Most photographers prefer to be behind the camera. That’s one of the reasons why you never see us in family albums at Christmas time. We prefer to make you smile, while we remain anonymous. However, last weekend at Chobham in Surrey, our event photographer Lee Cooke got the chance for a passenger ride.

And it wasn’t in just any old car, but in the Radical prototype racing car run by 6th Gear Experience director Andy Cummings. Andy races an identical car to this one in the Radical sports prototype racing series across Europe, so his idea of a relaxing afternoon is scaring passengers witless in a series of high speed rides in the Radical. Our first picture shows Lee with his very best Nervous Smile at the pitlane exit. The image below was captured by the quick reactions of our trackside photographer as the pair took the chicane flat out at the end of the lap. The fine detail of the shot clearly shows Lee’s white knuckles on the roll cage. We’d ask him for a comment, but he’s not begun speaking again just yet….

A quick picture to share with you grabbed by Marc at Goodwood last week. We shoot quite literally tens of thousands of supercar pictures each year, capturing that perfect moment for guests on driving experience events. Most times, the car is a state of the art exotic Italian Ferrari or Lamborghini. But a quite different driving experience package is this car from Mythrill Racing.

Based at the beautiful Goodwood circuit, they operate a fleet of classic cars for customers to drive on track. This classic Mustang is one of the cars available to drive, along with E Type Jaguars, air cooled Porsches and even classic Aston Martins. No traction control, ABS brakes or other modern aids, this is track driving in one of it’s purest forms. Mythrill Racing’s website shows the full details of the classic cars they have, take a look here

We’re quite pleased to read some very significant news in The Guardian about Next profits rising by 12%. This means that for the first time, they’ve now overtaken Marks & Spencer. Next have long been considered to be a ‘little sister’ to M&S, but no longer. For us, the exiting part of this increase in profit is that it’s almost 100% derived from online sales.

Why are we so thrilled by this? We’ve been working hard with Next for more than a year now, constantly improving the product photography used in the online stores to depict the products you can buy from Next Online and in their catalogue. With store sales up 1.7% but online sales increasing by 12% it shows that good photography to accurately depict your items for sale is now more important than ever.

We’re currently working with several other retailers on ways to improve the customer experience online through quality product photography and it’s an exciting time for us. If you have an online store with a range of products, we can help you improve your success in selling online. Drop us a line for a chat about ways to achieve this, we’re always happy to discuss this fascinating area of online selling.

Images are all around us, more so than ever with the advent of ‘always on’ digital content, iPad apps for shopping and digital, interactive shopping channels. The need for images has never been greater and yet most people don’t ever give a second’s thought to how they were created.

Unless it’s a newsworthy event, a peak-of-the-action goal scoring shot or an Olympic winning sprinter, we never give it a thought. And yet just as much care is needed in the creation of the photography you see all around you, every day.

Just to remind you, here’s a selection of that type of photograph. Fore more than a year now, we’ve been working with the NEXT catalogue, photographing every pair of shoes, each article of furniture, in every combination and from several angles, so that customers can make shopping choices online. Together, we devised an entire workflow, a cottage industry of product photography so that when new products go live, the images are ready to describe and portray. It’s something that needs to be controlled, repeatable and above all, high quality. When images are used to portray goods for sale, they must be accurate and honest, not Photoshopped like a supermodel. Below is a diagram of one of our studio layout bays.

We use both Canon and Nikon cameras in our work, shooting tethered into Apple Mac workstations so that we can examine each image minutely to ensure the best quality. Far from being boring, it’s actually rather absorbing. For instance, just how do you photograph a heavily mirrored vanity unit made from mirrored panels and highly polished surfaces without appearing in the reflections ourselves? Well, that’s probably a subject for another blog post….