Contacting Industry Professionals

As part of the research for this report, I have contacted two photographers, and two architecture firms, so ask for their insight into their respective industries, and asking for information in regards to the professional relationships between photographers and architects. Below are my conversations with Neil Perry Photographic and James Billett, an architectural photographer and property photographer respectively.

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For the sake of variety, I have contacted both an architectural photographer, whose main clients are architects; and a property photographer, whose main clients are estate agents.  I used the same approach for architects firms, this time choosing a smaller firm (James Wells), and a much larger firm (Foster + Partners), in order to see how the relationship changes as a firm grows.

Foster and Partners – Architects

James Wells Architects

Design Elements

Design elements in a typical magazine.

• Headline / Standfirst / Byline
  • Fairly self explanatory. This introduces the article hints at the content. The byline can sometimes be found in the gutter.

• Body Copy

• Pull Quote
  • Usually an extract from the body copy, can be used to sum up important details and draw people into the content.

• Drop Cap
  • Signifies the start of the copy. The first letter of the first word in the first paragraph is increased in size, and can be followed by the remainder of the first word being in full caps.

• Subhead
• Image Caption

• Slug
  • A running design element if content runs into several pages. Usually small and indiscreet. In this example, the segment about Myanmar’s internet adoption runs across six pages, and this slug is found somewhere on each spread.

• Folio
  • Any text found in the margin, usually the publication name, page number, and a website.

 

Basic Lighting Setups and Experimentation

Building upon these, we were told to decide on a print publication and shoot the cover image for it. Out group decided to shoot the cover for Vogue Paris, and use a variation of the loop light setup.

We shot at f11, setting the key light to a power of 5.1, and introduced a fill flash behind our model to create a very bright, solid background, and remove most of the distracting textures.

I found this task to be quite stressful, working in a relatively large group who seemed to share the same distaste for this kind of photography, encountering quite a few technical difficulties with transferring images to Capture One. This was alongside having to share the studio with four other groups, each with their own lighting setups and backdrops. That being said, I found it useful to go back to basics with lighting, and this has helped me create a starting point for the setups I would like to use in my MONO project.

Photographers who use Photographic Lighting

Lachlan Bailey – lachlanbailey.com

• No contact details on website
• Based in New York
• @lachlanbailey

Arnaud Pyvka – http://www.wschupfer.com/photographers/arnaud-pyvka/overview

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Based in Paris
• No contact details
• Instagram: @arnaudpyvka

Dan Winters – https://danwintersphoto.com

• info@danwintersphoto.com
• (323) 957-5699
• @danwintersphoto
• Los Angeles/Savannah

Alison Baskerville – http://www.alisonbaskerville.co.uk

• @alisonbaskerville
• @AliBaskerville
• No other contact details
• Based in the UK

Dougie Wallace – http://www.dougiewallace.com

• @dougiewallace
• @dougie_wallace
• dougie@dougiewallace.com
• 07944425563
• Based in London

Sam Hobson – http://www.samhobson.co.uk

• samhobsonphoto@gmail.com
• @samhobsonphoto (both Instagram and Twitter)
• Based in Bristol

Stacy Kranitz – http://stacykranitzprojects.com

• stacy@stacykranitz.com
• 213-447-8229
• @stacykranitz
• @s_ak
• Based in Chicago

Ian Munro – http://ianmunrophotography.co.uk

• Based in Wales

Tim Wallace – http://www.ambientlife.co.uk

• tim@ambientlife.co.uk
• 07816615604
• Based in the UK
• @ambient_life

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A Small Voice – Mark Power

• The challenges of photographing America 

• • Interested in land use, social injustice.
  • Detailed landscapes, story told in the layout of the book.
  • Much easier to get photographs in the United States that the UK.
  • Parallels with Trump Election and Brexit

•Collaborating with Poet Daniel Cockrill on Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment

• • Finished in 2010, published in 2016 bust before Brexit vote. Waited to publish after publishing so many books in the past.
  • Self published. Can make more money doing it that way. So much more work involved in it.
  • Rise of nationalism?
  • ‘What is Englishness?’
  • Cross contamination of work, poetry inspired photography, photography inspired poetry.
  • Mix poems and photographs from different locations which resonate and change the meaning of each other.
  • More photographers should seek out collaborations.
  • Hold each other accountable

• How he nearly quit photography after getting into 25K debt…

• • Began to train as a carpenter after ploughing more money into sending work to photography magazines which didn’t pay.

