Nope, not an encounter with Jack Nicholson and his pet axe in a remote hotel – a shoot with England rugby superstar Jonny Wilkinson. The World Cup is nearly upon us again so what better way to commemorate that drop-kick that earned us victory over the Aussies than a shot of the man himself.

Commissioned by Getty Images for the NSPCC this shoot was part of the full-stop campaign. Jonny is supporter of the NSPCC and so we had him wear an NSPCC shirt and the agency had provided a green NSPCC coloured ball. Read more from this entry »

Gratuitous plug time.

A very good friend of mine, photographer John Carolan who lives in Shetland (that group of islands you can just see on the weather map that lie between Scotland and Norway) has spent the last two years on a personal project shooting portraits documenting 100 of the islands women.

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When I’m not shooting commissioned work I shoot for a few stock libraries. One of my drivers, as you’ll see if you look at the portfolio, is the concept of symmetry and it’s extremely rare to just stumble across this in nature.

The following image was made during a trip to Germany & Holland in spring this year to shoot stock. I found myself driving through the beautiful countryside of the Eifel region in Germany (south west of Bonn) with its rolling hills and amazing wind turbine farms. The main purpose of the day was to visit some of the little medieval villages that populate this region and to shoot them for my stock libraries.

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This image was made during a day shooting portraits and interiors at a hotel for a national UK chain. Its a good example of what can be achieved in difficult lighting conditions with only a few minutes with the subject.

I had planned to spend 30 minutes with Arve, the head chef, but busy schedules and the need to get lunch underway meant that I had 10 minutes maximum to light and get the shot. As usual, with environmental portraiture work, I don’t know what conditions I’m going to find until I get there. The client wanted me to shoot Arve in the recently refurbished lounge.

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Advertising photographers on shoots that include crew, art directors, catering, the works, normally refer to the whole caboodle as ‘The Dog and Pony Show’. Well earlier in the week I had my very own….with a real live dog and pony!

The shoot was commissioned by the London based Mission21 agency for an English Heritage promo on ‘Dogs through History’. The idea was to emulate an old WW1 press photo which showed an officer leading his horse back from the front line along a lane, giving a lift to his Jack Russell dog who was riding nonchalantly on the saddle.

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Rather than type it all out again I thought you might like a look at the article I wrote for Cat Morley’s ‘Business of Design Online’ website. Cat asked me to describe a typical day in the life of Jon Boyes. I tried to describe it and you can see the results here.

Until later……

J

Welcome to the blog.

I’m sure it will develop a theme as it goes along but initially I thought I’d show some images that are favourites and talk about how they came about. Over the last few days the part of my brain that isn’t taken up with the finer intricacies of Photoshop has been overloaded with talk of trackbacks, pingbacks, feedburners and other blog type web 2.0 niceties that I’ve yet to fully digest!

I think the RSS feed is working though so please subscribe and keep up with my updates.

Until later……

J