Industrial Shoot for The Sign Shop at Plymouth Community Homes

Today I assisted Tony Cobley on an Industrial shoot for The Sign Shop, at Plymouth Community Homes. The sign shop is a non profit organisation that used to be part of Plymouth Community Homes. It has now branched out and has become its own business, in which the profits go towards improving the City of Plymouth. The images were created to advertise the commercial side of the business and will be displayed in a brochure and on a website.

This way day two for Tony on this job so most of the negotiations and assessing the clients needs had already been achieved before I tagged along for work experience. Tony explained that he had received this job through a marketing agency, so most things had been pre-determined by the agency. We chatted about how to get across the right messages for the clients needs, how difficult it can be when dealing with the general public and how sometimes the client being opened minded and uncertain about what they actually want can be negative. Your own personal taste might not be what they had in mind, leaving them unhappy. I realised that agency and corporate work minimises this as often they know exactly what they want, how many hours they want to book you for and how much they want to pay.

We worked with the Mark Powell a leading member of the sign shop team came with us on our shoot, to point out which signs in the Plymouth area his company had made. This worked out really well because he was able to show which signs he wanted photographing but also gave us information about each one. He was a really nice guy and was very laid back in allowing Tony to use his own creative style when Photographing and seemed really positive about the images created.

These are some of photographs that were taken today

(Copyright of Tony Cobley Photography)

The shoot was cut in half as Tony had worked over the scheduled hours yesterday due to the weather being considerably better. I was really impressed with Tony's time management as he had checked the weather in advance for both days and planned around this. It has made me realise that my time management needs stepping up as there is no room for chance in running a business. 

Over all the day was extremely successful, the client was happy with the images and I feel I now understand a different area of commercial photography. However much I prefer photographing people, photographing in this kind of way is a lot less stressful and I'm sure I will have to do some form of shoot like this in the future if I plan to take on any kind of commercial work. Tony was again a pleasure to work with and he even brought us donuts :)