A year of events photographed in 2010

Though the majority of my work is in private and corporate portraiture and architectural and interiors photography, I regularly cover events in both formal and informal ways using a Fuji Finepix S5 Pro and a Leica M8 and have put together a slide show of some of the events I did photograph last year.

These include the launch event for the Boiler House Event space at Battersea Power Station, Designer Breakfasts, At Abrahams, 

A gilding master class by Rodrigo Titian, a Triibes Seth Goldin meetup at the Royal Festival Hall, 

 The Music Publishers Association AGM, The Thinking Hotel 24 hour workshop,

The British Quality Foundation Awards and the Change Play workshop - variety is the spice of life.

 

and a wedding in Surrey,

Photos taken on my way to the Designer Breakfast on 23rd September, then ...

I decided to take my Leica M8 to this months Designer Breakfast held at BBH's offices and chose to start snapping as I emerged from Piccadilly Circus Underground Station and keep snapping all the way to Kingly Street.

Knowing I have an assignment coming up involving compositing three shots to look like one for a client, I decided to have trial run on the street and several quick fire sequences of people passing in front of interesting spaces. Back at the office, firing up Lightroom 3 I exported the sequences to layers in CS5, then aligned the layers and used the rubber tool to reveal each position of the wandering folk on the layers above them - voila - magic!

Sebastian Conran, proved a fascinating and entertaining speaker

 and with my appetite for design whetted, I headed off to Borough market for sustenance, the Clerkenwell for a Business Junction networking session, continuing to snap on the way.

You can see some of the resulting images in the slideshow.

Designer Breakfast with David Kester 22nd of April 2010

On Thursday, off I went to the sumptuous, quirky offices of Bartle Bogle Hegarty BBH  for a Designer Breakfast at 8am, looking forward to hear David Kester, chief executive of the Design Council talking about 'Design against crime' and 'Designing out bugs' which are Design Council-led projects to bring design into the heart of the public sector’s decision-making process. And the designers share the financial rewards as well as retain their intellectual property.

As usual I took along my Leica M8 and snapped the goings on, which I have put into a short slide show.

David spoke entertainingly and informatively for 45 minutes, using the dreaded PowerPoint slideshow to great effect and followed it up with a really useful Q&A with good questions coming from an expert audience.

Designer Breakfast on 26th March @ the St Bride Library

On Thursday I attended my first Designer Breakfast, mixing with an eclectic crowd of creatives intent on networking and learning useful things about how to run and grow their businesses.

This breakfast asked the question: How do you band together as a group of equals with a shared set of values and an eye on the big project? How do you organise in a way that is equitable, viable and rewarding? Amanda Tatham welcomed us and introduced the speakers.

Claudie Plen of specialist change consultancy Edge Thinking gave an interactive seminar that addressed the must-ask questions of successful collaboration today. She did so in an authoritative and engaging way, with lots of audience participation. We had to work! I came away with some useful ideas on structuring work collaboratively, with ticklists of issues that need to be addressed if planning to do so successfully and enjoyably.

Paul Richards then presented an example of such successful collaboration by talking about his agency, Be Like Water, a fluid agency of partner professionals united by an idea – creating better work in a better way.He is a man with a compelling use of language and one phrase remains with me - people are what they show they are and not what they tell they are.

Many people stayed on afterwords to discuss these and other matters further. I will endeavour to return next month's Designer Breakfast and thereafter as it really was a morning well spent.