I don’t know what it is, the aircon, the amount of bodies, London itself but Lesley, Lilly and I all always come back from one of the most important weeks of the year ILL… lol its just not fair! The start of the year always plays host to one of the most important events in the Professional Photographic world, The Societies of Photographers International convention. I’m safe in saying that its Europes biggest event if not the worlds. There certainly entrants from all over the world, Australia, Malaysia, America, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Italy etc, etc… yes, quite literally all over the world. The week starts with the 20×16 print competition. I’m very proud to say that once more I was honoured to be asked to Chair the proceedings, That takes me to my 17th year of being an internationally accredited judge. I LOVE being involved in this, working alongside some of the very best judges, again, from all over the world and getting to see some of the very best images around. I’ve have had major success in competitive photography over the years, 12 Photographer of the year titles to be precise. I won 11 in a row and then had a 10 year break. In that time I played the role of Chair of qualifications and Chair of Chairs, I suppose a position of senior judge. With that being the case I thought it wrong of me to enter as I wanted all to be fair and above board in every way it could be viewed. I then entered an “I’ve had 10 years off” anniversary image and took my 12 title winning Avantgarde photographer of the year. Now as important as this events are to me personally things changed for me when I became a mentor. No matter what I have won personally, and I am grateful for everything, it pales into insignificance when you see a mentee thrive and win! This year I saw the amazing Jocelyn Conway pick up another award winning the In camera artistry category of the 20×16 print category, she’s having an amazing career, she is a delight to support and mentor and I’m proud of her.
How can that be topped? The fact is, amazingly so, it can be. This year saw an often overlooked mentee hit the jackpot and strike gold!
Neil Shearer, a talented commercial photographer, whom only 6 years ago was a research chemist, pre a career change, finally got the accolade he richly deserved… His first title, Fashion Photographer of the year!
To be honest it was massively humbling to see his reaction to his first major international win, seeing his emotion, his passion, his desire hit the reset button for me. He showed me that maybe I’d taken my own achievements far too lightly and hadn’t always appreciated their impact, importance or validity, shame on me!
This was soon to be rectified:
I was super pleased in a macabre way to “pip” Neil to second place in the advertising category in the 20×16 competition. Nobody really likes second place but after so much time off from competitive photography to fit in behind Italian based photographer Sarah Edmunds Ferrara was indeed a pleasure.
My second place image was “The Magic Milliner”. A set of images celebrating an amazing collection of hats made by the Swedish artist Zacharias Eric Vindbacke. I shot them whilst at my friends Olof Raven Frejd shooting another fashion commission. I guess you could say it was an opportunistic accident.
Simple lighting, just a few brollies… this is how it was done:
Truth is I didn’t know we were going to shoot these so like I always say a good photographer can adapt, improvise and overcome, we just had to make the best of the opportunity.
There was a set of five hats to shoot all of them cream or white. It just happened that part of Olof’s entrance hall to his home was cream panelled so it seemed obvious to me that this was to be the “studio” to shoot these magnificent creations in.
Now, as mentioned, I was in Sweden. I didn’t have a full choice of kit, only what had been shipped to me curtesy of the kind people at Elinchrom, so it was time to think out of the box, I needed a little bit of limited kit to work magically to do justice to these creations.
The standard “go to” for beauty photography is a clamshell set up to produce a butterfly lighting pattern. I had the lights and the modifiers to do this, but not all the stands I needed to pull the set up off. No time to panic, just think out of the box!
The “key” light was a reflective silver parabolic umbrella almost “table topped” ,this just means horizontal to the floor to use the sculptural edge of the light for shape, directly behind and above the camera position.
My “fill” was another parabolic brolly. This time a shoot through. Being a few stands short I just balanced this 135cm monster on the floor in front of where I was standing. For this shoot I used the Pentax 645z firmly secured to a tripod… my arthritic hands just wont cope hand holding a camera like this anymore.
The “Key” was silver to add secularity to the skin and the shoot through was there to control shadow density. As I knew these were heading potentially for Swedish Vogue I had to make sure they were in good register to print so i metered a 2 to 1 ratio between these two lights.
