Branding photoshoot for Rhino roof racks.
A lot of my photography is working on branding photoshoots for a wide variety of businesses across the UK and abroad. I have worked with creative branding agency, Creative Spark, on lots of different jobs and on this occasion they asked me to do a lifestyle photoshoot for Rhino roof racks. Rhino are one of the UK's leading roof rack and commercial roof bar manufacturers, so putting together a photoshoot that told a story about what they do was going to be right up my street. As a photographer who specialises in working on location and documenting my client's narrative, this was perfect for me.
As with lots of my photoshoots, the creative brief required a real feel. The images had to look like they could have been real moments but with a stylised finish. Creating real moments of trade workers using the Rhino products on different working vehicles on location that will serve to create an aspirational effect.
Sometimes I get to recce locations and sometimes I don't, in this case I hadn't seen any of the locations apart from a google map recce. I can get an idea of lighting direction, geographical concerns, etc but nothing can beat a 'feet on the ground' recce. The other uncontrollable element was the weather.
Most photographers will always tell you that they are never happy with the weather, occasionally ideal conditions will prevail but we're a fussy bunch. For this shoot we had clear blue skies and full sunshine which, as you might suspect, wasn't exactly what I had hoped for. In an ideal world just a fine layer of cloud every now and then would've been great to soften the light as we were shooting in early Summer and the forecast was sun, sun, sun! However, it could've been much worse and tipping it down with wind and rain. Working with daylight is often easier and quicker than using flash or artificial lighting, so we were able to minimise portable lighting set up and just use flash lighting where necessary to lift dark areas and create additional impact if needed. With the help of Sam, my regular assistant we could just use reflectors for most of the day, which kept the shoot moving at the pace needed to fulfil the shot list.
The post processing approach was typical of how I work with most clients. The creative agency received an edited version of the images in low resolution format to do their selection from. Once we have been narrowed down their selection, I will then send over a couple of process styles that we have already discussed using Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is my 'go to' choice of editing software for most jobs. Once they pick their process style we then refine each image jumping to Photoshop to retouch and finish as necessary.
It was another nice shoot and good fun to work with Neil and the team at Creative Spark, they always bring so much energy to every project. Have a look at their website to check out what they do, https://creativespark.co.uk
