The Ritz and The Post Office Tower

We've just had another action packed week which culminated in a large awards video and photoshoot for the UK Cabinet Office on Thursday and our regular booking at The Ritz hotel in London.

Winner of a TW3 award

The Cabinet Office have an annual awards ceremony for the winners of their TW3 competition which sees the various Government departments entering their best agile working concepts for recognition. The days of people working 9-5 at the same desk day in day out are thankfully on the way out, and the TW3 program is all about helping people to develop a more flexible approach to work. We created a video and some stills to be played on the day before the awards began and we also photographed and video'd the event too. We had a crew of three and we used three Sony cameras to record the actual awards ceremony in the theatre with Jack running the show from the rear camera whilst watching a large monitor feed from the other two Sony's. We had a walkie talkie link up and Chris was operating the camera at the front near the stage. I took the still images and shot some B Roll on my 5d MK2.

Jack and Chris with two Sony's

We also had a Sony A7s MK2 and a set of LED panel lights set up outside to record interviews and again my trusty EOS 5d MK2 captured some B Roll and the stills.

On Friday I photographed the Philips Chairmans Awards at The Ritz which we are lucky to cover twice a year. The six best employees as voted for by their peers are invited to lunch at The Ritz with their partners, are treated to a suite for the night and show tickets too. I take the pictures and provide everyone with a leather bound album which captures their day.

We also had several client meetings last week which resulted in a few new booking for both stills and video, and we have just been commissioned to shoot for three days in Germany at the upcoming Light and Build show in Frankfurt.

One of the winners of the NHBC Supreme Award

We may well be off the Adu Dhabi too in April to the Lux Live show which will be a great experience. It will boost  the Airmiles a bit too!.


The previous Friday we had great fun shooting the Grand Finale of the NHBC Pride in the Job awards at the Intercontinental Hotel at Westminster Bridge in London. That was another long but rewarding day and the event went off really well. We are so lucky to have so many large clients and we do get spoiled on these super events!.

Happy New Year!

Well that's Christmas out of the way and we all feel refreshed here at Redshift Media Production after a good break. We started back last Tuesday and it was a really fantastic week back. We had a large project for the Cabinet Office signed off where we are videoing and photographing an upcoming event in London at the Post Office Tower. For this project we're using our Canon 5d MK2's and our Sony A7S2 for the roving footage and to capture interviews and we'll be using three Sony EX3 cameras to video the actual awards ceremony. We have a set of LED panel lights which can run off V lock batteries and these are perfect for lighting interviewees without having cables trailing everywhere.

We also had a smaller conference job confirmed where we'll use the 5d's to capture some interview and presentation footage for Havells Sylvania in London.

Two stills jobs were booked last week too including one at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford for Soraa lighting and another for corporate headshots in two office locations near Reading for a brand new client. All in all a pretty good week back at work.

Today I've taken a booking for a shoot at John Lewis in Birmingham so a good start to this week too.

Here's to a Happy New Year to all our friends and we hope you'll keep following our blog in 2016.

Christmas!

Well it's nearly Christmas and today we're finishing off some editing here in the edit suite with our clients from The Cabinet Office and we've also got some final retouching to do on some product photographs for a lighting company called Ceravision. Once that's all done we're breaking up for Christmas and we all feel ready for the break.

It's been a very busy year once again and we've moved the business along a great deal from where we were a year ago. Our turnover has been about the same but we've reduced our overhead substantially and we've also moved to a more modern office here in Milton Keynes.

We now have two websites to reflect the different sides to the business - one to showcase our video production work (www.redshift-media.co.uk) and one to highlight our architectural photography (www.redshift-photography.co.uk). We are also about to launch a new print sales website featuring our photographer David Thrower's personal work and the prints on sale will be ideal for boardrooms and meeting rooms etc. The site is still being built and the web address is www.davidthrowerphotography.co.uk so please check back in a couple of weeks and let us know how it looks.

Last week we took some pictures in our pop up studio of an up and coming model and actress called Georiga and here's a few of our favorite pictures from the shoot.

Considering this was her first time in front of the camera we think she did really well and shows some great promise.

For the technically minded reader we used three Bowens 500 heads to light Georgia and a Canon EOS 5d MK2 with Voigtlander 90mm f3.5 manual focus lens to capture the images. The workflow is then Lightroom for Raw conversion, Photoshop CS6 for additional retouching and the final colour profiling was done with DXO Filmpack.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all our clients for their support again this year and to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!.

