What can you do when you only have five or ten minutes to photograph people?

What can you do when you only have five or ten minutes to photograph people?

Well I’ve been shooting portraits for a few different educational clients over the years and one thing i’ve learnt is to put people at ease very early on when you need to photograph them to take their portrait.

I’ve got one client who runs lots of different schools, college’s and universities and they like to feature students for their case studies and websites. So we tend to line up a day of photography in order to take as many portraits as possible.

However I tend to only get five or ten minutes with students as we can only drag them out of class and lessons for a very short time. I can also tell you that photographing students who mostly are all very self conscious can be a tricky thing. But if you treat them with respect and talk to them, find out a bit about them and try and make a connection, it can really help. Of course having lots of experience photographing people, knowing your equipment, what makes a good photograph & being a professional photographer helps as well.

So here are 150 portraits of students all taken on location and all taken quickly.

The Way We Work - Care

Last months theme for the portraits for my ongoing photography project with Viva Brighton magazine, The Way We Work was ‘care’ so we thought we’d photograph care workers.

So we headed down to the wonderful Martlets Hospice in Brighton & Hove, Sussex to photograph some of the amazing people who work there.

This morning I received this lovely email passed onto me by the magazine:

”I just wanted to pass on a huge thank you to you and Adam for the incredible ‘Way We Work’ Martlets feature in this month’s Viva Brighton – so many people have mentioned it to me and noticed it.  All the people in the magazine have asked for extra copies for family and friends (considering they all ‘hate having their photograph taken’ I think that shows Adam’s wonderful talent that everyone is pleased!)  We’re also delighted to be in such a wonderful edition – it was quite hard to get any work done when it arrived...

I hope you are all well, best wishes and many, many thanks again.”

It’s always nice getting feedback, but from people who literally change peoples live, it means a lot.

If you’d like to see some more of this photographic project which i’ve been shooting for over five years now, just click this link.

The first five years.....

I don’t really do photography projects…..however I seem to have accidentally been shooting one for five years now.

Once a month, every month for the last five years (that’s 60 shoots), i’ve been photographing Brighton people (326 in total) in various professions / hobbies / businesses for the wonderful Viva Brighton Magazine with the help of the amazing Rebecca Cunningham and Kelly Mechen.

Although it's not quite an A to Z of professions, we’ve shot everything from Adventures to Window cleaners including Butchers, Bakers and Cocktail Makers.

When I started the first The Way We Work shoot in November of 2014 I didn’t think we’d be still shooting five years later, but to be honest, i’m more than happy to continue this project indefinitely as it’s such fun, incredibly interesting and is literally a documentary of The Way We Work.

Like I said, I don’t really do photography projects, but when I do they seem to be big.

Management Team Company Head Shots

There is something very rewarding about taking company head shots / corporate profile / professional portraits of board members and management teams.

I just love when people don’t have much time and the come into the meeting room which I’ve set my studio up in and I guarantee that the first thing that at least 50% of the people will say to me is: ‘Oh I hate having my photo taken.’ or ‘I’m really not photogenic and have never seen a good photo of me.’

I always see this as a challenge and a wrong to be put right. So I make it my mission to make them look good and for the last thing that they say to me to be: ‘Oh I don’t look bad in that. I really like it and that wasn’t painful at all.’

I really do believe that everyone is photogenic. You just need a good photographer to capture the real you. And this is why it really is worth investing in company head shots / corporate profile / professional portraits for your business.

If you’d like to find out more, please do get in contact.

Relaxed Brighton Linkedin profile shot and meeting for coffee

I had the great pleasure of meeting life coach Regan the other month for a Linkedin / website profile portrait shoot. 

In fact we met in a Brighton coffee shop and chatted for ages and drank coffee and I pulled the camera out and took a few portraits. 

I really like this informal relaxed way of photographing as it really didn't feel like a shoot at all. I'm a great believer that to get a great portrait / profile shot you need to be relaxed and comfortable in front of the camera, so I spend a bit of time trying to get to know my subjects, which I think works out better for both of us.

So please do give me a shout if you'd like to meet for a coffee.......erm.... i mean have a portrait / profile / headshot taken.

Mine's a latte.

Revisiting a portrait shoot from two years ago.

Two years ago I got to take the portrait of a Brighton photography Legend. Tony Tree, who was a staff photographer on the Argus newspaper for a long time in the golden age of print.

I remember having a great time on the shoot while photographing Tony and I was just asked this morning if someone could use the photo I shot back in 2016 for another article. So I thought i'd revisit the images from the shoot to see if I could offer them anything else, and I came across this photo that didn't work for the first article, but I really think it captures Tony's reflective nature. 

So I suppose the moral of the story is that it can pay to look at your work with fresh eyes and a couple of years distance.

Oh and here is the original image from the portrait shoot we used two years ago.