Studio diary of Hampshire photographer - Mike French
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Today I covered the PR for the Lee-on-the-Solent Tennis Club on their annual Open Day.
This year both Pat Cash and Andrew Castle visited the tennis club to be part of this well prepared, and executed event.As with last year my brief was fairly straightforward. Capture the day, photograph some PR images of the celebrities with the sponsors and their families, and then shoot the tennis matches.
Once again I will be the official photographer for the Lee-on-the-Solent Tennis Club open day, commissioned by the club to cover the day and to photograph a series of images for them. This year the club has Pat Cash, and Andrew Castle returning to do battle in some exhibition tennis with Chris Wilkinson, the club’s Director of Tennis, and commenter/umpire Matt Chilton also there – it promises to be bigger and better than last years amazing event.
We just completed an executive portrait for a management consulting company based in Whitely near Fareham in Hampshire. The Operations Director visited the studio for a formal business portrait and we quickly created a series of different looks and lighting and some high quality portraits before he left.
Last week I entered a local print competition with two of my favourite images for sometime. With over 80 entries across a wide variety of subjects, and a singular judge there is never any kind of expectation as to how you are going to get on. Well we did great. After all the comments and scoring both of the images were held back for a final comparison and score, and the result was both images were awarded perfect 10′s and also unexpectedly a 1st and 2nd place, which was a first for this competition.
I spent today in the fresh air at the very lovely Fair Oak at Rogate working with equestrian photographer Martin Lewis who asked me to shoot with him today at the Wey Valley Riding Club one day event. The dressage, show-jumping and cross country overlapped some significantly and so I lent an extra pair of hands, some camera equipment, and of course my eye.
Well it is election day, and for the last few weeks we have been receiving election flyers from all of the main parties – Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Labour, and some of the independent candidates and smaller parties. Frankly I have been shocked, and not by some of the policies and promises but the quality of the portrait images, and election campaign images being used by the candidates to promote themselves.
