editorial and lifestyle photographers

Showing posts with label flashcentre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flashcentre. Show all posts

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


7 Sept 2010

And we're off!

By Matt Gore/iconphotomedia


This is it the start of the icon blog....







We couldn't see the point of it and I'm sure we'll regret it, we'll think it's too much work and we won't have time for it, but we'll get addicted to it and busy ourselves posting, until such time when we won't be able to fit in any work and subsequently have nothing to write about....




welcome everyone, I hope you find it of interest!


Photograph above, shot at the flash centre, Leeds by Vicky Matthers (Vicky will post shot details in the comments section) These guys are the best, they're friendly, helpful, very knowledgeable and have been a pretty essential part of our supply line since we started back in 2005. I just wish we could have the same relationship with London as we do with Leeds though, I guess that's the big smoke effect...oh and the rather important fact that Leeds you can pull up in the car park and have a quick cuppa, plus Russ and Graham are all round good eggs! 
New account or purchase of new kit is thoroughly recommended here, they offer unsurpassed knowledge on all things lighting, they're also a dab hand at advice on moving, well.. to all things moving, the 'darkside' as we refer to the world of moving film and video. 


last week we had our first client request 'do you do video? 


icon: First thought was 'can we wing it, can't be that hard?
client: it's a 'battle of the bands' six to ten acts to film and record sound at a major London venue, then post on the clients website for the public to vote in a X factor style, all in 2 hours shot/recorded.
icon: errm..sound?!?!


We referred the client to some dedicated video guys www.stillmoving.net and top photographer and film/video man www.drewgardner.co.uk and decided to double our efforts in thinking about trying to decide upon when we'll start the process to get into video! : )