Food Glorious Food

We've been very busy with food photography lately and we have been taking pictures for British Bakels who make ingredients for many high street supermarket bakeries.

We love visiting their bakery centre as the smell of the bread is so lovely and we always get treated so well and have lots of samples to eat whilst we are there.

We also took some pictures for a new start up in Bicester called Mi Burger. These guys make super tasty burgers all using locally sourced meat and ingredients. The burgers are really delicious and I think these guys may well be onto a winning formula.

Here's a few pictures from these shoots

Competition Success and Photography Workshops

Screen grab from the Colour Awards

I usually enter two competitions each year - the Spider Awards for black and white photography and The International Colour Awards. I've had some good success with images being nominated and one honourable mention. The International Colour Awards have just listed the winners and this time both my pictures have received an honourable mention so I am really pleased.
Here's a link to the website https://www.colorawards.com/gallery/

A shot from the recent workshop of one of our students

The commercial photography work has been steady since Christmas even though this is usually a quiet time of year for us. As out work is 99% business to business we always have a slight down time in February and March as our clients are coming to the end of their financial year. Once the new marketing budgets are in place from April 1st we get very busy again.

As I've had time I have started a photography workshop side to the business and we had the first workshop a couple of weeks ago. I base these at the lovely Devere Horwood Estate and we have a mix of theory and practical photography out in the gardens. The workshop went really well and all the students gave me really good feedback which was fab.

I have two more planned in the coming couple of months and you can book in here :-

https://www.davidthrowerphotography.co.uk/book-online

Another shot from the recent workshop of one of our students

Please do spread the word about the workshops as they do offer great value for money at £95 each for the basics of photography course which includes a hot three course lunch and is limited to just 4 people. This means I can spend time with everyone and tailor the course to each person.

The studio basics course is £125 and the extra fee is to cover the cost of a model.

Medical Detection Dogs

It was a lovely clear but cold day yesterday and perfect winter light for some drone shots. I had promised my friends at the Medical Detection Dogs (a wonderful charity that I volunteer for as a photographer) some drone shots of the work in progress of their new building so I popped along with the Phantom 4 Pro and took some shots.

Medical Detection Dogs HQ

 After the drone shots we took each of the wonderful dogs out into the garden for a quick portrait shoot so there is a good stock of images for when each dog wins the "dog of the week" competition!.

All the dogs have loving foster homes and are dropped off to the centre each day (3-4 days per week so days off too) to do their amazing work of sniffing out cancer in urine samples.

Please visit the website for more information on this really great charity - https://www.medicaldetectiondogs.org.uk/

Bumper 

I love all the dogs but I do have a big soft spot for Bumper - he is a big cuddly Golden Retriever and apparently his deep gold colour if the original colouring for the breed although the light gold is the modern favourite and the most common.

Charity Work and Aerial Photography

Tony and Jane Henman

It's always good to put something back and we represent several charities here at Redshift Photography and this month I have been busy with three of them. I did a shoot for the Freemasons to promote their grant giving work last week when I photographed two senior guys from the Bucks Province at Willen Hospice alongside one of the lovely nurses that work there. The Masons had donated £3,000 to buy a special chair which enables the patients so lay back or sit upright via a motor in the chair itself.

Ride High and the Freemasons

Willen Hospice Chair Donation

Later in the week I took some pictures at Ride High in Milton Keynes which is a splendid charity that helps young people with confidence issues due to bullying or learning difficulties to build their self esteem by learning to ride. Many of the young people make a very close bond with the horses and they gain a tremendous amount from the time they spend at the centre.



Finally today I photographed Tim Henman's Mum and Dad at Medical Detection Dogs in Gt Horwood as they were visiting the centre and had helped to organise a donation of tennis balls for the dogs to play with from the ATP tennis circuit.

Tomorrow I have a shoot with some Chinese diplomats and next week I'm shooting food at a gourmet burger bar - plenty of variety!.

