Last Thursday I was asked to help take photos of a number of publicity stunts to promote the new film Frank, which is out this Friday (9th May). My client, the company who came up with the ideas, have provided some interesting work in the past, so I was looking forward to an enjoyable day; I wasn’t disappointed. Here are some of the planned and—even better—unplanned moments that happened that day…
I had another shoot with some Icelandic people based in London for my Icelanders in London project on Saturday – you can see the stories of Rannveig and Clara, as well as all the other Icelanders who have been involved so far, over at the project website.
If you’re reading this, and you are Icelandic and live in London, please get in touch if you’d like to be involved.
This London based furniture showroom sells a range of high end Italian designed furniture. While I was at the shoot, a couple had flown over from Bermuda and were discussing their requirements with one of the staff. Many of the units on display here fetch four or even five-figure prices, so not the sort of thing you’d find in the January furniture sales as advertised on the TV after Christmas!
The London store is a franchise, operating under the name of the furniture manufacturer but being run as a separate company. They had shown me the catalogue produced by the Italian franchisor to give an indication of the sort of images they wanted. I composed the images to capture narrow colour palettes and desaturated the images very slightly to match the mood of the images from the catalogue I had been shown.
With hotel interiors, the emphasis is generally on the space, with the size of the space an important consideration, so wider lenses (around 16mm) are usually preferred. However when shooting furniture, you’re concentrating more on elements, so I stuck with a 24mm lens for most of the shots, shifting the lens slightly where needed.
At times the angles needed meant shifting the lens horizontally to ensure the strict horizontal and vertical lines were retained, even when not aligned with the centre of the object:
I always take longer lenses with me to interior shoots as the detail shots can be as effective as the wider images:
Of course for the shots of the whole showroom, it was necessary to go a bit wider, and from the elevated perspective I had to take full advantage of the shift capability of my 17mm lens:
As you can see from the plum-coloured pedestal, when shifted this much, the distortion can be quite extreme, so you need to be very careful using these lenses with elements that are visible at the extreme edges of the frame.
Once again this is an example of looking the other way. As part of my work as the London photographer for Hotel Tonight, I have been sent to some pretty spectacular hotels and apartments in and around the capital. One of the ones that impressed me most in 2012 was CitizenM London Bankside, part of a Dutch chain of hotels which feature identical budget rooms alongside highly decorated public areas. The Bankside hotel is in a converted office building and features automated check-in via computer terminals and a wooden spiral staircase from the ground to the first floor.
I love spirals, in nature or otherwise, so I set my camera on the tripod at the bottom of the staircase and pointed straight up. Craning my neck to view the display on the back of the camera, no doubt attracting puzzled looks from hotel guests and staff, I aimed the camera up along the axis of the spiral staircase towards the black globular lampshades hanging from the first floor ceiling, and ended up with a photo that is almost abstract, fooling the eye with the combination of sweeping curves and radiating wooden slats.
I’ve taken hundreds of photos of hotels over the past two years, but this one is probably my favourite still.
An acronym from my former life working in finance there for you: Year to Date. Anyway, for no reason other than I want to (and it’s my blog, so why not?) here, in no particular order, is a selection of photos from my year so far. It’s been a good year; mostly interiors but with some variety, as well as the start of my personal project, Icelanders in London.
Prints of some of my images are available at nickminers.com/prints. Â Proceeds from the prints you buy go towards helping me pursue my personal projects. Thank you, and enjoy!
