. This is very common, portraits shoots are as much about psychology as technique. It is good to have your technique refined so you don’t even think about it. Get to know your subject:…
Another Magic Fountains Shoot
Return to the Magic Fountain About a week after doing a corporate portrait shoot outside I got another inquiry. Murat Uslu wanted a mix of shots but doing indoors and outdoors in an hour is not so feasible. Apart from setting up the studio you are going to need at least half an hour jus…
Looking to refine my Corporate Portraits
Corporate Portraits? I feel the need to experiment. A large amount of my work of late is corporate portraits and the vast majority of these are headshots against white backgrounds. Now studio style photography is fine and would be awesome if I had a proper full size studio. But given the choice I still prefer…
OOH Capital
Bloody hell a paid job, thanks OOH Capital. Post-Covid is still proving to be difficult. Work is not back to its normal level. This job with OOH Capital is pretty typical of what was common pre-pandemic. A set of headshots and a group shot or 2. We were working at the Almanac hotel just…
The Great Outdoors
Yes, finally a corporate headshot session in the great outdoors! Barcelona is quite hot (bearable) and sticky (less so), so… not having to set up a home studio was a nice change. Giuseppe wanted this and i was more than happy to oblige. I remembered near me there is a small park behind the library.…
Albert Ferrer, Me and My Medals
Albert Ferrer ‘Chapi.’ The Times Newspaper. Though Covid has affected work terribly I did get a couple of jobs from UK newspapers which tend to be interesting and relatively well paid jobs. Albert lives out of Barcelona in a small town called Masnou. I went with my friend Brett who has a car and a…
Pento; 50 Portraits in Four Hours
Pento event at the Arts Hotel. As I mentioned in another post there was a brief hiatus in the ongoing Covid saga that allowed me to get some real work. Another one of these clients was Pento who held a quite large event over several days at the Art Hotel. They contracted me to go…
Jordi Petriz, from Telescope to Microscope
The beach seemed as good as a place as any to start the job. Jordi Petriz was the subject.The theme was where he liked to go when not in the laboratory… I really was hoping to spend time in the laboratory, the potential for over-the-top lighting and all that tech. Hey ho. The client was…
Home Studio; Cost Effective Portraits
I would love to have a studio. But I don’t particularly want to spend my life working in one; I still prefer the idea of environmental portraits. But, at times the ease of a studio is very seductive. So, home studio or even pop-up studio, call it what you will. If the results are good…
A Flying Visit To and Then Around Casa Bonay, Barcelona
One of the first really interesting job of the year was a shoot at Casa Bonay, a boutique hotel recently opened by Inés Miró-Sans in the centre of Barcelona. Receiving an email that is a possible job is always a little like Christmas, when it comes from another country even more so, because apart from the appeal of…
UBIS, Geneva
I was contacted by Elena Panizza, head of Brain Bazaar about this job. I was very pleased to be asked, after all, it combined travel and decent renumeration, though, in truth, living in Barcelona means I am no longer sure what that is, as very few here want to spend money on work that might be professional when they…
Olga & Carlos
These 2 were my old flat mates for about a year, they moved out when Olga became pregnant. She asked me about doing some photos and I got this idea in my head that was something between a portrait and a still life, I wanted to include a lot of objects that were symbolic and…
My Experiences with Home Studio Photography
Almost all my work involves me going places and photographing people in their homes or somewhere convenient for them. I have on occasion used my home as a make-shift studio, the walls are of a light enough colour and I can get just about enough distance that shooting portraits wide-open it is possible blur away…
Paolo Guidoni, Opera Singer
Paolo is one of those people you just get on with. I went there with an idea to experiment with a lighting effect that would give me an almost painterly effect; quasi Renaissance perhaps. As a result I fluffed around a little experimenting with different things, but Paolo was very patient and amenable. I photographed…
Profile Photography: Joan Calvet Merce, Wine Tester
Joan works for a wine company as a taster. To get to his house I took the Bicing to what is the last stop in that direction, essentially Sarría, it is all up hill and with a heavy camera bag quite a challenge. Once you are in the rarified world of this barrio you soon…
Women at Pregnancy Services
These are images for an article about people who offer services to pregnant women in Barcelona, aside from the usual midwifery this includes such things as massages etc. I did pictures of several of them together at the offices where they worked. There was a nice amount of white space and natural light to play…