Family and children sessions, newborn, portraits and headshots, pets, events and weddings, and the commercial work companies need — teams, workplaces, product and property. The same studio also shoots video and handles audio, so you can brief pictures, film and sound once instead of hiring three people.
Children change faster than anyone photographs them. A family session is a proper record of a particular summer, a particular height, a particular way of standing — not just a portrait for the wall, though you get one of those too.
Sessions run at the pace of the youngest person there, which is the only pace that produces anything worth keeping. Mostly outdoors or in your own house, with as little posing as the picture will tolerate. A handful of arranged group frames — the ones grandparents want — are made early while attention lasts; the rest is left to happen.
Newborn sessions are booked around a due date rather than a day, held as a provisional week and confirmed once the baby arrives. The first two weeks is the window. And if a child is unwell, the session moves at no charge, however late the notice.
Individual sittings for people who need one good photograph of themselves: a profile, a book jacket, a press kit, a website, or simply the first decent portrait since a wedding fifteen years ago.
One light and a reflector more often than four heads. The point of a sitting is the twenty minutes of conversation that make somebody stop performing, and equipment that takes ten minutes to move works against that. Studio, your own office, or somewhere outdoors that means something to you.
Retouching is color, contrast and tone, never the person: blemishes and stray hair, yes; reshaped faces, slimming or skin-smoothing, no. You should still recognise yourself. Team and executive work, where matching a whole set matters more than any single frame, is under business photography.
Almost entirely about time and location. An animal asked to sit still in an unfamiliar studio gives you one kind of picture; the same animal on a beach at the hour it likes best gives you another, and the second kind is what people keep.
Beach, woodland, snow and open ground at first or last light, or available light at home for older and nervous animals. Fast shutter, continuous autofocus, and enough distance that the animal forgets there is a camera. Owners in frame or out, as you prefer.
Sessions are booked with slack in them on purpose. Nothing useful comes out of the first ten minutes with a dog that has just arrived somewhere new, and the good frames arrive once everybody has stopped trying.
Coverage that does not become part of the event. Conferences, panels, launches, performances, award evenings and weddings — photographed quietly, and edited fast enough to be useful while people still care.
For corporate events: keynote, breakouts, exhibition floor and the reception where the useful pictures usually are, with speaker names checked against the programme. A tight edited selection goes out the same night or the next morning, because press and social need pictures while the thing is still happening.
For weddings: a timeline built backwards from the light, group photographs done quickly and by name from a list agreed in advance, and no direction at all during the ceremony itself. The files are yours to print, with no print package requirement.
A wedding is not a unit, so there is no honest list price for one: hours of coverage, a second shooter, an album and a timeline running from morning preparation to the last dance vary too much between two weddings for a single number to mean anything. Ask for a wedding quote and one comes back in writing before anything is booked.
The pictures a company keeps needing: headshots that match across a whole leadership page, people actually at work, the workplace itself, culture imagery for careers pages, and one planned shoot that produces a reusable library instead of four urgent commissions.
Team headshots are shot to one agreed look and the setup is recorded, so a joiner photographed eight months later matches the people they stand beside on the page. Sittings run on a short slot each, on a schedule that fits a business day, with a compact lighting setup that fits a meeting room rather than needing one cleared.
Usage rights are stated up front — where the images may be used, in which territories, for how long, and whether paid media is included — and delivery is in the exact crops and formats your channels take, not a folder of full-frame files somebody has to cut up. Screens, whiteboards and documents are watched for and composed out; work under NDA where required.
Commercial work does not have to go on a card. If your finance team needs an invoice or a purchase order, ask for one here — net 30, with the dates held while it goes through your system.
Everything about product photography is solvable except consistency across a run, which is what actually breaks catalog shoots. That is a discipline problem rather than a lighting one.
