Evening Puja ceremony on the banks of the River Ganges, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. January 2011
Business leaders forming the judging panel for the 2012 Property Awards, Mayfair, London, United Kingdom. February 2012
The need for images is everywhere, across all types of media. Businesses of all types require images such as staff portraits for websites, shots of meetings for annual reports and bid documents and coverage of conferences for both internal and external marketing. Working as a freelance photographer you find yourself as a type of 'gun for hire' with commissions leading you to photograph subjects you may not have been instinctively drawn to.
Over the years I've carved a bit of niche for myself as a sort of corporate documentary photographer and while these are the type of shoots that some photographers may not get terribly excited about I've found that they are often the type of shoots that can push you most as a photographer.
The shot above is from a self initiated trip to India. It's the kind of scene that I'm drawn to and interests me, it lends itself to be photographed and give great images, all the elements are there, you just need get in place and fire the shutter. On the other hand when you arrive at a commissioned shoot consisting of a group of gentlemen sitting around a table and nothing more this is the kind of setting that can really call on all your knowledge and skills to try and generate engaging images.
These corporate type images might not the first I would promote but they are a large part of what I do, at the end of the day I'm interested in photographing people of all types in all settings and it's commissions such as this that make it possible for me to then take a month off to travel.
I usually shoot such settings with two cameras sporting zoom lenses of different focal lengths, a 24-105mm so I'm covered for the wide room shots and a 70-200mm to capture individuals and reaction shots. Shooting over someones shoulder at the person opposite with a short focal length is always a good way to get across the sense of discussion and once the meeting starts you'll very quickly get a sense of which angles work and the best positions to give you the images you want.
There is always room to try out a few different things visually and it's usually these experiments within such a tight shoot that can give the most interesting images for both yourself and the client.
In the shot below once I had the main images in the bag I fitted a 50mm prime and tried out a few shots at very short focal lengths to isolate the various hand gestures during the discussion
The following shot is from a meeting of architects discussing the regeneration of a site in Stoke. As the site plan was the main focus of the discussion I tried to get across a sense that these architects held the fate of the site in their hands, looking down from a lofty height
This shot from a conference held in Wales came about while walking around the back of the auditorium looking for a slightly different angle. I noticed that the video camera set up to record the event had a tiny blue light on the back of it, I stood with the back of the video camera about a foot away from the lens and composed the shot so that the back of the camera with the blue light came slightly into frame. As I'm focusing on the speaker at the other end of the room the lens threw this tiny blue light out of focus into a nice blue blob that added something extra to the shot.
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