editorial and lifestyle photographers

21 Mar 2013

The importance of doing nothing!

by Matt Gore/iconphotomedia

Hi All, 

Yes bit of an Intriguing title.. 
For us it's a mantra, I mean it, it refers to our mindset when a few of us get together to goof about. 
We do test sessions where we may want to try a certain technique or look, but often is equally productive to just play about, have fun and achieve nothing!

One idea we often use is to take a lens, camera, light whatever and see how many looks/uses we can make from it. It tests your creativity and often results in some interesting discoveries. 
The important thing is to try not to be quick to judge and or be too results focused. Go with it, do some goofy stuff be child like, contradict yourself. 

Now I could show you all sorts of pictures from these sessions but in reality they don't cut it...but then that's the point!

Here's some shot a week ago that did work though and resulted in a technique I used to illustrate a story idea a magazine had...







and then used live on the client job. The Magazine article was entitled 'Outside looking In' referring to the recruitment policy of this particular company hiring highly skilled experienced staff from outside the sector.



A simple discovery using the Elinchrom Quardra ECO ringflash hand held. Great on some business jobs where the location offers little in the way of interesting backgrounds or details and time is often of the essence...isn't it always these days!?

The additional kicks you see to our faces in the studio pictures are created using a large silver brolly camera right (with CTO gel) and behind and a strip box camera left and behind. 
The images shot on the job were ringflash and softbox camera right, then comp'ed as a triplet in Photoshop. 

And here are one or two more from the shoot with the good people at The Richmond Housing Partnership in London.






All good fun and looking forward to seeing what the designers do with the layout