Group portrait photography 2

This image was of one of the people working at the kiwi spit roast barbecue king company, a photography shoot I did for a commercial mayonnaise brand promotion . I used the wonderful 85mm 1.2 canon lens to control the backgrounds with its wide aperture and ability to make interesting things out of areas that may not look so good in focus - of course the wide aperture also gives the opportunity to be more flexible in low light areas so there is less fiddling around with lights etc making the subjects nervous.
Continuing on with the people theme , this was taken earlier this year as a portrait of the production team for a cookbook I was working on . It was carefully staged to look natural - I prefer to work that way so usually pick the location and relax the subjects into it . I used available light and a little bit of flash to compensate for the overhead lighting . I was Pleased with the result as commercial kitchens can look a bit grim sometimes.

Group portrait photography 1

I photographed this group of property agents in Epsom the other day out side their offices in a prominent building of the area. It was a great opportunity to do something a bit different from the regular corporate shot and also to use black and white. The brief was to have them moving and not looking too static , and to fit a panoramic format as that was the size of the promotional piece they were planning. a quick visit to the site and some initial planning to work out the angle. Then it took a little direction to get them moving the right way and the biggest issue was yelling over the noise of the traffic! We were all very pleased with the outcome.

All about me

I am a photographer based in Auckland , New Zealand. You can see some of my work at www.seanshadbolt.co.nz

I have been in business for about twenty years now , through the most intense time of change the industry ( and many industries ) have seen in the past one hundred years or more . When I started in the industry , my employer still used a half plate ( 6x8 inches ) view camera to take passport photographs, 35mm film wasn't generally used in the commercial world as scanning technology was still quite primitive and the bigger the original transparency or negative the better. Photographers didn't need to know much about the technology at all , just how to make a good image on piece of film .

These days it seems like a digital madness . while it is great to have all this technology at our fingertips to be able to control the quality of out put to clients , at the same time the amount of new software needed to be learned for both photo production and delivery is extraordinary. And just as you think you have it all sorted out it changes again. Life with a roll of film seems so simple by comparison.

In the past I used multiple formats of film for the production of images . Everything from 4x5 large format film to 35mm and medium format roll film in multiple formats from 6x4.5 to 6 x 17mm sizes. I sill like to shoot a roll of transparency film once in a while to see what a

" real " photograph should look like , but almost all my work is now done on digital equipment for the sake of convenience for both me and my clients , although if the need arises , I still use film . Now the question has changed form " what format do you prefer to use " to - how many megapixels do you use. In my opinion , once megapixels moved past the 16 mp range , the question almost is academic .

Originally in digital land I used a 6mp Kodak 760 camera and the files from that camera were used from thumbnail to billboard size and were all satisfactory.

Nowadays I use 21mp Canon cameras and 22 and 39 mp medium format Hasselblad cameras and apart from the smoothness in the files , the main reason is the " look " the larger cameras give - richer and deeper colour and incredible detail.