After an extended holiday in January my first job back was right up my street. It was a feature on a Barista at work for Caffe Ritazza. This was a commercial shoot for the company that owns Ritazza and the Barista I was to work with is their head of training and award winning coffee man Graziano Moroni (with a name like that you have to be a coffee man!)
Graziano had picked a Ritazza coffee shop in the middle of London's Victoria station. He wanted it busy and lively. The brief was simple 'Striking portraits of him in a work environment'
For all of my jobs I always sit down and have a good think. I look for ideas, direction and do as much research as I can on each subject I'm commissioned to shoot. Goodness knows what photographers did pre-Internet to find all this information out. I nearly always google map the location and street view the area, I find this a God send as I'm already familiar with the geography, this is also useful if you're running late and you work in a big city such as London where it's so easy to get disorientated.
My photography often depends on putting the subject into an appropriate 'landscape' I start to form initial ideas before I arrive in the area and do my recce. At icon we have always employed a 'half hour rule' on every job we do, that's 30mins before we are supposed to be somewhere - it's a contingency plan but it also allows us to get into character...not unlike Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction as they entered the students house : )
Anyway..Over the ideas stage I realised what I really wanted was to shoot a documentary of this chap working - the client was initially thinking one portrait picture in the company brochure but I could see the potential for a photo essay, which I felt formed a better 'portrait'
I had up to an hour with him and I knew from experience that any Victoria station coffee shop never has less than 3 people in the queue. Lighting this in my usual way was going to cause problems, small cafe, busy counter area, paying customers, light stands, expensive camera bag full of toys (as with any big city London does have the occasional crime)
This challenge helped to form a look to the job - I telephoned the clients agency Words & Pictures and spoke to the head of Photography there Alan Barton. The idea I sold him was to shoot documentary style using wide open fast lenses in available light only, the minimal depth of field will help 'clean up' the environment and any motion blur, out of focus items would just add to the feel.
This approach is often employed in food photography both in stills and video; Production crews on Jamie Oliver, Nigel Slater, Gordon Ramsay, Nigella and the like all use it and coffee shops such as Cafe Nero display wall art in there stores shot in a similar fashion.
With the clients approval I was on - I took my new lowepro flipside 400 backpack with my Nikon D3 50mm F1.4, 85mm F1.4, 135mm F2 and 18-35 F2.8 lenses and that was it!
The D3's sensitivity to light is awesome and widely acclaimed, I felt confident cranking up the iso to 1250 as required.
One of the first problems I encountered was the coffee machines location, it was on the back wall so the barista always had his back to the customers (and me!) Shooting down the line of the coffee bench, using such large apertures ( I didn't shoot above F2.8 once) I was able to shoot through the cafes equipment to introduce vignettes and interesting flares to help frame the subject and add a bit of visual interest.
Working details allowed the essay to come together.
and every Commercial client loves a bit of branding..
Here are the full job contact sheets, everything I sent to client, I have also posted them up on our website www.iconphotomedia.co.uk here you'll find contact sheets from other commercial photography assignments.
The Agency client was really happy with the job "Bloody Lovely, if the client doesn't like these we'll take them to Costa!" and I was really happy - you don't think anything went to waste do you?
