Photography Location - Simon Plant Photographer

Jun

Lifestyle Portrait From Beach Babes To Toilet Attendants

I’ve photographed a lot of people over the years including my fair share of lifestyle photos of bikini-clad models.
Although models on beaches are always fun to shoot my favourite people to capture are those that ooze character.
I spotted this chap who was a Toilet Attendant whilst looking for a toilet (you never know where they will pop up) in the resort of Yalikavak Turkey.
When I spot someone like this gentleman I find it very hard to walk by without asking if I can take lifestyle portrait of them and In Turkey at least I can’t remember ever being refused to date.

The image is a great addition to my travel photography portfolio

Lifestyle-portrait-toilet-attendant-turkey

Jun

Boy In The Bay

I captured this image while out for a stroll one evening during my recent trip to Turkey.
It’s not often these days that I go out and just follow my nose with my camera and rarer still that I don’t use a tripod.
Most of my work these days is fairly planned out at least to some point or other so to go out and simply walk & explore is bliss. This takes me back to a time when I was learning my trade and the camera was welded to my eyelid wherever I went!
It was a beautiful evening and I came across 3 young lads jumping off a small wooden pier into the bay at Gumbet.
It wasn’t long before they spotted my camera and started to play to the camera which would normally be my cue to pack away. I decided however the light was just too good to walk away and besides I was simply enjoying the fun too much and getting too many great captures to end it.
Despite being grab shots the images still got a good dose of post production to help portray the mood of this beautiful sunset over the Aegean.

May

Turkish Car Parks & Cruising the Aegean

I’m writing this after a day cruising the Aegean coast in Turkey.
Myself and a friend spent a rather stressful day yesterday checking on my villa which was purchased seven years ago.
The site has taken a long time to complete due to various issues and each year I visit often find some major issue.
A couple of years ago I found it full of bar furniture ..which of course was not mine! Another year it was badly flooded and it goes on and on.
So you can imagine I was dreading what delights might be waiting for me this year.
Even by Turkish standards what I found even shocked me which was to find a car park built where my large garden once stood!
After some frantic calls and some checks it was confirmed that not all of my very large garden was actually owned by myself and the previous owner had decided to grab some extra land !
So after some checks and the matter cleared up my blood pressure was reduced. This was especially helped with the good news that the site now is finally nearing completion.
With all of yesterday fun we decided a little sailing on the Aegean had been well and truly earn’t to chill out and take a few pics.

May

Turkish Tony & Friends

In Turkey checking our Villa and catching up with friends like Fatih Touran aka “Turkish Tony”

Otten Local Businessman

May

Turkish Tony

Here once again in Turkey checking on our villa and catching up with some old friends.
I met Fatih Toran or “Turkish Tony” as we refer to him some 7 years ago and has become a good friend.

Another guy we have known for several years is Otern who is a local guy with fingers in many pies !

May

Branscombe

Kids on school trip till 5pm so me and Mrs P hit the beach at Branscombe 🙂

Apr

Shooting On Location With “Good King Hal”

Following on from my previous post I have now completed the post production work on “Good King Hal”
The shoot took place with Mike Farley aka Good King Hal leading professional Henry VIII lookalike here in the U.K.
I had an idea of what I wanted the final image to look like and this was helped along further by doing a recce of Barrington Court a few days earlier.
The planning also helped move the shoot along nice and quickly to save keeping former comedian Mike waiting around too long, in fact we where all done and dusted in about 40 minutes.
A big thanks to Mike and to the National Trust’s Barrington Court for allowing us use of the property.
Below is the final image together with a short location video.

Henry-viii-lifestyle-photo-retouching-composite-somerset

Henry VIII Shoot At Barrington Court, Mike Farley 07709 216281 http://goodkinghal.co.uk/

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Feb

Swans Splashes & A Somerset School

A couple of weeks before Christmas I had a call from an agency called Ice House Design based in Bath.
They had a job for a client that was a private school called Kings Bruton School here in Somerset.
They needed a very particular image creating of a Swan taking off over water to fulfil use in several publications they where planning.
I was especially excited about this brief as I have been working on a personal project titled “Life In A Somerset Landscape” for nearly a year. The project involves photographing (and compositing) well known Somerset Landscapes with both people and animals within them so this job was a good fit for me on the back of this.

