Busy busy

So as you may have noticed (I just did) I've not been on here since November last year.
What with Christmas and then spending most on January coughing (most pointless illness ever) I have utterly forgotten that this spot existed.

So I am endeavouring to wake it back up.

Recent lovely news has come in the shape of award statues (Graphis, One Eyeland), all projects I collaborated on with Jonathan Knowles . Two of which I Art Directed and a third commissioned piece I Project Managed for Tribe Marketing.

Have a nose at them below and watch this space. I'll be back soon I promise.

Brand Warriors Campaign for Tribe Marketing

Red Head Style by Jonathan Knowles

Knowles Studio Christmas Card 2013

Inspiration

Endeavour by Jonathan Ford

I am really loving the work of Jonathan Ford.
The light is beautifully understated and there is a richness across is portfolio that adds to an utterly gorgeous atmosphere.
Have a walk through his online portfolio here <==

Sir David Attenborough by Jonathan Ford

Portrait Salon

In 2011, Carole Evans and James O Jenkins started Portrait Salon, a Salon des Refuses aiming to show the best of the rejected works from the Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize. In previous years the Salon existed as a newspaper and a one off projection event, but this year the they will also reside in the Four Corners Gallery in Bethnal Green for a week.

I am proud to have been part of the sponsorship team for the last two years and last night attended the launch in London, it was a great night with some stunning work on show.
With simultaneous projections of the submitted work in five different cities: London, Leeds, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Brighton it was great to see the photographic community come together to celebrate in such great numbers.

And tomorrow, November the 14th, there will be a panel discussion on the nature of photography competitions at the Four Corners Gallery featuring Steve Macleod from Metro Imaging, Eleanor McNair from MediaSpace and photographer Harry Borden. A must see!

The 2013 Portrait Salon press release can be found here.

Thoughts For Photographers

How do I get an Agent?

A question I hear multiple times, daily, sometimes hourly.

But is it the right question to be asking? 

It's really important to take a step back and think first about what it is you want from your relationship with an agent; asides from the obvious "lots of jobs".

Is is marketing support and booking you appointments? Do you feel swamped when it comes to organising a production? Are you looking for a creative mentor? Or do you feel in a weaker position when quoting to clients?

When you've asked your self those questions first, then it's time to think about how you find your perfect Agent.

Print Mailers - Dean Belcher

My job provides me with a constant source of wonderful creative minds to work with.
Anyone who knows me well knows I'm all for a bit of Creative Collaboration, so I try to encourage the folk that come along to my consults to use me as a sounding board when ever they need to.

Be it workshopping personal shoots or brainstorming mailer ideas, bespoke targeted print mailers are a real favourite of mine actually, as you may remember.

One of my latest collaborations has been with the lovely Dean Belcher.
Dean has just launched a new look website, complete with the major image edit we put together. It is looking fantastic, if I do say so myself!
But what is a new website without letting the world know that it exists?

The trick with print mailers is to produce and send something that the receiver is going to want to keep. With this in mind Dean and myself got to brainstorming and came up with this little chap.

Mini Desk Dean

Mini cartoon Dean's were sent out last week all with a little note . . .

"I know it's tricky to find the time to see photographers and their folios these days, so keep me on the corner of your desk; and when you need me I'll be there"

Simple, thoughtful, fun.
It was key for us to come up with something that would bring a smile to someones face, that no matter how bad a day they were having Dean's mailer would be well received. Job done.

Miniclick Presents Giles Duley

If you find yourself in or around Brighton on the 15th of October I would highly recommend a trip to the Old Market for this month's Miniclick speaker; Giles Duley.

For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Giles is a London based photojournalist who was severely injured by an IED during a work trip to Afghanistan in 2011. As a result of the accident he is a triple amputee but remains a working photographer.

He gave an amazing TED talk in 2012. Have a look here <==
And for the bargain price of FREE (you have to love Mini Click for this) you can see him chat about his work next week.

So make sure you head there early if you are going. Free entry.

Self Portrait by Giles Duley

Full information about the Miniclick talk can be found here.

Giles Duley's website.

Creative Advice Network

As most of you know I am the co-founder & a director of Creative Advice Network.

Well hopefully most of you know :)

For the past year CAN has acted more as a hub company for me and my business partner Marc.
People come to us and generally they filter either to my consulting branch or to Marc's accounting & financial business at A.E.L. 

But now with our lovely new logo and a few things up my sleeve I am slowly but surely moving my freelance consulting solely under the CAN banner.
It feels like the right time to do it too. I've always been a firm believer of letting things take their own time to grow, never rushing decisions, certainly not in business. And this formative year for CAN has allowed me and Marc to see what we had created and where we wanted to take it to next.