Food Photography and Trains in Norwich

British Bakels

We had a very enjoyable day photographing cakes and bread at the British Bakels baking center in Bicester. I used three Godox AD180 flashes with a special high speed flash trigger to capture the action as the flour and chocolate toppings were added. Toni my colleague kept a keen eye on the compositions spotting any background clutter that I might have missed through the viewfinder and helped to move the lighting around. The shoot lasted around 6 hours with a break for a lovely lunch kindly supplied by the guys from Bakels and the day was a great success. We are currently post processing the final selected images but I have dropped in a couple of my personal favourites here.

Crown Point Depot

I also photographed Crown Point railway depot this week which was a treat for me as I love trains (I am not a spotter by the way!) and the focus of the shoot was the new LED lighting supplied by UK lighting manufacturer Carbon8 http://carbon8lighting.co.uk/ who manufacture a range of industrial lighting products. The shoot was great fun and I even managed to get a shot on top of a scaffolding overlooking the engines in the repair shed.

Nest week we have some street lighting to photograph in Oxford and we are doing a food shoot for an artisan bakery so more nice food shots to come!.

Bicester Scramble Car Meet

We are very luck to have had quite a few bookings for photography and video sincec we came back after the Christmas break so the new few weeks are looking very busy. I might have a couple of bookings for the drone too.

E Type Jaguar Rolleiflex T

In the meantime I've been out every day shooting medium format film with my Hasselblad 500C and Rolleiflex T cameras. I love Ilford HP5 Plus and FP4 for medium format and I process this at home. I don't have a full darkroom so develop the film using a darkbag to get it onto the spirals and then once the film is dry I photograph the negatives on a light box and use Photoshop to convert them to positive images. I find this to be a good compromise and a lot faster than using a flatbed scanner.

Porsche 911 Hasselblad 500C

I also have a Pentax 67 which I tend to use for studio work as it's so big and heavy but it is a lovely camera too. The Hasselblad is lovely but a little temperamental at times and occasionally jams and you have to remember to shoot it carefully and to follow a routine of winding on, darkslide out and firing the shutter without trying to remove the lens or back if the darkslide isn't in place and the shutter is wound on. Of them all the Rolleiflex is the easiest to use. It's light and easy to load and unload and the fixed 75mm Zeiss lens provides beautiful images.

I urge you all to shoot film. If you don't have a film camera you can still get bargains online (especially 35mm kit) but prices are on the increase as film makes a comeback.

I'm running another photography workshop in March (max 6 places) and I still have three places left so please get in touch if you would like to come along.

Jaguar XJ220 Rolleiflex T

Ferrari Dino Hasselblad 500C

The Bicester car scramble is a fab event which happens every 3 months at the very cool Bicester Heritage Aerodrome. It's only a few quid to get in and the cars on show are fab. There were literally hundreds of classic cars there and I took my own lovely Jaguar XJ6 along too. It's a great opportunity to photograph some very rare cars and there are plenty of great food and coffee stalls there too.

Here's a link to the website - http://bicesterheritage.co.uk/tickets/sunday-scramble-tickets/

Welcome back after Christmas!

Christmas flew past and here we are back at work again!.
We've already got a busy January with several booking in the diary and quite a few jobs about to be added too. A lot of our work comes in at the last minute but we have already got some dates in for February, March and April which is great news.

 We also had a busy December and I've included a couple of shots from one of my favourite shoots of the month - 111 Buckingham Palace Road in London. I photographed this same interior a few years ago and it was interesting to go back and photograph it again after an extensive refurbishment. The lighting has been very skillfully designed by Hoare Lea Lighting and the colour temperature over the escalators is a warm 3000K whilst the lighting in the main reception area is a cooler 4000K to accentuate the different areas.

I always think shots like these need a careful mix of balance and perspective. When we photography interiors we use tilt shift lenses to keep the walls of the buildings straight and vertical. I often see wide angle interior shots where the camera has been tilted up resulting in converging verticals which makes the space look distorted. I like to include blurred people movement too if at all possible to give a sense of scale to the interior and a human element to the pictures. It's a fact that we are all attracted to images that have people in rather than empty spaces.

It's time for me to power up the drone again too as I haven't flown it for a few weeks. We have a booking in February for aerial photography so I need to get all the firmware updated and spend a couple of days taking some new portfolio shots. We have had a steadily increasing demand for the drone which is great news as I haven't really promoted that heavily.