Over delivering

I like to over deliver where I can.  That's not just to make my customers happy. It's also to make sure their needs are truly met. Often I'll be hired by someone who isn't the real end user for pictures, so I try to think of what a layout editor or web designer might need from a set of photos and deliver them with the options they might need.

Last week I had a chance to get out from my desk at Destination Content and do a little stills shoot for a new commercial client. The job involved getting some shots at one of their customers, a local joinery business. The job was really just to get one shot that depicted the business, so a hero shot of one of the employees in action seemed to be in order and my client agreed. Since this was to be the first of a series of shoots, I wanted to make sure I was on the right path and invited her onto location.



I picked a well-lit part of the workshop to create the shot, but thought the background needed a little lift.



So I hid a couple of flashes to push a little light onto the back wall and up into the roof. Then I got Michael to get to work sanding the window frame, hitting him with a little key light from the left. I like how the frame reaches out to us, adding a little depth to the shot. My client seemed pretty pleased with what I was doing and headed back to headquarters, but I wasn't done.




After the action shots were sorted, I thought I'd mooch around a little to see what caught my eye. It didn't take long to find three things I thought were needed to really tell the story of the joinery business: some raw materials, some tools, and some finished products. So I went to it. The ambient light was perfectly adequate for this part of the job.

                

The planes above were shot with the Canon 24mm 1.4 EF II lens and it's my favourite piece of glass at the moment. Sharp, great colour and great shallow depth of field effects. I recently shot some video on it in the evening and it made the most beautiful bokeh out of the city lights. I might write a little more on that lens later.

I made sure I had some landscape and portrait options to deliver, as well as some with gutter and text space, just so my client had everything a designer might ask for. Now I'm greatly looking forward to the next assignment.