Now the real test. I still needed to light the background AND add separation to the subject and it appeared at first that I didn’t have enough kit to do the job to the standard I wanted… creative thinking time.
I had two lights left and at first glance too big a space to light to magazine quality and one light can’t do the accenting I wanted.
Got to think out of the box!!! I set the last two lights up on stands and fitted both with shoot through parabolic umbrellas. I made sure that the flash tubes just “sat in the parabola of the brolly. I needed to get the maximum angle of spread out of these units.
I positioned the lights at about 45 degrees behind the subject as best as the room layout would allow, please remember I was using a dear friends entrance hall as a studio! The big trick was angering the units to both flood the background AND subtly accent the subject. To do this I had to turn the lights into the background and just use the edge of the shoot through to “clip” the subject.
Job done!
Heres a single image of Elin Boberg entitled “Feather brained” (I assure you she isn’t)
And here is how the Swedish Vogue worthy collection was presented to the panel judges, shame really the collection needed to be bigger than the comp allowed, its magical at 60”. The guy in the middle, the mono shot, is my dear friend Olof!
I thought that was all the excitement for my night then something really magical happened! The photographer of the year categories were being announced. There were 11,320 entries this year and I’d but in maybe 4 images over the whole year. Sometimes magic happens though.
When the Beauty & Boudoir category was announced I was delighted to feature in the top three, humbled when third place was announced as I realised I must be in second. When second was announced I was ecstatic as the image wasn’t mine and I realised I’d won!
That makes my THIRTEENTH Photographer of The Year title in my career. 10 in a row, a 10 year break then 2 in a row… a bit like buses I guess.
The image is from a collection I’m shooting entitled “Statuesque”. My MUA and assistant Lilly Von Pink and I have a blast doing these… if you fancy a go drop us a message!
This image was a little bit of a fluke as it was shot whilst testing flash equipment for a feature article we were putting together entitled “chasing the lightning” which compares some of the current flash brands believe it or not this was shot with a single AD400 pro pixapro lighting head from essential photo.
On the whole it was an amazing convention for us as a group, thats the Mentor Me on Steroids group I’m referring to. This event saw the group achieve 30 Merit scoring images, A Fellowship and 4 POTY awards including one being from the MMoS Alumni.
In 13 years of mentoring the Societies convention takes our tally of helping people achieve their goals to 35 POTY awards, I’m very proud of that fact but more proud of those that put the effort in to accomplish these amazing achievements.
In fact, since I started writing this we can add another achievements from Neil Bremner who achieved yet another POTY title winning the Guild of Photographers Commercial Photographer of the year. So….. that’s 36 in 13 Go MMoS #MMoSforthewin
Lesley and I were delighted to present a masterclass on behalf of Permajet talking about a little “Post” and the major importance of preparing an image for print. These are vital skills lots of photographers seem to have “misplaced”.
Regardless of if you use a lab or send your files to your own printer, if you are creatively using paper as we do with Permajet substrates you really need to know these things.
We were both delighted that so many turned out for our talk, especially as it was slated at 09.00 hrs the morning after the awards ceremony. A sincere thanks to you all for your time and effort in getting there. We hope you all enjoyed the limited edition prints we made and gave away.
Teaching the art of print production is something we will ramp up this year.
The only down side to the whole event was finding a very insensitive person making a nasty social media post. This lovely lady was questioning our “steroids” claim as she’d managed to snap an iPhone picture of both my girls sat down on our stand on phones! Sadly she didn’t know my wife is waiting for a knee operation and that she was dealing with family issues at home whilst Lilly was uploading video I’d sent her… how dare they do important things whilst sitting in a quiet moment!!! That ladies and gentlemen is how nasty and petty our industry can be and how 125th of a second doesn’t always tell the truth! I suggest that 36 Photographers of the YEAR in just 13 years and me holding the ONLY Fellowship in photographic training gives testimony to the claim of Mentor Me on Steroids… needles to say both Lesley and Lilly were very upset by this callous individual… petty, petty people who we don’t need in our lives. Anyway… what a week that was! Till next time
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