black and white photography Archives

CEO & Director Headshots & Portrait Package London.

These are a selection of portraits originally commissioned by The CEO Magazine a couple of years ago. They required a good variety of images to feature in a large article. We spent a couple of hours at the London offices capturing some interesting imagery.

Corporate headshot and portrait of CEO in London offices.

After the shoot we published the images on our blog and via our social media sites and found the style a variation to be of interest to our clients.We now offer a package where we can visit your offices and capture a specialist headshot and portrait portfolio. These give you a photo library to draw on for press release, LinkedIn, pitch documents, business social media, company website profiles, event presentations, gravatar and any marketing material.

This package is designed for business people who have a requirement to look professional and contemporary in their corporate public profile. These portraits allow you to control your images in the media and issue and send the correct headshot for the appropriate situation.

Depending on how many final portraits you require we can spend between 1 and 2 hours on site. Within this time we will have a quick recce of the offices and decide on several of the best location to capture the photos. We suggest a variety of backgrounds to give a range to the portraits and we can use the offices as environmental backgrounds and bring a plain white and black background as well. Our photographer will give guidance on posture and posing and suggest when to smile and capture a very wide variety so you have plenty to choose from. We can edit the selection for you or send you all the images captured within the session. Also as we shoot the portraits we can show you the results on the back of the digital camera so you will have a feel for what is being taken and it will give you confidence in front of the camera. Sometimes the client has a shoot list and a requirement for images to fit a design or document so we can tailor the shoot to accommodate these. Also we often work to a corporate branding guidelines including company colour and logo etc.

After the commission we will process the portraits and edit out any obvious flaws. All the images will be uploaded to our secure server and then we send a download link that can be password protected if required. We send out low res images for quick and easy viewing and also high res versions approx 3mb jpgs. If you require RAW files we will need to know this prior to the shoot. Delivery of image download link is within 48 hours.

Within the package we offer free retouching and airbrushing to your favourite portraits. Select a couple from each setting and location we shot and send us a list with the original jpg file numbers. With portrait retouching we do it in a subtle way making sure it is not obvious that anything has been retouched. We decrease wrinkles and clear up any spots or stained teeth. Ties can be straightened and clothes can have dust and fly away hairs cleaned up. Pretty much anything is possible with photoshop. Depending on the amount of post production work on at the time we normally take around 48 hours to return your retouched headshots and portraits to you.

If you would like to know more about our Director and CEO corporate headshot & portrait package please drop us a line. Corporate Photography Agency

Giorgi’s Cafe, Bethnal Green Road, London, 1971 by Neil Martinson

19th February 2018/in black and white photography, London Photography, Photography News /by Editor

A photograph of Hackney in the 1970s by Neil Martinson, who has been documenting the area for almost 50 years.

London Photographer Neil Martinson

Neil Martinson was just 17 years old and still at school when he began taking photographs of Hackney, east London, where he was born and raised. “It was 1971. I bought myself a Zenit-E, a Russian-made camera, which was the only one I could afford, and I started to explore the streets, the shops, the factories, the bomb sites,” he recalls. “I was a nervous kid. Being behind the lens made me feel more confident.”

This shy schoolboy soon co-founded a radical photography collective, Hackney Flashers, and went on to take thousands of images of working lives and street scenes in Hackney in the 70s and 80s, many of which can now be seen for the first time at East End gallery Stour Space.

This photograph was taken on Bethnal Green Road on a Sunday, market day at nearby Brick Lane. “Looking at the people, their clothes, those prams, the way they stand, the relationship between them – it could have been taken in the 1950s rather than the early 70s,” Martinson says. “The whole area was effectively recovering from the slum clearances of the 70s and from the second world war. There were still bombed-out buildings everywhere. It was very impoverished.”

For many, a visit to Brick Lane market was a highlight of the week. Not only could you buy anything from clothes and food that was “seriously past its sell-by date” to live animals, “it was also an outing for locals, in much the same way that it is now for hipsters and tourists”, says Martinson. Giorgi’s Cafe, now long forgotten, was in a prime position. “This was in the days before there was a coffee bar every two shops, so it was incredibly popular.”

Martinson has never moved from the Hackney area but now prefers to take landscape photographs in remote locations, such as South Uist. “The reason I called the exhibition Another Time Another Place is that Hackney has changed so profoundly,” he says. “I grew up in a period when you had a lot of people doing manual jobs. There was a huge amount of manufacturing going on in the borough, which helped to make it diverse and vibrant. Now many of the local people are employed in the service industry, cleaning and so on, while others are making money out of thin air, in the digital world.”

More of the same Phil Maxwell’s photographs of London’s East End 1980s

Black and White Photographs of the London Underground being Built.

11th January 2018/in black and white photography, London Photography, Photography News /by Editor

Rarely-seen black and white photos of the London Underground being built have been released to mark the network’s 155^th birthday.

On this day in 1863, the first section of the world-famous London Underground opened to the general public after a massive engineering feat burrowing new tunnels under Victorian London.

Among the fascinating photographs released by the London Transport Museum is a picture showing an early trial trip on the London Underground as well as workers building the new line in Bayswater.

Rarely-seen black and white photos of the London Underground being built have been released to mark the network’s 155th birthday.

The first line which opened was the Metropolitan – then named the Metropolitan Railway – between Paddington and Farringdon via Baker Street.

The same stretch of the Tube is still in use today, with Baker Street and Great Portland Street among the Underground’s oldest stations.

The Inner Circle line, now just the Circle line, opened in 1884 and, to mark the new century, the Central Line was opened between Shepherd’s Bush and Bank in 1900 under the name the Central London Railway.

The Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines opened in 1906 while in 1911 another Tube first was marked at Earl’s Court where the first escalators were installed.

The Northern line opened in 1924, the Victoria in 1968 after 25 years of planning and the Jubilee in 1979.

Transport for London said two of London’s oldest stations – Baker Street and Great Portland Street – will soon be among the network’s most high-tech amid plans to transform the signalling.

Mark Wild, managing director of London Underground, said: “Today marks the 155th anniversary of the Tube which continues to be an iconic symbol of London and remains as vital as it ever was in the lives of Londoners.

“The oldest section of our network will soon be the most modern, with the huge programme to modernise signalling set to transform journeys on the Circle, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan and District lines – 40 per cent of the network – in the coming years.

“We are currently investing unprecedented levels into the Underground to make journeys more reliable, increase capacity and ensure that the network can continue to deliver for London for many more years to come.”

Article from the Evening Standard