Some of the best creatives I have worked with are the ones that give you a brief but allow enough room for me to interpret it and go that little bit further with it.
Jack Owen the Creative Director at Ice House was one such creative, he provided a fairly tight brief but one that we both collaborated on and pushed further.
After several discussions and a few ideas thrown around we set off to start work on the project.
The first job was to find some suitable water to capture.I had several location in mind and most where on the Somerset Levels but my first location which was a local reservoir turned out to be perfect so much so in fact that the background was also used from the same images and not stripped in as I expected it would be.

My only problem at the location was the wildlife which insisted hanging around the camera despite me attempting to scare them off (the wildlife are pretty hard down ere in Zummerset ! ). I also had a Robin who kept pestering me wherever I walked or turned and by the end of the shoot I felt a little like Evan Almighty !

Back at the studio I decided to strip two images together to create the slightly wide background required from two frames I shot using a longish lens which had helped to create a nice soft perspective.

Next I found a lovely sky in my archives that lent itself to the mood we wanted and promptly added this into the scene.

Bruton where the school is based has a lovely old Dovecote on a hill that we agreed would be a nice subtle addition to add to the scene.The plan was to go and shoot this in suitable weather but unfortunately the weather was not on our side so a stock image was sourced and then retouched for our needs.
Another element that I reluctantly had to source from a stock library was the Swan.This was partly down to the tight deadline and also the fact the image needed was quite particular.
It was extremely important that we sourced the correct image of a Swan taking off and that the lighting was a good match for our background.
The main problem I had after scouring through tons of images was that those that where a good match where often of poor technical quality but eventually we found a near perfect image.
The balance of the post production was to add the swan and most important of all perfecting the splashes in the water which where a vital element in the brief.

After a couple of minor adjustments the agency delivered the proof to the client whom I’m told where overjoyed by the finished image.My hat goes off to Ice House for a great brief and some beautiful design work and also to Kings Bruton the client for doing something quite brave and removed from their normal photography requirements.

Swan-pub-1

Swan-pub-2

Graphic Design. Ice House Design, Bath – Graphic Design + Branding

Photography & Post Production Simon Plant

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Feb

Rolling In Dirt & Dollars At The Colosseum

Several years ago I did a fair amount of productions shooting for stock libraries including Corbis & Getty images.
These where mostly lifestyle shoots on location but also a few landscapes & travel images which for the most part where less salable & profitable ….mostly.

If there is one sure thing in photography it’s there is no sure thing or second guessing what the market will want.So when I took a trip to Rome back in 2005 with the family I did take my cameras (of course) but did not really expect to capture anything that my stock libraries might want as after all how many images must there already be of the eternal city.
With this in mind I decided I’d just follow what took my fancy and capture images for pure pleasure just for myself.

Rome is a little like Venice in terms of photographic opportunities (see my last post on Venice) around every corner except there are more cars and less water !
One of the must have locations I wanted to capture during this trip had to be the iconic Colosseum which posed two problems for me to overcome.
The first and easiest problem to solve was the sheer amount of tourists at the location.This was easily solved as images like these are often captured (at least by me) in the soft light of dawn. Being early spring this meant a 5am start which also meant the only people up and around was myself and street cleaners.
The more challenging problem which I spoke about in my last post was how to photograph the familiar in a fresh interesting way.Can you imagine how many times the Colosseum has been captured over the decades?

