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Monthly Archives

• September 2010
• August 2010
• July 2010
• June 2010
• May 2010
• April 2010
• March 2010
• February 2010
• January 2010

Most recent entries

• September Newsletter
• September archive picture of the month
• Toyo 45AII 5x4 film camera
• Jobo CPE-2 Film Processor wanted
• August archive picture of the month
• Serco Annual report
• Photojournalist Steve McCurry
• July archive picture of the month
• Photography advice for graduate and student photographers
• Image used in Inside Housing magazine
• Adobe Photoshop CS5 Bridge startup scripts not loading
• Opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham
• June archive picture of the month
• 2010 10 mile RTTC National championships
• Adobe Photoshop CS5 Content Aware Tool

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Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter, to give you a closer look at some of the projects I have recently completed.

Photo story about the residents of Bournville after the takeover of Cadbury’s by Kraft, for Inside Housing magazine.

I was commissioned by the Features Editor after he saw my black and white portfolio. The brief was to produce images in the style of 1970’s documentary photographers, and the rain, I think, complemented the style required.

Crown Chambers 10th Birthday party.

Brief from the client was to capture the celebratory atmosphere of the party, and deliver the images (170!) next day for viewing. 

New commercial boiler installation for Worcester Bosch

Image supplied for trade press release. Working in a very tight space, I was required to produce an striking image that ‘stood out’. A couple of small flashes were used to add a bit of blue to help the boilers stand out.

Image for new freight distribution website and brochures.

Once again, working in a very cramped conditions, I photographed the call centre.  I used a simple 3 flash setup, choosing the slightly bleach out the background so the 3 shooting locations would all look the same in the finished brochure.

New MG design centre

A new major investment for MG. After organising the opening pictures, PR images were sent from the design centre to the regional and national press.

Jousting at Warwick Castle

Images supplied for Warwick Castle’s PR and Marketing, who wished to update the current image library. The brief was to capture the emotion and atmosphere of the medieval events during the summer.

I hope you enjoy the images, and that it’s given you an insight into the wide range of commercial, editorial and PR photography I undertake on location for clients in the UK.
Follow me on twitter @edwardmossphoto
Freelance commercial photographer

England cricket captain and opening batsman Andrew Strauss, pictured in his old school classroom at Radley College in 2004.

Toyo 5x4 field camera mounted with the Nikkor 90mm F4.5

Sorry about the lack of updates in the past few weeks, I’ve been busy with work and shooting a personal project on my new 5x4 camera, a Toyo 45AIIL. (The L means it can use Linhof style lens boards.) It’s not too heavy, has enough bellows extension, via the double extension bed for the majority of uses and importantly, folds up nice and small.
The camera is still in production, so sourcing spares shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
I’ve matched the Toyo with 3 lenses, the wonderfully sharp 90mm Nikkor-SW , a 150mm Schneider APO and a 250mm CM Fujinon-W mounted with a Copal 1 shutter, which helps to keep the weight down. I’ve also purchased several Fidelity double dark slides and a new Manfrotto 410 geared tripod head, which is probably the best accessory I’ve used (apart from pocket wizards.)

I haven’t shot any film, commercially, since 1999 but after looking at the work of Alex Prager recently I’ve been inspired to revisit some old techniques.
I’ve been using a mixture of Ilford FP4, Kodak Tri-X 320 and Kodak’s new sheet film, Ektar 100. Processing them myself in a recently purchased Jobo CPE rotary film processor. Black and white results so far have been fantastic using XTOL diluted 1:1.
Still haven’t decided how to produce the work yet, book or prints, but looking at proof scans using the Epson V700 with Vuescan I may not produce traditionally printed prints.

I’m after a working Jobo CPE-2 film processor, with or without lift for a project I’m currently working on.
Please email me if you have one for sale.

Taken during a summer holiday to Cornwall in 2006.

I work for several public sector organisations and and spend a few days each year working for the prison service.
Here is a small selection from the recently published Serco 2010 annual report.

Annual report photography

I was commissioned to photograph Steve McCurry last week, the Magnum photographer who took one of the most famous photographs in the word (Afghan girl.)
An exhibition of his work is on until October, in Birmingham museum and art gallery.
Well worth a visit.

Steve McCurry

A dancer pictured during rehearsals for Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2003.

Many thanks for all the correspondence from students and graduates in the past few weeks.
Unfortunately I haven’t had time to reply to all of you, but to help you with your chosen career here are a few things I wish I’d known before I left photography college.

1 Arrive early, leave late, especially on news jobs
2 Back up, back up, back up
3 You can never have too many spare batteries
4 You can never have too much spare equipment
5 Shoot RAW
6 Keep asking questions
7 Keep listening
8 Don’t take pictures to become famous, your subject is more important than yourself
9 Apple will always find new and better ways to take money off you
10 Adobe will want you to upgrade, at least once a year
11 Don’t be an early adopter of technology
12 Equipment doesn’t make you a photographer
13 IMAP email is better than POP3 if you are a location photographer
14 Never give away your work for nothing
15 If you become a commercial/editorial photographer, learn how to shoot a portrait in 5 minutes
16 Shoot for the market
17 Develop your own style
18 Never stop looking at other photographers work
19 Depending on the job, dress smartly
20 If you are looking for work have all ages in your portfolio, not just your friends.
21 Learn all you can about about copyright and image licensing
22 Make sure your spelling is perfect
23 Never forget, it really is the best job in the world!

Here’s my first ever front page, from the Biddulph Guardian, published whilst I was still a student at art college.

Article about improvements to the Newtown district of Birmingham after Beverley’s daughter, Charlene Ellis, died in a gangland shooting in 2003.

For anyone having problems with Photoshop Bridge CS5 startup scripts not loading I’ve found a solution.
Since purchasing Photoshop CS5 I’ve been unable to produce contact sheets from the output panel in Bridge (it’s been empty.)
Several re-installs of CS5 and a clean install of Snow Leopard didn’t make any difference, several suggestions on the Adobe forums also didn’t work for me.
Solution is to run diskwarrior then rebuild the directory and repair permissions (using the Diskwarrior tab.) I also ran check all files and folders.
Previously I’ve always repaired permissions from disk utility so running repair permissions from Diskwarrior did the trick (may even work by repairing permissions from the OSX startup disc.)
This has also solved the invoke Bridge error message in Photoshop.

Patients and staff began their move today to the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.
Over 500 patients will be relocated this week from the old Selly Oak and QE hospitals.

Related pictures: Building of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham

In 1993 I had the privilege to spend a few days with the Rev. Andrew Dean in Liverpool for a picture story I was working on. This is one of the images from story I produced.
The story lead onto another project, Ordination (Ordination of women as priests), which was exhibited in Manchester.

After competing today in the Road Time Trials National 10 mile championships I stayed on to watch Michael Hutchinson win again, with a time of 18.37 minutes (average of 32.2mph.)

2nd place went to world track gold medal winner Ed Clancy, recording a time of 19.20 minutes.

Adobe’s latest version of Photoshop, CS5 was released last week and like most photographers the feature I was most interested in was content aware. The demo from Adobe looked like no more hours of cloning and using the healing brush.
The example I’ve used is a panorama of 7 images stitched together in Photoshop CS5
.

As always it does a brilliant job but you do loose a bit of top and bottom of the image.

This is a far I could get using the content aware tool, it did a good job of the sky and part of the foreground but it couldn’t cope with the large area of water no matter how many times I tried.

Finished image with water cloned in using the clone tool.
Time taken from start to finish, 5 minutes. The image could do with a lot more work to get it looking perfect but the content aware tool looks like it’s a good starting point for cloning, although not the perfect solution.