Adding the Human Touch

The Mallow project is drawing to a close now.

One of the important things we were asked to do was to show the sports complex as a living thing. This is a refreshing request from an architect. Usually, architectural photographs are devoid of any human presence.

There are a number of reasons for this, one of which is purely technical. Often architectural photography requires long shutter times. In the case of long exposures, that means that anything that is moving either doesn’t register at all, or shows up as a faint blur.

Below are two recent images taken for the project that show that the facility is indeed being used - one is more abstract than the other, but neither could have been produced without human activity in front of the lens.

Mallow GAA Sports Complex
(c) Roger Overall 2008

Mallow GAA Sports Complex
(c) Roger Overall 2008

Season’s Greetings

As far as the corporate side of the business is concerned, we’re off the clock now until the New Year. The wedding side of the business will interrupt the Christmas and New Year period here and there, but we’ll snag a few long weekends in January to compensate.

So it’s time to roll out this year’s Christmas greeting:

Have a great Christmas and all the best for 2008.

Nice work if you can get it

My best assignment so far was a couple of years ago, when a UK-based marine company commissioned me to photograph their barging and tug operations in Scotland, Guyana and Suriname.

Not only were the locations and the personnel I photographed fantastic, the client was a true believer in the power of photography. My brief was to shoot pretty much what I wanted, how I wanted, when I wanted. For any corporate photographer, that sort of freedom is almost unheard of.

The assignment was special for one other reason. It was also the last time that I shot film for a corporate job.

The picture below was shot on the Suriname leg of the assignment on Fuji Provia 100F. Those words alone are enough to bring a nostalgic tear to your eye - if you’re old enough. It’s hard to get emotional about a 2GB Sandisk Extreme IV compact flash card. I mean, it just doesn’t push any buttons for anybody other than designers and engineers of compact flash cards.

The picture was taken at sunset from the bow of the foremost barge in a two-barge/single-tug combination hauling bauxite from the Suriname jungle to a refinery near the capital Paramaribo. I’d set the camera up on a tripod about twenty minutes earlier, having planned the shot during the day. For a while, it all looked like going wrong, as the sky was overcast and grey. The sun briefly popped through the cloud on its way down, though, and it produced the shot of the trip.

Shipping Bauxite
Suriname 2004
(c) Roger Overall 2004