Happy Birthday Icon!

By Matt Gore owner and founder iconphotomedia

There we were 10 years ago in The Tramshead pub just outside Saltaire (the Victorian model village near Bradford http://www.saltairevillage.info/), Guzelian photographers Matt Gore and Robin Hammond were hatching a plan to launch a photographer's agency that was to become iconphotomedia.

If memory serves me rightly (we were in the pub) some of the company names being banded around included:

Photo Republic
Untitled (we just got a kick out of visualising this in print as a byline)
M6 Pictures
Magenta 

Eventually, we agreed on iconphotomedia and have been lucky to be so well supported by a core of great clients for the last decade.

Our very first job - by Matt Gore for the Times Educational Supplement, who went on to become one of our biggest clients - was shot in Harrogate as Matt packed up his rental flat to move to London to start icon with Robin.

Picture by Matt Gore/iconphotomedia 

Graham Hoyle, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) published in the Times Educational Supplement

Even on the drive down to London, Matt stopped off in Leeds to shoot a commission for Leeds Metropolitan University..

Picture by Matt Gore/iconphotomedia
University students dress up WW2 style to entertain a local school visiting for a history lesson

Of course, we had no idea then that icon would go on to become such an outstanding success. In the early years we applied a very simple principle - to provide eye catching broadsheet style photography for a wide range of editorial and commercial clients. 

Here are some interesting numbers....

Heartfelt thanks to everyone who has helped icon survive and thrive over the past decade; our lovely clients and suppliers, a lot of which have become good friends, and also to our friends and family who have put up with the sometimes crazy lifestyle choice that is Professional Photography. 

Matt Gore

Our Christmas Card to you...

Merry Christmas from the team at iconphotomedia

Challenge the Norm - It's all in the Process

 By Matt Gore/photographer

Day to day jobs for Commercial clients may seem mundane and pedestrian to many Photographers but I have always liked the challenge. In my mind the ability to create striking photography in the most benign conditions is often what separates the average from the professional. 

The below job came in via an Agency on behalf of Directline Insurance. The Commission - to Photograph a client of Directline's picking up her newly repaired car from one of their Accident Repair centres. See what I mean?! ....But on reading more of the brief the Project Manager went on to request some images of the people involved in the process....hmmm now that's got potential!

I photographed each of the 5 specialists in the Spray Paint room lit with a Tulip style soft box single fabric skin baffle and a white disc baffle very high slightly camera right. I had a kicker light in the paint room blocked by the subject coming back to light the room and accent the subject.


The Directline Process - 

Mechanic - Panel Beater - Spray Painter - Quality Checker - Driver.

Learn with Internationally Acclaimed Photographer, Joe McNally, on KelbyTraining.com

I supplied the images like this in a Negative frame for Publication across a DPS the final image was of the Owner with her car that they used larger on the final page.

All in all a tidy little afternoon job 30mins from my house! 

Group shots........!!!

by Vicky Matthers

def  Group:  a number of persons or things ranged or considered together as being related in some way.

I'm not sure if you agree with me but group shots are a photographers nightmare, well, certainly mine anyway! I can honestly say that when a client mentions the word group shot I actually cringe and physically wince with pain!

I have always found it difficult to find suitable locations for large numbers of people without it starting to look like a football or rugby team photo!  You definitely need a good vantage point, especially with groups of 7 or more, stairs are often a good option if you can find them as long as you don't end up blocking any fire exits.  Of course the problem in our job is that you usually can't see the location beforehand and have about 5 minutes to make a decision as to where you are going to put a whole team of people that you have never met before and have no idea what they look like.....winge, winge, winge!!!

Recently I was lucky enough to do some photography for one of our regular clients in London.  The brief was to photograph a team of about 9/10 people looking happy and proud, hopefully in an outside location near the office.  The logistics of photographing outside in the centre of London are a bit of a nightmare, as you can imagine!  Even though we thought we had permission we found out on the morning of the shoot that we needed to get approval from the building management group.  Luckily the right person was found and permission granted about 30 minutes before the afternoon shoot!

I like to get to a shoot early to scope out a place, usually in a nice coffee shop nearby.  As I was sitting in a Starbucks opposite the offices I was going to I noticed a perfect place for my group shot:

I decided to light the picture very simply as I knew that I wouldn't have much time with the team as taking them away from their office meant there was no-one there so we had to be quick!  I used one Quadra light with shoot through brolly slightly left at the front and one Quadra light far left up high to catch the tallest person of the team at the back!

All things considered I think that it was a success, I just wish that I could transport those concrete blocks with me everywhere!!!

The Currency of Ideas

Our 2013 website revamp has just gone live...
by Matt Gore/iconphotomedia

Light It, Shoot It, Retouch It! Learn Photography and Photoshop Online with Scott Kelby!



www.iconphotomedia.com

Yep, I have been busying myself with editing, image selection, photoshop, html code and various vectors, buttons, textures and backgrounds. With a little help from a template and lots of midnight oil we have finished the revamp of our main website as part of our ongoing 2013 strategy. 

I'll post lots more visuals with a step by step on how I produced the website and created the visuals at a later date.
It's all part of our idea to evolve iconphotomedia and what we offer our clients in light of new technology and the changes in Visual Communications. Photography has changed along with the huge improvements in  communications. As a result Advertising has been flipped on it's head so traditional media outlets are rapidly changing to keep up. Rather than see all this as a negative (fitting pun) we Photographers should embrace the new opportunities. Ideas are our commodity - creativity is the currency of ideas and we are all wonderfully placed to realise this and use technology to expand those ideas. Think big as the World has just got a little smaller...

Here's a taster of some of the new look....









Hope you all like it...

www.iconphotomedia.com

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

Corporate Photography

By Matt Gore - london based icon staff photographer 


We shoot a lot of corporate photography a lot...often this isn't without its challenges.
Magnolia walled meeting rooms, a giant conference table, three suits and 10 mins isn't exactly easy.
I use a variety of technique and photo kit to makes things interesting, nearly always that's a 'down n dirty' approach - (down n dirty is my affectionate term for the use of speedlights over remote studio packs)
You have to be quick and able to change things up and react to new opportunities during the shoot, often you have to change location several times during the job. I have learnt from bitter experience that the best pre lit ideas and locations can often be shot down when the executive arrives. I once spent 45 mins pre-lighting a honda sports car in the reception of honda's uk headquarters, moving the vehicle around, setting up an elinchrom octa with a couple of gridded kickers for the grill and underneath the car only to be told on his arrival he wants to be photographed outside with a honda mower!
The problem doing commercial work is you're often photographing the person who pays the bill - if this had been an editorial shoot I could insist that we do the car shot 'as nothing else will get in' but I need to work again so ...'where's this mower then?'

The use of ringflash and a simple bold colour

Ambient lighting in the shadow of an office building. I liked the colour palette 

I used a single gridded speedlight camera left, and dropped the ambient exposure. This help clean up the messing office background that was visible through the glass in the background.

Nikon SB800 in a chimera softbox camera left and high. 

Every now you get to photograph someone who practically makes the picture themselves, this is a fantastically friendly an energetic frenchmen at Orange. Not everyday you get a vice president to do this!