So go and have a look at our website here <==   and keep an eye out for new developments over the coming months.
Oh! And follow us on twitter too :)

Just one of the many things we can help you with.

A great project to crowd fund

A lot of you will know Marc Wilson and his ongoing project The Last Stand.
But did you know you can now get involved to help him crowd fund it's next steps through emphais.is ?

Have a look at Marc's videos here & get involved ==>

Glugged!

So I Glugged and survived. Phew!
It was certainly my biggest audience to date, with over 300 in the room and a TV link up sending my waffling wisdom into the other room to a couple hundred more.
 
Huge thanks to Nick & Jenny for inviting me down.

Glugging

Tonight I am heading over to Cargo to flap my gums in front of those fabulous Gluggers.

With the evenings focus on Creative Startups I was honoured to be asked by co-host Jenny Theolin to sign up as a speaker.

“Creative Startups” celebrates all the new talent, start-ups, new business, up and coming talent and well established big hitters like Morag Myerscough in there too, as they talk about setting up, the challenges and the stuff you never get to hear about."

And with our new Creative Advice Network logo newly launched it feels like a great time to chat to people about the work CAN does and how we got to where we are. Snappily in 15mins, and hopefully not punctuated by my usual enthusiastic Portsmouth swears :)

There are a few tickets left so grab them here <== quick and I'll see you tonight.

Brand Warriors

I had the great pleasure of Art Buying and Creative Consulting on Tribe's latest photoshoot 'Brand Warriors'.
I was approached by Tribe's Creative Director Martin Homent* to brainstorm the initial creative stages, source the right photographer and pull together the creative team.

The whole campaign came together seamlessly. Unbeknownst to Martin, I'd been chatting to Jonathan Knowles about shooting more face paint projects, after the success of our 'Kissed by a Superhero' project. So he was the perfect choice.

It was a pure joy to work on especially once I had favourites Aly Hazlewood (Make Up) & Jack Flynn (Videographer) on board. This project really felt like creative matchmaking & collaborating at it's best. With every team member adding their skills & own unique creative input.
Creative collaboration is one of the things I love most about my job and why me and Marc started Creative Advice Network.

The campaign has already been receiving a great reception, so hopefully you like it too. You can see the whole series here <==

*He knows I have good taste, I'm marrying him after all.

Video Content For Photographers

These days with our fast evolving consumer needs and multi platform readership here is a pressing need for photographers to supply moving imagery to their clients.

This can be hugely daunting for some photographers, and agents alike, to grasp.
But it doesn't have to be a complicated, hugely storryboarded, fully cast, all singing all dancing movie extravaganza.

Here are some recent examples of video content that I think hit the right tone and perfectly show how you can show complimentary work in addition to your stills.

Behind the scenes work from Photographer Simon Webb:



A Samuel Hicks commission to show the exposure capabilities of a Sony camera:


A 30sec teaser for an upcoming print campaign by Jonathan Knowles:


And a stop motion piece from still life photographer Chris Turner:

Inspiration

Sun patterns within the Sydney Opera House, 1962. by David Moore

Celebrate the sun, celebrate Spring, enjoy the light and breathe!

Mini Click - March Programme

To coincide with International Women's Day, Jim Stephenson & his Mini Click crew have lined up a fantastic programme of talks throughout March. 

Over to Jim . . .
"On March 2nd we're doing a full-day of talks and panel discussions co-curated by us and Fiona Rogers from Firecracker and hosted by Miranda Gavin. It'll feature Jo Metson Scott, Agata Pietron, Maria Gruzdeva, Chloe Dewe Matthews and Abbie Traylor Smith. More info here <== 

On March 24th we're running a workshop with Laura Pannack. More info here <==

And on March 28th we've got a night of talks from Alma Haser and Natasha Caruana. We're also launching the first issue of our new magazine that night, which is also on the theme of Women in Photography. More info here <==

The talks are free entry & the workshop £90. Thanks for curating another great programme Mini Clickers.

My Heroes

Photographers and Agents alike are always asking me to recommend suppliers. So I thought it was about time I shared a few of the great on here.
In this, the second of these posts, I bring you the incredible make-up stylings of Miss Aly Hazlewood.

I am ridiculously in awe of Aly's make-up skills & portfolio. Last year I had some shoots coming up with Jonathan Knowles, we were looking for a new artist to work with and spotted Aly's work in a stylists folio.

It was this shot (right) that had us itching to work with her. That colour and blending work is stunning, and so hard to do.




