Witty Words or Pretty Pictures?

In the eight years I’ve worked with Greg on many different projects, we’ve often debated whether marketing vehicles such as websites, brochures, leaflets, reports and advertisements should be image-led or word-led.

His mantra has always been that a picture says a thousand words; my view is that the best selling and most influential book of all time never had any pictures in it!

Ultimately, it’s about working together for the client and over time we’ve developed a very easy communication style with each other. He tolerates my often unique artistic direction and I’ve learnt to keep my mouth shut when he spends 30 minutes just setting up the lighting when we’re in a busy location! What always unites us is during the post production stage when we sit, over several mugs of tea, seeing the emergence of jaw-dropping images that make us both grin like Cheshire cats.

So as his guest blogger this month, what should I be writing about here? Do I impart valuable wisdom about key word saturation versus relevance for websites and how Google Pandas have taken over from the previous spiders? Are you more interested in hearing about content marketing and how to it fits within integrated marketing communication strategies? If I haven’t lost you yet, then please stay with me because that’s as bad as it gets! You see, my biggest belief when it comes to writing – whether online or offline – is that you have to make it interesting.

So if you’ve been reading Greg’s previous posts here it’s because I’ve encouraged him to write about what photography enthusiasts want to know, such as how the shoot went or the challenges he faced. And it’s the same when I’m writing for commercial real estate sustainability consultants or outdoor military fitness companies, I talk about the stuff that’s interesting.

Ultimately, what makes a good copywriter or a good commercial photographer is the inherent trait of being very nosey. Both Greg and I are very comfortable in asking clients a myriad of questions all the way through projects – “Why do you stick them on that way?” “Does that hurt?” “Who thought of pushing them together?” – if you’re genuinely interested in what the client does then your work – whether words or pictures – will reflect their business in a fascinating way.

Although I’ve still yet to fully understand why it takes Greg half an hour to set up a simple light!

You can get in touch with Suzanne and follow her regular blog at www.wordofmouthassociates.co.uk - I highly recommend it.

I was recently invited to present a portfolio of work to the University of Lincoln in an effort to obtain a long term University photography commission. After being interviewed  alongside 5 other hopefuls, I was fortunate enough to be selected as their official photographer. Awesome! It’s always a real boost to pick up a new client, but a ‘puff-your-chest-out’coup when you’re being measured against 5 other professional photographers. As I understand it, my work stood out above the competition not only in the quality and consistency of the work which of course is important, but in how I demonstrated and showcased my skills to them. I wanted to give you a quick insight as to how I approach all my presentations to potential clients.

I’ve attended a good many interviews and portfolio reviews over the years and although I’ve not always come away successful, I’ve always tried to learn from the experience and to gain feedback that will help me to prepare better for next time. On the failed interviews I’ve always sought cold, hard, honest feedback, this is extremely important if you’re going to make changes that will bring you greater success in future. Unfortunately getting this valuable feedback, is almost impossible as people rarely like to give negative criticism. I personally think long term success is all about identifying the negatives or weaknesses and turning them into positives.

For this particular blog piece I wanted to concentrate on how I showcase my images. My methods have changed drastically over the past few years, mostly inspired by technology and driven by convenience. Long ago, I’d drag a huge A3 printed portfolio around, multiple sleeves and tear sheets. Great looking initially, badly organised, gets tatty really quickly and difficult to update with new work easily. I then I moved to a less than portable 20″ iMac, the screen was rich, bright and fabulous looking and I could store and organise all my images in high res. Great. The clients used to love looking at it, but I used to wonder if they were more interested in the iMac than the pictures,but quiet frankly  the weight was crippling to move around any sort of distance.

