Photography by James White the Manchester Photographer

Manchester P.R.Photographer

Here is a round up of recent Manchester P.R. photography jobs. These photographs were taken for my Housing Association / Trusts clients.

I’ve worked as a Manchester photographer for over twenty years and in this time the requirements of Housing Association companies has changed greatly. When I first started out most of the photography was fairly unmanaged, I was usually commissioned to go out on to several housing estates and do pretty much as I pleased ! This tended to be a mixture of architectural photography and a reportage style, trying to capture both residents and their homes in one image.

The photography is much more managed now. Most of the photography is commissioned by P.R companies or in-house P.R. and marketing departments. There is a clearly set out
brief, aims and requirements for the shoot.

I don’t mind working this way and as a professional photographer you are commissioned to fulfil a brief, not to amuse yourself ! The clearer the brief the easier the job.

I do believe that it’s always good to try and do some thing extra on top of the brief. I usually just have a scout around before and after the shoot to see if I can come up with a different angle. For myself, I like to take a mixture of candid reportage shots and environmental portraits. And it’s really rewarding when these self generated images get used

Architectural photography - advise

Here are my tips and advice for night time architectural photography.

Who am I? I’m an experienced professional photographer, working in Manchester, the North West and nationally, with over twenty years construction photography experience. I’ve worked as a commercial photographer around Manchester, primarily specialising in photographing buildings for a variety of commercial clients including Architects, Construction companies, Builders and Housing associations / Trusts .

As a professional photographer I’m quite often asked to provide night time photographs for my architectural clients. I thought I would share some of the techniques and tricks I’ve learnt with you.

Firstly, the most important piece of photographic equipment is …… wait for it …a really good, solid tripod. It needs to be heavy enough to hold your camera for quite long exposures, possibly running into the 10′s of seconds. For a recent professional photography commission, some of the exposures were at 15 -20 seconds.

The camera used could be pretty much anything as long as it has a tripod mount on it and some manual exposure controls. If you are a professional buildings photographer then you definately should get a camera with noise reduction as an option and also ‘mirror lock up’ to reduce camera shake.

If you are doing this as a bit of fun rather than as an architectural commission then a good choice of building would obviously be one that has plenty of glass in it ! I don’t find that old buildings in Manchester photograph very well. You really need a nice modern build with plenty of glass.

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Arrive at least half an hour before dusk to plan your shot and get into position. Despite the fact that these are night photographs they still look better with a blue sky. They should really be re-named dusk photographs as this time yields the best results. At dusk the sky will go a nice deep indigo colour that looks great on the photographs.

Technique; at dusk take a light reading inside the building or from just the outside of the glazing. This should be done at dusk as the inside of the building starts to ‘glow’ i.e the interior starts to become visible. This will be your exposure. Let’s say that it’s 2 seconds at F11.

We then set up and frame our shot and wait for the ambient light to drop 2 – 3 stops below 2 seconds which would be 4s or 8s. We shoot at 2 seconds exposing for the interior lights but our exterior has now dropped to 2-3 stops below.

I generally keep shooting until its fully dark but usually find that there is a premium time of about 10 minutes when there is enough light left to render details on the outside of the building before they disappear into darkness.

You can view more examples of my work on my Architectural Galleries page .

Here is another job for Pozzoni LLP, based in Altrincham, Cheshire.

This was a quick job photographing a recently completed Travel Lodge in Manchester.

It was quite hard to find anywhere to stand and set-up a tripod as there were lots of parked cars about.

I ended up using an extremely wide angle lens ( 15mm ) and then doing a fair amount of Photoshop work to get everything looking nice and perpendicular.

You can view other examples of Manchester architectural photography in my Architectural Galleries .