The light from the sunrise that morning was simply beautiful and made even more sweet as I had this magnificent and historic building all to myself well at least the exterior of it. As I explored the location It dawned on me (no pun intended) that shooting with Contre-jour light and a precise exposure would help reproduce the beauty I was experiencing.
What makes this image so successful (more on that in a moment) in my opinion was the fact I always explore my composition options, moving left-right up and down around the scene to find what gives me the strongest image.In this image I decided an ultra low angle lying on my stomach with a wide angle lens would provide a strong foreground with the sunlit cobbles.
Although I knew I had several strong images I was still unconvinced about submitting these to my Art Director at my stock library after all landscapes / travel images did not sell that well partly due to the vast amount already available but I decided to send them in anyway.
To my surprise the agency took a good selection of those I submitted including several of the Colosseum images but the best was to come.
The first month they appeared for sale the Colosseum image featured here sold for $25,000 to American Airlines for an advertising campaign they where producing and it continued selling for the following 18 months notching up some amazing sales.
The least financially beneficial sale it received but probably my proudest was when it appeared on the cover of the National Geographic.

So why did an image of one of the most famous and photographed land marks in the world gross in excess of $50,000 in sales when the market was saturated with images of it?
Well I think it’s very simple..It’s the familiar captured in an unfamiliar way. By lying on those dusty uncomfortable cobbles and using the beautiful dawn light the best way I could I had created an image that was pretty unique and fresh compared to anything else available at the time.

In my opinion to succeed in today’s commercial photography market it’s essential to be as unique in your image creation as possible to have any chance of standing out in the overcrowded market and that means understanding & developing your eye / visual style over many years.

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Feb

Venezia, Gondolier’s, A Straw Hat And A Dog With A Bone

It’s so easy to travel to a popular destination and simply fall into shooting well known landmarks from where everyone else does.
Lets face it the reason a particular spot is often used over and over is because it’s simply a great angle that many photographer’s (and possibly painters) have used again and again.These images get seen published and then searched out by others to replicate.
I’m not saying this is wrong but the problem for me is that by doing this it’s not exactly being creative as you are simply copying what every other bugger is doing again and again !
So the challenge for me is to capture these iconic places in my own style and hopefully a fresh new way …which not easy!

Gondolier Grande Canal, Venice Italy

A few days before Christmas in 2004 I was itching to take a trip to test my transition from film into digital capture. I persuaded the wife that a romantic trip to Venice was needed together with 20kg of shiny new gear (fortunately she’s pretty strong !) and off we flew.
Venice… lets face it you would have to be complete lemon to go to there and not come back with at least a few great images from what is one of
if not the most stunning and unique places on earth.
Needless to say I took a lot of images during the trip and being December the light was good all day and fortunately dry although bitterly cold.
On our final morning I left the wife in bed and carried my kit myself to a very famous spot where I planned a dawn capture of the Grande Canal with the Maria Della Sallute in the background.
Although this is a very famous angle painted and photographed a million times I was determined to make it my own in some way.
As I was early I decided to pop into a cafe alongside the bridge where I planned to shoot from to wait for the light and have a well deserved Cappuccino especially after having to carry my own kit !
It was from the cafe I noticed a decked area with some plant pots and it was from here I decided would give me an interesting fresh angle for my image.
The dawn light was everything I hoped it would be and the scene came alive.
I added some extra depth by allowing one of the cafe’s plant pots to appear out of focus in the foreground.
Apart from a few cranes I was very pleased with what I had but could not help think how perfect would the image be with a gondolier in the scene.
I decided to wait in the hope one would appear in my beautiful composition but despite my patience none appeared.

My mum always say’s that once I have a bee in my bonnet I’m like a dog with a bone and just don’t let go !
I decided I definitely wanted a Gondolier for the image and went on a mission to find one before my flight departed that afternoon.
I searched high and low trying to capture a gondolier at the correct height (to match perspective) and in a similar light to my background and found several BUT none had the classic straw hat..that I now decided was also required for the perfect image I had in my head.
Time was getting short and despite my effort no gondoliers in the correct light and perspective with a hat could be found on the water so I decided I would have try another way.
Finally after much stalking around the rustic back streets of Venice I found a suitable doner hat and although the light was not quite perfect I knew with some tweaking I could get it to work.

This is one of my favorite images maybe not because it’s one of my strongest but probably because it’s a reminder of a magical weekend a few days before Christmas in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It was also the start of a new way of working & capturing images that blended seamlessly with the way I already was working in post production and of course it was also a romantic weekend with my wife 🙂 ..yep that too

Images Available As Prints In Our Gallery

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