Photographer

I start with a call or a written brief rather than jumping straight to a shot list, because half the technical decisions depend on things the client hasn't always thought to mention, like where the final images will actually run. I ask about the intended use first: social, print, a website hero image, packaging, because that changes crop ratios, resolution, and even how much negative space I need to leave around the subject. From there I build or ask for a mood board, usually in Pinterest or a shared folder of reference images, so we're aligned on tone before anyone shows up on the day. I turn that into a written shot list with rough timings next to each setup, and I confirm who else will be on set, whether that's a stylist, an art director giving direction in real time, or just the client. For anything with a brand identity behind it I ask for the guidelines document upfront rather than discovering colour or logo rules midway through editing. The goal is that nothing on shoot day is a surprise to me.

I keep my portfolio tightly edited rather than let it turn into an archive of everything I've shot. I'd rather show twenty-five strong images than eighty mixed ones, because a weak image sitting next to good work drags the whole set down in a client's eyes. I keep a version tailored to the type of work I'm pitching for, so a corporate client sees headshots and event coverage first, and a brand sees product and lifestyle work first, even though the underlying site has everything organised by category. When there's a gap, say I want to move into more editorial-style work but haven't been booked for it yet, I'll shoot a personal project specifically to fill that hole rather than waiting for a client to hand it to me. I review the whole portfolio every few months and I'm willing to pull images that felt strong a year ago but now look dated next to newer work, even if a client loved them at the time. It's built on Format, and I keep load times and mobile viewing in mind since most people look at it on their phone first.

Brand guidelines usually cover things like colour palette, tone, and how the brand wants to be perceived, but they rarely dictate composition or lighting in detail, so that's where I still have room to bring my own eye. For a recent hospitality client with a very specific warm, muted colour story, I matched my colour grading to sit inside that palette, but I still chose to shoot most of the lifestyle images with strong directional window light rather than flat, even lighting, because that's what gives the images a bit of atmosphere instead of looking like stock photography. I read the guidelines document properly before the shoot rather than skimming it, and I ask directly if anything is ambiguous, like whether people in shots should be looking at camera or caught candidly, since that's a tone decision brands often haven't fully thought through themselves. The guidelines set the boundary, but producing something a viewer would recognise as that brand's work even without a logo on it only happens with a genuine point of view behind the camera.

What keeps me in it is the moment right before you press the shutter, when a scene comes together and you know you've got it before you even check the back of the camera. That feeling hasn't changed since I started, but the way I work has, because the industry moves and I'd be doing clients a disservice if my style stood still. I follow a handful of photographers whose lighting or editing I admire and I'll sometimes recreate a technique I don't understand yet just to learn it, then adapt it into something that's mine rather than copying it outright. I take on personal projects with no client and no deadline a few times a year specifically to experiment, most recently a series shot entirely on flash during daylight, which taught me things about exposure I now use on paid product shoots. I also ask a couple of photographer friends for honest critique on new work rather than only posting it and waiting for likes, because that feedback is usually more useful than anything client-facing work tells me.

On a corporate headshot day for about forty staff, my main strobe pack died two hours in with people still queued up outside the meeting room. I always travel with a second, smaller kit as backup, so I switched to a Godox AD200 with a shoot-through umbrella while my assistant tracked down a replacement pack from a hire company nearby. The light quality changed slightly, softer and a touch warmer, so I reshot the first three subjects once the swap was in so the whole set matched. I also moved faster through each sitting to claw back the time we lost, cutting my usual three poses down to two strong ones per person. The client never saw the gap: the schedule finished only fifteen minutes late and every image in the final set is lit consistently. Since then I test every piece of backup gear on a set schedule rather than trusting that owning it is enough, because that AD200 hadn't been switched on in weeks before it saved the day.

During one September I had a fifty-product e-commerce catalogue booked the same week as a two-day conference I was covering for a repeat client, plus a smaller headshot session squeezed between them. I built a shared calendar with hard cutoffs for each delivery and worked backwards from those dates to block editing time, not just shoot days. For the catalogue, I set up a fixed lighting rig and shot tethered into Capture One so the whole set stayed consistent and I could batch-process rather than adjust each image individually. I brought in a freelance retoucher I trust for the conference gallery so I could stay focused on culling and colour matching for the catalogue, and I flagged early to both clients that the headshot turnaround would be twenty-four hours later than usual. Nobody missed a deadline, and being upfront about the one slower turnaround meant the client adjusted their own schedule instead of being surprised by it.

A skincare brand booked me for a single day of product and lifestyle shots at a rate I quote for social media use, then their marketing lead asked afterwards whether they could also run the images in a national print campaign and outdoor ads for two years. That's a completely different value of usage, so I walked them through the difference between social licensing and a broader commercial buyout, and quoted a separate usage fee based on the media, the territory, and the length of the campaign. I offered two options: pay the extended usage fee, or keep the images to social and paid digital only, which is what the original day rate covered. They chose the extended licence for six of the twenty images rather than the whole set, which kept the cost down for them and still reflected the actual value to me. Since then I put usage terms in writing on every quote before the shoot, not after, so this conversation happens before anyone is disappointed.

I cull first, usually in Photo Mechanic because it loads full-resolution previews fast, and I get a shoot down from maybe eight hundred frames to a shortlist of sixty or so before I touch colour at all. From there I bring the raw files into Lightroom or Capture One depending on the client, Capture One for anything shot tethered because its colour handling on skin tones is stronger out of the box. I build a base correction on one representative image, exposure, white balance, and any lens corrections, then sync that across the set and adjust individually where the light changed. Grading comes next: I keep a few custom presets as a starting point but always hand-tweak curves and split toning rather than applying one flat look across a whole shoot, because lighting conditions vary even within a single session. I export as sRGB for web and social, and Adobe RGB or ProPhoto for anything going to print, and I work on a calibrated monitor so what I see matches what the client sees. Delivery goes through Pixieset with a gallery link for client selects.

Reflective products are the trickiest for me because the lighting problem and the composition problem are the same thing: every light source and every dark surface in the room shows up in the reflection. For a recent jewellery shoot I built a full light tent out of diffusion fabric, used two soft boxes at low power rather than one strong one, and added black flags just outside the frame to control where the shadows fell on the metal. For low-light event work I shoot with fast primes, usually a 35mm or 50mm at f1.4 to f2, and bounce a speedlight off a ceiling or wall rather than firing it straight at the subject, which keeps skin tones natural instead of flat and harsh. For subjects that won't hold still, kids, pets, live sport, I switch to continuous autofocus with back-button focus and shoot in bursts, then cull hard afterwards rather than trying to nail one perfect frame in the moment, since in all three cases the real skill is knowing which variable to control first: light, then composition, then timing.

I shoot with a body that has dual card slots and I always record raw to both simultaneously, so a corrupted card never means a lost shoot. I carry a second body and at least one backup lens on every paid job, even a small one, because gear fails without warning and clients don't care why the shoot didn't happen. On site, memory cards don't get reformatted until the files exist in at least two separate places: usually a laptop and a portable SSD, and for anything higher stakes I also push a copy to cloud backup before I leave the location. I keep a consistent folder structure by date and client name and rename files on import rather than leaving camera-generated numbers, which matters once you're managing several jobs a month and searching for a specific frame six weeks later. The rule I hold myself to is that a shoot isn't backed up until it exists in three places, not one, and I don't consider a job finished until that's done, before editing even starts.