These days I have a very simple, portable solution. Not a laptop, but the iPad. The difference this one tool has made to my business presentations is incredible. When the iPad first came out I was in the middle of considering a laptop to show my work. I didn’t need the processing power of a real computer, I’ve got more than enough of those already. I was sceptical about how useful it would be and was a little concerned about it’s 10 inch screen size, but knew I needed a bright crisp display that could organise, enlarge and display my images with ease. I invested and since then the iPad goes almost everywhere with me. When required, I load up a customised presentation specific to the sector or speciality of the business that I’m speaking to. I pass the iPad across and let the clients flick through it themselves. I find the tactile nature of this item mixed with its super clean clear display a real clincher when it comes to nailing a show and tell. Sure there’s plenty of photographic purists that would prefer to leaf through a bromide print stock, but for busy clients trying to visualise how my images will play within their marketing strategy the iPad as a presentation tool for me wins hands down. There’s a huge array of apps that you can use to showcase your images too, but I prefer the pre-installed photo app, its simple and slick to use, no delay or lag prior to starting the presentation. This is a really good device for selling your creative skills and talents as you can demonstrate not only stills but also movies you might make too.

I love that the device gets out the way of the images; its unobtrusive and serves as a great tool for sending examples of your work after the meeting should the client request any images from your presentation. I’ve still got the 1st generation iPad, but for now it keeps winning me work and paying for itself over and over again. Other than my camera kit, its been the next best investment for winning me work.

Click on the main above image to see a small set of images that was shown in the 20 min interview and portfolio review. If you’d like to view a testimonial from Salford University marketing about my work click here.

Salford University's Acoustics Brochure

Undergraduate Poster

How do you present or win work for your business? What works best for you? I’d love to know. Please share your comments below.

Following my previous post of preparing to photograph in cold conditions. One of the biggest challenges I found of photographing in a snowy location was getting around the various snow and ice circuits; as anything away from the driving track was pretty deep snow. This required the use of snow shoes which was novel for a day, but after that just hard work. One upside though was there was no chance of getting cold, as just walking through deep snow and carrying a heavy back pack with cameras and various lenses was hot and pretty exhausting work.

Click on the image to enlarge.

On the first day I scoped out the courses to get my track bearings and to get handle on the best vantage points to see the cars coming around corners at speed and to try to anticipate when most of the action is likely to occur. I wanted to be able to provide images from viewpoints which obviously showed the track, but could easily pass as shots taken from a road side of a typical winter road. Typically of course, these were areas of the course that were only accessible by foot.

Weather conditions across the week varied considerably, everything from heavy snow to beautifully crisp blue sky days. The temperature remained fairly constant thorough-out the week and another problem when photographing in this sort of environment is keeping the batteries warm. All batteries suffer in extreme conditions, they drain very quickly and the last thing I needed was a dead camera. Old batteries in particular are hit hardest, so I bought so brand new ones before I flew out and I packed some air activated hand warmers, these last for up to 8hours, although they don’t last that long in very low temperatures and drop off pretty quickly after 5 hours.  After I made this video I even took to wrapping the batteries and warmers together in a large cleaning cloth. This ensured that the batteries remained in contact with the warmers.

Poor visibility and low contrast played a big part during the week and at times made shooting almost impossible. Thankfully the good days were exceptionally good and we were able to tick a lot off the shoot brief within a fairly short space of time.

Photographing the ice straight track.

On the fine weather days I concentrated on creating some marketing and advertising images for the client and on the bad weather days I made sure that the guests were more heavily featured. Heavy falling snow causes lots of problems for shooting cars travelling at speed. The light suffers really badly, the resultant scene is extremely flat and with low contrast ambient light it makes it difficult for the camera autofocusing system to nail the focus. It not much fun for the drivers either, on the ice tracks the falling snow was a much bigger problem even a small amount of snow layered on ice makes the track un-driveable and dangerous, so on bad days the ice circuit would have to close.

One thing I hadn’t anticipated was the volume of images or data I’d shoot throughout the week. Not having done a great deal of track photography before, on the first day I was shooting in RAW (my default shooting mode) and burst through 25+ gigs of data. First day, yikes!! I wouldn’t be able to sustain that burn rate and I’d run out of back up space fast. I decided I was either going to have to be super concise in my shooting, deleting as I go or start shooting high res JPEG’s. I switched to jpeg to test the scenes exposure latitude and was pleasantly surprised at the results. I had to be super accurate with the exposure but it was a trade off I could live with. My final plan was to shoot all the track and performance testing in High Res JPEG and move back to RAW for the important marketing and advertising work. This worked like a charm and my burn rate dropped to a more sustainable 8-10 Gb’s per day.

