We recently had the great pleasure of working alongside Bolton Independent School.
Bolton School is an amazing independent day school in Bolton, Greater Manchester. It has a large in take of approximately 2,500 pupils, that span an age range from around nursery (0 years) through to sixth form (18 years).
The school age ranges are spilt into 8 distinct divisions.
We were tasked with creating images that would be used in their marketing and specifically to be used on their website headers to highlight each division.
This was an exciting challenge, working with many moving factors. The weather was a large unknown for the outdoor locations.
In order to create the very best Hero images we planned the shots with specific locations in mind. That required a few reccy's on Bolton's campus to look over and the discuss options whilst on location. We worked closely with Bolton School marketing personnel to exchange ideas and prepare the areas prior to the shoot dates.
With great care and a lot of logistical planning on Bolton's behalf, we arranged to shoot the Hero images.
Each shoot need to be shot with maximum flexibility in mind. The images were composed to allow branding to be easily placed, flexibility in composition and so we could rotate different students in and out of the frame to get the best look and offer the most options.
Using a technique of layering we were able to shoot the location from a fixed location, whilst exposing for all the different elements that would need to be combined. For example if inside, exterior light coming from windows, interior class room and highlighting the students to provide a focus of attention.
We also controlled the elements of the foreground, mid-ground and background. Switch students around and ensuring the props and tasks looked appropriate to the age groups.
All these elements and the various exposures were then combined onto layers in Photoshop to create one final image. This gives maximum flexibility and control of what, who and where the subjects are in the frame.
One of the largest benefits of working like this is the ability to photography multiple students and incorporate them into one image.
Working with children especially very young children can be extremely challenging, they get bored easily and move around a lot! So trying to create a very crafted image from a single shot just isn't realistic.
This is a much slower capture process and more time consuming in post-production, but the result is much more polished and controllable output.
You can see the final images being used in content.