See you in 2016!.

Greenhouse Photography on the Isle of Wight

Following on from a Christmas party shoot at Woburn Abbey last week I set off for the Isle of Wight yesterday to photograph a tomato growing greenhouse owned by Wight Salads - variation is the spice of life after all! . We do a lot of work for the various groups with Philips and this shoot was for their Horticulture division based in Holland as the LED lighting in the greenhouse was supplied by Philips.

I've only recently started working with the agriculture guys and they are great fun to work with as the brief includes lots of people shots which is great to do. The tricky thing is balancing the light. The LED lighting supplied is a very deep pink in colour which encourages the plants to grow more quickly and healthily. This makes taking pictures in the greenhouses very tricky indeed and I use some fill flash to help maintain a natural skin tone to the people in shot. 

Here's a quick test shot from the shoot of Monica the supervisor in the greenhouse I was working in.

Monica

The trip down was good and the Isle of Wight ferry was great!. It ran on time both yesterday and on today's return and the cafe and lounge areas were really clean and tidy. I stayed in a very nice hotel overlooking the sea too last night although I couldn't see the sea due to the heavy rain when I arrived - I just believed them when they said the view was good!.

It will take me a good day or so to properly edit these as I really need the colour balance to work so I'll be in the office tomorrow working through them in Lightroom and Photoshop.

I've recently been working with some Photoshop plug in's made by a company called Topaz Labs and I really recommend them. I use the Clarity, Adjust and De Noise filters and they to add to the final look of my pictures and they are very easy to use. Here's a link to their website https://www.topazlabs.com/ which is well worth a look.

Party Season

We shot our first Christmas Party last night for the lovely people at New Era Caps. This is our third year covering the event and they are a really cool client to work for and their staff are all really energetic and bubbly which comes across in the pictures. The event was held at The Sculpture Gallery at Woburn  which is a venue we work at fairly often.
The AV and sound was managed by Chameleon Events who did a great job as usual and we work with those guys too on many high end events and awards.

It was a late finish last night and it's off to the office now to process all the pictures and deliver them by lunchtime.
We love photographing and videoing awards ceremonies and parties as the atmosphere is always electric and it's great to be working as part of a team. We work closely with the client, event team and venue to make sure everything goes to plan.



Back at the office we had one our of regular video clients in yesterday morning to run through a series of podcasts which we have filmed and edited. Kate Russell of HR specialists Russell Consulting visited us for a couple of hours and went away with 11 30-40 second clips for their social media channels. This a great way promote your business and we highly recommend giving it a try.

Here's a link to a recent video podcast created for Kate - get in touch if you'd like us to create some great online content for your business - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-CVUXEyX_w

Welcome to our new Blogger blog!

Welcome to our new blog here on Google Blogger!.

We'll be regularly updating it with new stills and links to our latest video productions.

As you'll see from our bio we've been in business for over 14 years and we provide a top quality stills photography and video production service to our clients. We are lucky to have a great client list including the UK Cabinet Office, NHBC, Philips, BUPA, Marks and Spencer and many more.

We travel all over the UK and into Europe and in the past couple of weeks we've photographed three churches in Yorkshire, created a video at a BP facility in Aberdeen, interviewed a design engineer in Edinburgh and photographed a plant nursery in Cornwall!.

This week we've been a little closer to home and yesterday we filmed at DW Windsor a leading UK lighting manufacturer in Ware and today we've been to Buckingham Palace Gate in Central London to photograph a high end office.

Here's a quick shot from behind the camera's at yesterdays shoot were we interviewed some key members of staff for a corporate capability video :-

Interview Time!

We're finding that many of our clients are turning to video to showcase their talents and we are really happy to help out.

The secret to a good video production isn't just in the picture quality - sound is really key too and you can see our boom mic in the shot here capturing some lovely clean sound which we'll sync up during the edit.

To see some more of our video productions please check out our Vimeo channel :-

https://vimeo.com/redshiftmediaproduction

If you get time take a look at our two websites - www.redshift-media.co.uk and www.redshift-photography.co.uk 

Hopefully you'll follow us on our journey and we'll catch up with you again soon!.

In the meantime you can follow us on Twitter @redshift_media and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/redshiftmediaproduction/