Tyre performance around the ice circuit.

Overall the week long shoot was a huge success, after each day of shooting it’d be back to the hotel to download and backup the images, clean off the cards ready for the next days shooting and if time allowed, quickly process a few up in Lightroom to show the client for the following morning’s review. I managed to get some super advertising and marketing shots for GT Radial, which have surpassed their expectations for what was possible on the shoot.  When I get the o.k from GT Radial I’ll upload a few of them to show you. I’m be super excited when I they start using them in their marketing material. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime I’ve got some exposure in the Tyres and Accessories trade magazine, who are running a feature on winter tyres and my images feature pretty highly throughout. Again, when it’s published I’m drop you a link.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and if you like the images feel free to ‘Like’ or share the post with others. Until next time.

As a commercial photographer being asked by a major tyre brand to photograph one of their most important corporate marketing events in the UK can be pretty daunting, but when GT Radial told me that their event was taking place within the Arctic Circle (where the weather was likely to be -20 centigrade) and over a very full week, frankly I started to feel a little nervous.

Background info

The corporate event photographs were to capture the winter tyres performing in some of the harshest of winter conditions. The setting for this event was the highly secure Test World in Ivalo, Finland. This is located some 2000km from the North Pole. Test World is well known in the automotive industry as one of the premier facilities for winter testing and boasts 26 specialist winter (ice/snow) terrains and tracks, each designed to test the limits of the cars/tyres performance in some pretty extreme conditions. Major tyre & car manufacturers use this facility as a proving ground in which to collect sensitive data on prototype vehicles and tyres. Due to the confidential nature of their business and their reputation with major automotive brands, the centre is extremely restrictive on who has access to this facility and understandably cautious about letting an (unknown to them) UK commercial photographer into their classified areas. Understandably there was an initial rejection from the centre and the project seemed lost, but clearance was eventually received after GT obtained exclusivity of Test World for the week.

Superb! I’m in, so now what…start to panic… No. Start to plan.

 Initial concerns:

Whenever you take on anyone’s photographic work, the concerns are always fairly similar; what time, where, how much kit will I need, when do they need the images by etc. However those concerns are doubled when photographing abroad (as there’s no quick popping back to base to fetch the missing item) and then tripled when coupled with a remote location and extreme weather conditions. I had to pack enough camera kit to allow for redundancy should the worst happen, (this is likely in very cold conditions) and then consider how to store and back up the files generated on the shoot.

In a previous post I put together a little movie to go cover some of the camera equipment packed, I tried to keep it as light and portable as possible. I wasn’t sure of the conditions I was going to face when I finally arrived there so flexibility and redundancy were given a high priority. Failure was not an option.

Getting my kit there and back again in one piece was paramount, so I took the ThinkTank International v2.

The ThinkTank International v2

This case offers great storage capacity, plenty of packing alternatives and it’s an all round high quality supportive case that conforms to all the current flight restrictions. Gone are the dys of trowing a few rolls of film into the case, so a mixture of large capacity CF cards, computer laptop and various backup drives where included to ensure the safe return of the files and to be able to show the client the previous days work. In addition to the Think Tank case I took my trusty Crumpler Shinkler a packback with lots of room and decided that once there I’d decant the items I needed into the Crumpler on a day-to-day basis.

This video shows the kit on the shoot within the Crumpler back pack.

On the next blog post I’ll take you through the location and the snowy environment and show you some tips to keeping batteries alive in sub-zero conditions.

In the meantime click on the main picture above to see some of the images from the shoot.

This image was taken at MediaCity UK as part of a series of recently commissioned night photography around Manchester. I’ve photographed a good many Manchester buildings at one time or another, but this one of the new BBC headquarters stood out as a bit special so I thought I’d share.

This time of year is perfect for photographing outdoors at night or at twilight. The late evening light is beautiful to work with. The image above was created with a small amount of post-production in Lightroom and has not been anywhere near a HDR processor.

If you’d like to have your business premises photographed at twilight, dusk or night time then get in touch.

Hi all, just before my snowy commercial shoot in Finland next week, I thought I’d share a quick video of what I’m packing for the week long shoot. I’m trying to cover a lot of bases and given the scope of the brief, I think what I’ve packed will give me some flexibility and importantly redundancy should the worst happen. Fingers crossed it won’t.

