Party, portraits and another party!

Commercial Portrait & Event Photographer Leicester

Leicester Business Photographer

December 2019 I was asked to photography a works party and awards ceremony, the company was Industria Personel. Industria are a fantastic recruitment agency based in Leicester but with offices in Northampton, Manchester, Coventry, Uxbridge, Germany and Poland!

Fast forward to March 2022 and I get a call from Amanda from Industria about taking staff headshots of all of the senior recruiters in the UK offices in preparation for their new website.

After a few dates were passed around, the Leicester office was booked in. 24 people were photographed in a 2 hour session. A couple of weeks later Coventry was photographed, then Northampton, then Leicester again (as a few people were away and some people from the Birmingham office came over), then Uxbridge and finally Manchester. Phew!!

All in all over 50 people got ‘shot in the face’ by me, and we kept the look consistent in all the different locations.

Here are a few shots from all locations

Leicester Event Photography

Industria also celebrated their 20th year in Business, and I was asked to photograph the party at the Marriott Hotel here in Leicester. This was an incredible night, with lots of photos and stories from the early days of Michale Walker setting up the business. I honestly found that presentation about the company so interesting! The thing that really struck me was the culture, all of the staff genuinely enjoy working for Industria.

It just proved that if you have a great idea, determination and good people around you.. you can achieve anything. 

This year they hit the £50 Million Pound turnover, which is incredible, well done Industria! 

Here are a few photos from the party.

Leicester Branding Photographer

Next, we have to talk about ‘Branding’. 

I had an amazing video call with two ladies from ‘The Orange Notebook’, a brand marketing agency over in Birmingham. There is actually 3 of them, Beatrice however is based in Sweden! 

Their company needed a bank load of images for their website and social media, we put a plan together to create the images they needed. It was decided that we would meet at Medicine, a coffee shop in Birmingham that they often frequent. We would use Medicine as location 1, getting individual and group shots. A local photo studio was also booked so they we could get some more varied shots, such as clean studio images with the orange background to tie in with their branding. This was a really fun shoot, the 4 hours went really fast. Sadly I was still suffering from the effects of COVID and was really tired towards the end. I don’t mind saying, I slept for 13 hours when I got home!!

I also competed a brilliant branding shoot for the fabulous Sukh Kaur and her bespoke matchmaking service, ‘Matched by Sukh Kaur’. 

We met up at the Exchange bar in Leicester, grappled a coffee and talked about the shoot. This shoot was originally going to be a simple headshot session, but after Sukh saw some sample images from The Orange Notebook shoot, an upgrade was ordered.

The setting in Exchange bar is always good for photos, and the coffee is pretty amazing too! We shot in 3 different areas before heading to my favourite studio in Leicester, XYZ.

At XYZ we used the classic white and grey for headshots and also positioned their graffitied sofa near the exposed walls for a more urban looking shot. 

Very soon there will be a personal branding page added to my wesbite!

I can’t explain how much I enjoyed these shoots, it’s a different process to my normal portraits and headshots.. and if you know anything about me, you’ll know I enjoy a creative challenge. Branding shoots tick all the boxes for me

A blog about a vlog... ;-)

I did a vlog, now a blog about a vlog... ;-)

Professional Photographers Workflow

If you’re interested in what happens after a photoshoot, the stuff you don’t see… this is the video to watch!

In all seriousness, this stuff behind the scenes is mega important.

I had a phone call with a family member who was photographing a friends wedding last year.. I was also photographing a wedding. On a break I checked my phone and saw 5 missed calls from said family member. I called him back and he asked me a question…

“I changed lens towards the end of the ceremony, now when I look at my images I can’t find anything before the ceremony…”

My question back was “have you changed out the memory card for a fresh one??” he had not. So he did, and I arranged to meet up with him the following day.

Turns out he’d been victim to a fake memory card, which had corrupted and was overwriting old images when the card became full. So the whole bride prep and 90% of the ceremony was now gone forever.

The message here is he’s not a professional, and he didn’t have a professional camera.. a camera that has two memory cards. He put the images he had on his 8yr old laptop, and he was done.

This is very different to what myself and other professional photographers do.