On Ilkley Moor....

We were up on Ilkley Moor last Saturday to shoot Joe and Fiona's wedding, and it turned out to be one of the most gorgeous and fun so far. It's always great when a couple are really keen to get some special shots in a favourite place, and we had a good laugh trying to get the planned shots before the rain rolled in.

Here's just a few shots as a taster. Looking forward to showing them the lot when they get home from their honeymoon!

Commercial, product and PR Work

It's occurred to me that so far, I've not written anything about the work that turns out to be a considerable chunk of our business. I seem to have put loads on the blog, on Facebook and everywhere else that we have a profile about our portraiture shoots, the photoparties, and of course the weddings but nothing much about our commercial work. Whenever I talk to aspiring photographers, after they've talked about rock-bands and models and fashion, it's the exciting, beautiful, high-emotional-impact stuff that they want to do. They want to be recognised as being the artist who is capable of freezing one amazing moment of time into a stunning image. And we love that sort of thing too. But the majority of commercial photographic images produced every day are of products, or are documenting events of significance for companies and their employees. We do lots of this.

Jo and I met whilst working at a family portraiture studio, and learned how to quickly put people at their ease and explain what we needed from them, learned how to pose people to get relaxed shots, and how to set and change the studio lights so that 9 times out of 10 they were right for most customers. But we also realised that we were missing the challenge of being on the spot to capture fast moving and interesting events as they happened. We'd both previously enjoyed studio product work, which demands a slow, thorough studio preparation but can be enormously satisfying, for example trying to make a black box stand out from a black background and look alluring through careful use of lighting, or simply showing the full colour range of a line of t-shirts for a catalogue.

As we first talked about what the ideal photography job would allow us to do, it emerged that we both wanted variety and different challenges, and over the last couple of years since starting our own company we've had some corkers.

Every 3 months, we contribute photographs for the staff magazine at Unilever's packaging centre at Colton, illustrating stories about staff achievements and company developments. There are lots of technical challenges presented by low light, flammable gases and safety sprinklers, not to mention the general unattractiveness of factory machinery, but we overcome them for each issue, whilst wearing full personal protection equipment.

Recently, we've been commissioned to do more staff communications work, this time for Royal Mail. We love this type of work because it's always interesting and you never know what you're going to get sent out to cover. So far, I've been out to photograph the man who came 3rd in the sidecar races at this year's Isle of Man TT Races (the quite astonishing Conrad Harrison, who is a distribution driver in his day job), and to cover the arrival of Chris Moon (one of the most amazing people I'll ever have the pleasure of meeting, I'm sure) into Leeds Mail Centre as he runs 1000 miles in a month (36miles a day on average) raising funds for Royal Mail's nominated charity this year, Barnado's.

Everything we do at HSP is about getting the images the client wants, and with the right briefing and a good discussion beforehand, we can get the right result, no matter whether it's a lovely family portrait in or out of the studio, a beautiful record of a wedding day that no-one will ever forget, a catalogue shot to show off your merchandise or a shot to help tell a story in a magazine.

Whatever we can help you with, we're waiting for the request! Just give us a call and tell us your ideas!

Oh and another thing...well... two... no, three!

Only a quicky this time....

Just a couple of companies (among many we've worked with) using our work on their websites right now.

Flying Colors - Team photos.

Golf Exclusive - Full clothing range.

And...

We were really touched to have received some super lovely feedback from Steve and Margaret, the new Mrs Torn's mother and father, after Rachel and Richard's wedding at Oulton Church. It reminded us that there was something we'd meant to do for ages, and so we've finally got round to adding a "Testimonials" page to the website.

This also brought on a re-jig of the tabs on the front page, with a "Blog" button so that more people can find this blog and read about our adventures, and so far it's bringing 4 times as much traffic here.

At last I know I'm not the only one reading this!