• … and how being in Berlin ‘by mistake’ when the wall came down changed everything

• • Met with girlfriend in East Berlin just as the wall opened. Cleared debts in one night.
  • Had no clue how to photograph a news event

• Why The Shipping Forecast sold over 10,000 copies

• • Inspired by a tea towel he had bought from the RNLI.
  • Began teaching at Brighton, learned about American and German large format photographers.
  • Invested in a large format (transitioned to digital in 2015).
  • Thought it was a bad idea, realised it was a good idea after, when people told him it was their idea.
  • Sold out in two weeks when it was made book of the week by The Observer.
  • ‘Place based project’ vague project. All photos connected to the sea, but didn’t have to contain the sea as the subject.

• Why 26 Different Endings was by far his hardest project.

• • Conceptual, completely different to his style.
  • Prefers to work anything he likes within a defined area.
  • Had to be on the line at the edge of the map

• Tips on sequencing

• • Work with physical prints
  • No one correct way in sequencing, but there are times where things are obvious.
  • If it doesn’t fit, get rid of it.

Zine Layout Inspiration

BRUTAL LONDON – Simon Phipps

Type over Image – opacity has been reduced slightly.

Double Page Bleed

Single Page Bleed

Floating images

Half page bleed

26 DIFFERENT ENDINGS – Mark Power

Very deadpan, angular. One photo per page; ‘the blank page’.

Canary Wharf Magazine

High end, free publication available in the Docklands. Adverts (Breitling watches) and content (Samantha Cameron) suggest a more well off readership. There is a mix between text heavy and image heavy articles, though there doesn’t seem to be a centre page spread at all, with the ‘Less Is More’ interview appearing on page 24 in a 132 page magazine.

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WIRED

Imported magazine from the USA, more technology based. Readership is in the upper classes, male, between 25 and 39 years old. Centre pages seem to be used predominantly for adverts.

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The RPS Journal

Double page spread. Diagonal text in masthead and subhead to match dynamic image angle

Double page spread with border for page details.

The Photography Industry – Introduction

Those Involved With the Photography Industry

• Photographers
  • Freelancers
    • Pay taxes, employees etc
  • In House
• Editors
  • Choose images for publications
  • Employ freelancers
• Post Production
  • Retouching
• Curators
  • Belong to/own galleries.
  • Choose works for display
• Assistants
  • Photographers
  • Assist with lighting and props etc
• Buyers
• Agents
• Models
• Stylists
• Galleries
  • Prints/exhibitions
• Publishers
• Picture Libraries
• Equipment Hire/Studios/Location Finders
• Start Up Companies

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Different Types of Photography

• Food
• Product/Still Life
• Architecture
• Interior
• Portrait
• Street
• Landscape/Cityscape
• Analogue (35mm, Medium Format)
• Travel
• Wedding
• Sport
• Wildlife
• Underwater
• Aerial
• Advertising
• Forensics
• Boudior/Art Nude
• Fine Art

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the-aop.org

You can use the Association of Photographers website to search for photographers, assistants, agents, and affiliated courses and associate; refining results by area of expertise, experience level, and location.

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Professional Online Presence

It is important as a photographer to have a professional presence on the internet, to allow photographers to display both commissioned and personal work.

The main platforms that are recommended are Instagram and Twitter, on top of a personal website, but other the more platforms you use, the more likely you are to gain exposure.

Personally, I have an Instagram devoted to just photography, a Facebook business page (which I need to update more frequently), and, more recently, a website created through Squarespace, as a Flickr page. I am yet to create a professional Twitter page, however.

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Jörg Steck

Jörd Steck is a German architectural photographer with numerous exhibitions across Germany and the UK and a wide ranging client base; including airlines, the automotive industry, and banks.

An independent photographer since 2002, Steck became a full member of the Association of Photographers in 2016.

I particularly like the compositions of his work, especially they way he sticks to framing techniques such as the rule of thirds, and his use of leading lines to draw the viewer into the image. In the image above, while this probably isn’t intentional as a commercial photographer rather than an artistic one, Steck has composed the image so that it becomes visually uncomfortable, with the structure coming into the image from the right, against the natural flow of the viewer’s eye.

This also seems to mix both pictoral/fine art and straight photographic styles, shooting at a narrow aperture to ensure the subject is sharp, while leaving the shutter open for a long duration to blur any background actions. On top of this, there is possibly a lot of post processing to introduce a more industrial colour palette, as well as removing all signs of any human presence and street furniture.

 

die Kirche Cantate Domino wurde erbaut von Tassilo Sittmann und Walter Schwagenscheidt, geweiht 1966

St. Ignatius und St. Antonius in Frankfurt am Main Architekt: Gottfried Böhm, 1964 geweiht

St. Ignatius und St. Antonius in Frankfurt am Main Architekt: Gottfried Böhm, 1963 geweiht

Away from architecture, Steck covers other areas, such as international reportage in places like Moscow or Tibet, portraiture, and documentary photography of the Rhur area of Germany; a post-industrial environment which suits his muted style of work.