In October I tried the Victorian approach to having a chest ailment and decided to ‘take the air’ somewhere less humid than old blighty. I headed for New Mexico. Apart from the desert air, it was a place I wanted to visit because its the location of the first Spaceport being constructed to take tourist flights. Richard Branson’s ‘Virgin Galactic’ is due to fly from a remote site close to the White Sands rocket test base. A hour and a half drive along a rocky white track and I found this sign. I drove around in the high chaparral for another hour or so, but the site proved elusive. I know it was there… but somehow it eluded me. As a long time space enthusiast, this location was the kicking off point for a personal project provisionally entitled ‘Rocket Lands’, more of which I will post at a later date.

Its been a while since I posted, partly thanks to the holiday season and partly I’m afraid thanks to a humdinger of a virus that knocked me down for a few weeks and even made me turn down a couple of assignments, (thats from the guy who believes that Nurofen cold and flu can keep him on the job when nothing else will do…)

A trip on the Northern or Jubilee lines last week gave me a buzz, because the photographs I took for the Barclaycard One-Pulse campaign are now plastered all over the tube and the London papers.

Having taken delivery of the images there is far too much detail to begin to resolve them from most of the way they are going to be reprinted, so I’ve provided three zoomify links to allow detailed perusal. Click on the thumbnail as required. These will try to appear in a pop-up window, or a new browser tab, so evidently you need pop-ups enabled in your browser to see them…

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The incredible retouching was performed by RodeoFX in Canada (for the London Eye, and Battersea images) and by Jean-Marie Vives for the Golf Image. Of course I played a small but significant part as well… just how small or significant, you can judge for yourselves.

September saw the publication of the PHWT campaign for Bayer’s Atlantis product in a variety of trade magazines. Shot in full-on summer, it shows the results of my retouching into an Autumn look as well as two days constructing a tractor from little parts (in retrospect an additional days shooting might have been quicker and cheaper and more fun than sitting in front of the monitor and poking around at 200%).

I’m mostly very happy with the results, but I’ll never underestimate the time it takes to move large agricultural machinery into position again (especially when the machines we get given are nearly double the size we had planned for).

This shot was the result of mixing mostly the ambient light from a new hotel room (to be announced the week after this blog post) with the inbuilt spotlighting in the bathroom. There was a small amount of fill flash in the room plus a light hanging from the shower rail. The model was incredibly good at her job maintaining complete stillness for a 1 second exposure.

The sophistication of lighting is increasing in interiors and in cases like this it’s essential to communicate what the lighting designer intended so careful attention to the colour and mood of the light is required.

Another image from the same ad shoot as for the Battersea image. This close crop won’t be used in the ad, but its one of my favorite from the shoot. Make sure your browser window is wide enough to show the whole of the image.

At one point I had St. Pauls, The London Eye and Big Ben and Whitehall all lit, while most of the rest of central London was in shade, which just goes to prove that clouds (and the British summer) are better than sunny blue skies, at least for photographers.

I spent the brief interlude in June/July’s endless rain messing about in a boat photographing Battersea Power Station for an advertising client. Its very challenging using a medium format digital on a platform which is constantly moving 2% in three dimensions. It was a long day with a 5 am start and this shot was taken in the 2 or 3 minutes of perfect light at 8pm. Its not quite nature photography, but patience is rewarded.

A fascinating occurence this, its a building where they have removed all the lower stories in order to rebuild. I think there might be an impressive atrium when they have finished. I had two jobs moved this week in one case because of the bad weather, and in the other because of a change in the brief. Still I thought this gives me a chance to play, so for the first time in ages I brushed off the Ebony and shot some Polaroids. After exclusively shooting digital for a year going back to 5×4 was actually a bit of a breath of fresh air. The total weight of the Ebony with a couple of lenses and all its gubbins is quite low, so in my smaller rucksack, plus a carbon fibre tripod I can happily move around town all day. This shot was heavily perspective corrected in photoshop and is from a polacolor shot I did before shooting on Provia and type 55.

I’ve now set up a listing on the Adobe Photographers Directory

There is an art to being well represented on this because of the tiny size of the thumbnails. On my next few interiors shoots I’ll keep my mind on the need to generate a killer interior shot which looks good as a thumbnail. Thumbnails have very specific needs. The purpose of them is to ‘grab clicks’ so its important that they make visual sense, even when very small. I think that this is challenging for an interior shot, much simpler with a sculptural building, or an exterior detail. Designing, shooting and making images that make good thumbnails could be considered an art in itself, similar to designing postage stamps. As I recently did a masters in photography my brain is organised for making massive prints for gallery display, making tiny thumbnails is the other extreme… from the sublime to the ridiculous one might say.

Sometimes its a good idea to get some extra height, many buildings look better photographed from a slightly higher vantage point, in this case we needed the extra height for an advertising shoot. We hired a Snorkel Scissor Lift to photograph a farm complex along with its farm machinery. Our client needed us to photograph some large machines and the only way to include the machinery and the buildings/landscape was to get 6M above the ground.

One limitation of these machines is that they need a level surface. Luckily a sheet of board can be used to level the machine easily, otherwise the machine refuses to lift more than about a metre (safety feature).

We hired the machine from ‘Height for Hire’ who are based near Huntingdon (Tel : 01480 890191) , they were very helpful and reasonably priced.

The photos are by one of my assistants that day, Rob Percy. My second assistant visible with me on the platform was Toby Carter (the handsome one) who won a recent AoP Student award.

This interior is from a job I shot for CTM Architects. The property is located on the South Coast of the UK.

Its an example for me of the power of supermodels.

While I can take credit for the composition, the technique, the lighting and the retouching… it’s really the combination of the architects design, the site and the taste of the client that makes this picture.

Its a real joy, and an asset to one’s portfolio, to have the architectural equivalent of a supermodel in front of the lens once in a while.