The shots that Jonathan & Aly worked on are to the left.

I hope to work with her a lot in the future, because Aly is the sort of supplier that I love, she brings her own creativity to the table too. And it's great. Invaluable really.


Have a look at Aly's website here <==
or Tweet her here <==

Creative thinking with Brand Perfect

There's me in the purple jumper

Last year I had the pleasure to lend Brand Perfect my creative brain for a few of their events.

If you've not heard of Brand Perfect, well they're a kind of wonderful creative think tank of an organisation. They work with organisations and individuals, looking at how brands are developing, how they could be developing and offer thoughts and magic creative solutions across sectors.
Currently they're braving the weather in NYC and running an Adventures in Publishing event.

Wish I was there really. Especially if it's anything like the event we had at the British Library, where 20 folks, including myself, were called upon to ponder a challenge set to us by BL; "how to get the library's 'Silent Network' to engage with each other."

It was great to be workshopping ideas alongside Creative Directors, Typographers, App Developers and the like. Throughly inspiring and energising really. And I think we came up with some great ideas.
Now it's over to the BL to pick them up.

You can read what the British Library thought of us here <= and what Brand Perfect thought here <=

O'Neil Awards 2012 - Pt1

Lossiemouth, Scotland. 2011 by Marc Wilson

Last Thursday night I went along to the O'Neil awards.
There's a great selection of work on show this year and it was fantastic to see Marc Wilson's The Last Stand scooping up third prize.

If you're not familiar with the project, in written description it's a documentary landscape series of the 'physical remnants of war in the 20th Century in the UK and Northern Europe'.
But in print, on a wall, it is a stunningly eerie, softly lit set of landscape art.

It leads your mind towards Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy.

Studland bay, Dorset. England. 2011 by Marc Wilson

I was also thrilled to see some work from Wendy Sacks. Which literally took my breath away. But more on that in the next post.

An added highlight of the night was the delivery of the winners names. Due to the poor sound system we all got a chance to announce them in a wonderfully complicated game of chinese whispers over two floors. Made us all giggle :)

Back to School!

So the 'Out of Office' Has been switched off and I am back to acknowledging my emails. About time reallyI suppose, but boy will I miss all that sleeping.

There are lots of exciting things lined up this year so keep an eye on here.

In the meantime treat yourself to a look at the work of Annabelle Nicoll, someone I'm thrilled to be working with this year.

The Twelfth Day / Me and I. By Annabelle Nicoll

Portrait Salon This Thurs

I am really looking forward to this Thursday 29th Nov, because it's Portrait Salon night!

Last years launch party was a great gathering of beautiful imagery, lovely upbeat photographers and plenty of boozes.
I was really impressed with how quickly and impressively Carole Evans and James O'Jenkins (PS Founders) had turned the event around. It's inaugural year was a real success and showed real promise as an annual event in the Photography world's calendar.


In fact I was so impressed that I offered to help them raise funds for this years event; after all they had self funded Yr1.

So I wrote a reference for their Arts Council grant and devised a sponsorship format that they could approach photographic businesses with.  And I jumped on board under my Creative Advice Network banner as one of their first sponsors.

This year Portrait Salon will simultaneously launch their 2012 exhibition in London, Brighton, Leeds and Cardiff. to find out more visit their website here <==

A selection of the 2011 exhibition

Photography Workshop

Balcony Jump are running a workshop on 8th & 9th December. 

This two-day intensive workshop is designed for photographers of all stages in their career, who are looking to improve their photographic, marketing and business skills. With over 15 years of experience in helping photographers build successful, lucrative careers we know how imperative it is to have a strong business ethic as well as a set of photographic skills.

The course will cover many areas of photography from fashion to stock photography, with something for everyone trying to improve or break into the photographic industry. We believe that spending time listening and learning from industry professionals is essential and hope to pass on all we have learnt to the next generation of photographers. This is a unique opportunity to speak to some of the industry’s most knowledgeable and well-connected figures for one-on-one advice and guidance.

Tutors will include: 
Tim Payton, MD Balcony Jump Management
Nick Turpin, Advertising and Street Photographer
Zoe Whishaw, Commercial Photography Consultant
Emma Taylor, Creative Advice Network.
plus more TBC…

Topics covered in the workshop will include:
• Breaking into Advertising Photography
• Stock Photography
• Commercial Galleries
• Editorial Photography
• Studio fashion photography session with a professional team of models and stylists
• Marketing for photographers
• Case studies, production and budgets
• Using social media to promote your work
• Digital retouching and workflow

BOOK NOW HERE <==