Yesterday I had a shoot at a government building in Westminster for a commercial lighting company who had supplied new ultra efficient recessed office lights as part of an initiative to save energy. We did before and after shots on different floors of the building and the new lighting was not only more efficient but also far more attractive to look at. The only problem was that the new lights had a high surface brightness as they were basically opaque plastic diffusers and therefore the only way to show any detail in the fittings themselves was to shoot a range of exposures for each final picture and blend the lights back in to the shot in Photoshop. This is a long winded and tricky method but it works very well for pictures with a high contrast range.

Today I photographed a huge new comprehensive school in Cheshunt (just off J25 of the M25) and it took me nearly 5 hours to photograph. The job went well though and it was good to finish off the week with a busy couple of days.

Next week is very busy too with three shoots in London and a day in the studio. I've now gone from being pretty quiet (last week) to being mad busy again - if only I could spread jobs out a bit more!.

I shot a load of Chromogenic film (black and white film that is developed in the standard colour process) last week and picked up the results today from Costco. They are only family snaps but the results were good and it's reminded me to shoot more film. I used my old Canon FD kit and the quality is really nice plus they put the pictures onto CD as well as developing and printing them so that means I don't have to spend ages fiddling around in Photoshop to get the best out of the pictures. If I'm taking pictures to print for albums etc I still prefer film as digital capture always needs to be tweaked in Photoshop to get the best results for printing and for me that's time and hassle I don't need.

I've attached another picture of Emma from last Saturday's session in the studio.