November Publicity Photographer Awards

November, sadly, was the last month of competitions with the SWPP for 2011.  So, with it being the last competition of the year, it’s always a nervous time as you want to submit your best images.  This, however, is also a drawback as you want to enter as many as you can and sometimes try to squeeze images into categories that they may not be best suited for.  I think I may have done that this month, but still took away 2 silver awards for the month of November.  1 for the publicity photographer category and 1 for the Family and Groups category.  To be fair though, and you will see this when you see the images, both were taken with my publicity photographer hat on as both were publicity commissions.  Anyways, let’s see the images and talk about them.

You may recognise the handsome chaps above from a previous publicity photographer post.  These are the boys from Keep It Secret, who were the winners of my band and musician competition. This was an image I worked on as a result of them winning the competition and I have to say I was quite pleased with the results.  It won Silver in the Publicity Photographer category for the month of November.  Why didn’t it win Gold?  Well, I like to break down my images after the competitions to see why (at least why I think) they didn’t score higher.  With this image, I think the slight lens distortion is the main culprit to it not being a Gold Publicity Photographer winner.  You may not have even noticed it until I pointed it out, but I always knew it was there, but thought it added to the image.  But, the slight lean inwards that they all have is probably what kept it from being a Gold.  Other than that, I can’t see anything wrong with it.  I had the lighting spot on in this image and was able to use three lights here (the sun being one) to give it drama and mood.  This image was a lot of fun to create and I used a method I use a lot when doing publicity work involving more than 2 people out on location.  I did something called a single space composite here.  What that means is that I put the camera on a tripod, took an image of the scene without anyone in it, and then shot each person individually.  The reason I did this is so that I could get them all lit the exact same way.  This is probably the easiest form of compositing to do as when I combine them all in Photoshop, since it was shot on a tripod, it’s just a matter of masking back in each member, and voila!

This image you may also recognise, as I only just recently did a blog post on it here. While this was an image most certainly taken while on a publicity photographer commission, it won Silver in the Family and Groups category for the month of November.  To tell you why this image wasn’t Gold is a little harder.  Strike that, not really harder, but to have fixed the problems with it would have been much harder for a number of reasons.  I think the reason it wasn’t Gold is probably again down to slight lens distortion, and maybe a little something that did bother me with the lighting (and that one I could have fixed).  The lens distortion, well this was taken in such a small space that I had to use my ultra wide lens and really didn’t have any other choice…so that was always going to be an issue.  The lighting issue?  Well, I don’t want to point out what it is as you will be fixated on it, but I had some light spill from one of my backlights.  It was something that could have been fixed in Photoshop, but I didn’t…for whatever reason, and I only have myself to blame there don’t I?  :D

So, there you have my 2 Silvers for the month of November.  I like to think that they were both for being a publicity photographer, as they were both for publicity commissions, but you can only enter 1 into each category.  :D  If you are a corporation, business, band, musician, or anyone that needs a good, award winning, publicity photographer be sure to get in touch. I am always happy to give a free, no obligation quote, but feel free to read more about our publicity photographer services here. We are based between Bury St. Edmunds and Cambridge and cover all the UK and East Anglia including Norwich, Ipswich, London, Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, and the rest of England.

If you have any questions or comments about the above images definitely leave a comment below!!