Anyway here is the first of a few posts about the journey and the shoot whilst I’m there.

Click the video below to see a quick break down of the packed kit.

Keep warm, see you soon.

We would like to thank Greg for asking us to write a guest blog.  We have worked with Greg Harding on many projects over the years.

As a commercial office refurbishment company we operate throughout the UK.  With over 20 years experience in the office interior design arena, we offer a blend of practical experience, office refurbishment, space planning and design skills to provide the ultimate in office refurbishment.

We work across a number of sectors including commercial, education, manufacturing, professional services and healthcare and provide a complete project management service. We ensure each and every job we undertake is successfully delivered, allowing the client to concentrate on running their business.

Typical mood board and detailed plans from Blessed Thomas Holford

We start by taking an initial brief to gain an understanding of the client’s requirements and vision so that we can provide the best possible solutions.

Our design experience helps us to ensure that the environment can be planned as cost effectively as possible, whilst still creating an exciting infrastructure for the people using the space.

Click the image above to see more pictures from Whitespace Consultants BTH project

We pay just as much attention to delivery and installation as we do to the initial design and planning.  By working closely with the client we agree the best times and dates to carry out the works, resulting in minimum disruption.

Our full office design and refurbishment service enables the client to have everything completed from a single source; building work, office partitioning, flooring, decoration, signage, window blinds, even plants and pictures.  As a result they have one point of contact to ensure a seamless transformation.

Offices today are the life blood of a business.  We cannot do tomorrow’s work in yesterday’s office.  We have to work smarter to be effective.  If you’d like to know more about what we do, please visit our website at www.whitespace.org.uk and do not hesitate to contact us should you require any further information.

I was recently asked by a local PR agency to cover an opening of a Health clinic, not that interesting you say. Maybe not, but the celebrity opening the Culcheth Health Clinic was the legend James Cracknall.

I accepted and was given a brief. I probed for more backstory and for the reason the 2 time Gold Olympian was interested in this particular Clinic. It’s been widely publicised that James had a pretty major (near death) head injury and it took months to recover with rehab. That’s where this clinic comes in as James is local to Culcheth and the Health clinic has brand new facilites specifically aimed at people recovering from serious injury and providing top class rehabilitation services.

 Click on the image to see more from the shoot.

The photography brief was pretty loose: James + public | James with rehab equipment | James opening ceremony | Anything else.

Needless to say, James was an absolute gentleman, (seriously good looking for the girls), generous with his time and open to photo suggestions. He’s a remarkable man and led an amazing life so far and yet, he still continues to push his limits and that inspires those around him. Legend.

Here's 5 quick pointers for capturing better Public Relations or Press images.

The tail-end of last year saw global tyre manufacturer GT Radial, commission Greg Harding Photography for a quick one-off corporate photography session. The purpose was to create ‘character driven’ portrait images for use on the website and for a press release profile to mark the new appointment. The brief consisted of creating images that would showcase the new European Director and provide images that would capture his personality and character. Up until now the only images they had, had been captured by an enthusiastic amateur and they were unsuitable for use on GT Radial’s corporate website and professional marketing literature.

I travelled to GT Radial headquarters in Manchester and had a quick 5 min conversation with the director about his background and his approach to business. During this period that I studied his facial expressions and mannerisms, as with most professional portraits the majority of time on the shoot is spent building a relaxed and easy rapport with the client and then creating a look that suits their style.

The shoot took about 20 mins (about the length of a coffee break) and took place in a spare meeting room (not a large room by any means), but what was more important was the reduction in down-time for this very busy director.

Since that initial introduction to the company, we’ve photographed the majority of the European team and created new images for their new truck tyre remould range.

GT Radial have been very pleased with the quality of images and service offered and I am pleased to confirm that they’ve named Greg Harding Photography as their Official European Photographer.

We’ve since been working closely with the marketing heads at GT Radial to support the existing marketing strategy and to develop new images that will further enhance the European division’s activities.

There’s some very exciting commercial projects coming up this year, so check back soon for more news.

To read about and to see other corporate portraiture click here.