Its been a busy week

This week has been one of those nose-to-the-grindstone weeks. I am blessed with a rather full workload and am really beginning to feel like I could use a second pair of hands/eyes/talent to help me keep up - and to help me to continue delivering better and better creative to my clients.

Blue Spikes

What work have I got on? Well, lets see: A website, brochures and photography for a security and facilities management firm. Poster, packaging and other bits and pieces for my fine Chinese Food delivery client. Case study photography in Warwick for my very loyal client, CPIO. Ongoing brand identity work for a retail start-up in Cobham - everything from the logo through to the packaging, signage, shop colour scheme and vouchers. I also have an ongoing saga job tweaking a logo that requires, in my client's view, ever more tweaking, even when it looked its best at draft 1 stage. As usual.

Again, I have been greedily hoovering up photographs when I do my compulsory daily walk. Many are of the same things I have shot before, but with different light or another lens, the fast-changing seasonal vegetation etc all offer up quite an interesting diversity of images despite the 'sameness'.

Jah Man!

I'm hoping tomorrow to get some more pics (weather permitting) down near London City Airport. There are some fine derelict buildings and wastegrounds. I feel a real need to shoot the ugly stuff - there's more character in it. I want to go and take pictures where the possibility of being mugged is very real. Or being stuck thigh deep in the mud as the tide floods back in (umm on second thoughts...) I need to feel that there is some degree of risk involved - it will work its way into the images.

The Pigeon Gang's hangout. Same shot as this, just wider and on another day with different weather and lighting conditions. I used my 15 - 30 lens and pumped the blue saturation in Lightroom. I love the simplicity of this image.

For me, its obvious: the best photographs are the ones I've worked hardest for. I've gotten up at 3am on countless mornings and traveled miles to get the early dawn light. I've stood chest deep in the Thames at 7am on a cold, late September morning in Henley, photographing rowers - watched from the shore by a mystified pair of policemen wondering whether to arrest me, to call the men in white coats or to leave me be. They left me be in the end.

Mitre Bridge, The Underbelly. I so dig rivets. They give such an 'engineered' look to steel structures. Welding has sapped the character away from engineering. Next I'll be bitching about how digital has sapped the character from photography (it hasn't). Progress.

So yes, tomorrow I'm going to be a bit edgy. A bit out there. Whoa!

Wanna see more photographs? Visit my website.