Positions logged, tethered capture to a calibrated display, and a color reference in the first frame of every setup, so the fortieth item in a range matches the first. Focus-stacked where the depth of the object demands it, which is most jewellery, most tools and anything shot close.
Seamless white or a chosen ground for e-commerce, built sets for packaging and lifestyle, and in-situ work where the object needs its context. The variants people ask for a week later — cut-out paths, separated shadow layers, alternate angles, square and vertical crops — are delivered with the first set rather than billed as a second job.
Two failures account for most bad property photography: converging verticals left to a slider afterward, and interiors exposed either for the room or for the window but never both. Both are fixed at capture.
Shift movements keep verticals vertical; blended exposures keep a window showing its view while the room stays the color it actually is. Rooms shot wide but not distorted, at the height a person sees from rather than at chest height on a tripod. Hero exteriors scheduled for the hour the building faces the light, which for most properties is a single window in the day.
Residential listings and developments, commercial floor space for lettings and tenders, and the close detail that sells a specification — joinery, stone, ironmongery, the way a handle meets a door.
Most corporate video fails in the first fifteen seconds, and it fails on structure rather than on camera. So the work starts at the script and the interview questions, not the shot list.
Brand and corporate films, documentary and interview, multi-camera event coverage, and the social cutdowns you will be asked for two weeks later — framed at capture rather than cropped out of a wide master, which is how a subject ends up half out of frame on a phone.
Editing, color and finishing are taken on as their own engagement too, including for footage shot by somebody else: archive and mixed-source material where half the raw footage are the wrong frame rate, the wrong color space, or both.
A scripted brand film is quoted, not listed: the treatment decides how many shoot days, how much cast and location, and how long the edit runs, so a number set before the treatment exists would be a guess. Ask for a brand film quote and it is scoped properly first.
Nobody leaves a video because the grade was a shade cool. They leave because the room is ringing, the level jumps between speakers, or the music is sitting on top of the dialogue.
Audio is treated as its own discipline with its own session, not as something applied to a video timeline at the end of a long day. Location and controlled-room recording, voice and dialogue, podcast production, mixing, mastering, and full post against a locked picture.
Rooms are listened to before anything is plugged in: a hard-surfaced meeting room with a glass wall is a worse problem than any microphone can solve, and the fix is moving, treating or rescheduling rather than repairing it afterward.
The same shape whether it is a family session, a day of headshots or a three-day film. What is being delivered — counts, crops, usage rights and dates — is written down before the first frame is shot.
What it is for and where it will be seen. Ends in writing: deliverables, counts, ratios, usage, dates, the price, and what is explicitly not included. Nothing is booked before you have that.
Light through the day, access and logistics. For family work: naps, meals and where the children are already comfortable. For video, the script. For audio, a listen to the room.
Tethered or monitored, so what is being captured is visible while there is still time to change it. Anything unrepeatable is recorded twice, and cards are offloaded to two destinations before anyone leaves.
An edited selection rather than a raw dump, two rounds of revision built in, then final files named to a convention you can search, with metadata and rights embedded. Masters kept for twelve months.
Landscape, water and city photography made for its own sake. This is not a service being sold — nobody commissions a dune — but it is where the habits that make the commissioned work good get practised: turning up at the right hour, framing once, and doing the developing rather than leaving it to a preset.
Personal work — not a service. The full gallery is in Work
A family session, a child’s first birthday, a baby due in six weeks, a dog that will not sit still, one good portrait of yourself. Or a leadership page that no longer matches, a product range, a building, an event, a film that needs a structure before it needs a camera.
Useful things to include: what it is for, roughly when, where you are, and — for family work — the ages of the children. For a newborn, the due date is enough.
Everything is quoted in writing before it is booked, with the usage rights stated in the same document. If the work would be better served by a specialist, I will say so and point you at the right kind of shop.
Already know what you want? Skip the conversation and book and pay for it directly — every listed session, shoot and post rate is there, a retainer holds the date, and paying in full takes 5% off.
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