Gareth Pugh

Highlight: Stroking hundreds of pins stuck in a piece of leather

Lowlight: Not being able to try on any of the clothes.

Fill-in: The brief was to capture Gareth talking about his work whilst he was being filmed for the Tudor Exhibition to be held at The Queen's Gallery in the Summer. It was amazing in his workshop which was almost entirely monochrome apart from the brown paper patterns at the end of the room. His collection was beautiful to photograph as it was so sculptural. Even Gareth himself was monochrome and sculptural! One piece he was making consisted of hundreds of pins carefully arranged and fixed to leather. The effect was like seeing velvet under a magnifying glass and it felt like stroking a baby hedgehog.

Tech spec: The white room was lit mainly by daylight, so it was fairly evenly lit which was a good job given the whole black and white thing going on. Even then it was contrasty when shooting from the side which I ended up doing quite a lot of to avoid getting in the way of the filming. Luckily my D7000 was quiet enough to shoot whilst the videographers were rolling.

IRN Awards 2013

Highlight: Listening to some of the best news stories of the year.

Lowlight: Not hearing the whole stories...the snippets were cut off just as we were getting to the interesting bits.

Fill-in: This is the third year I have covered these awards, held at the 20th Century Club, London. They always have a slick presenter and as its Radio the atmosphere is laid back and intimate. With Simon Cryer of Crying Out Loud at the helm there is rarely a hitch so all goes smoothly and for an award ceremony, which are usually stressful and frantic to cover, this is more like a chill out session.
Best Story: The fact that if Yorkshire were a country it would be above Japan and Australia in the Olympic 2012 medals table.

Tech spec: Getting the award presentation on stage was the worst problem. I wanted the lovely red and blue lights in the background but also get good skin tones on the people in the front. I set the ISO to 1250 and used the flash in fill-in mode, taken down a stop so it just punched in a nice bit of light on the faces without flashing off the glass award, casting a shadow on the curtains and knocking out the saturated colours. It was a small awards ceremony, so I shot lots from the back of the room for more flattering images.

http://www.irnawards.co.uk/IRNAwards2013/Home.html

David Bowie Exhibition - private view

 Highlight: Going to V& A for the David Bowie Exhibition.

Lowlight: Not seeing the actual exhibition.

Fill-in: The brief was to get the brave and beautiful at a private view for one of the must-see exhibitions  of the year.  Unfortunately for me I couldn't go round the exhibition as I had to leap on any celeb that passed through the doors so I was stuck with the posh canapes, champagne and cocktails in reception.

Tech spec: On camera flash and discretion. Guests have come enjoy themselves so take the shot quickly and then move on.

Tudor Stitching

Highlight: A private lesson in the most advanced, painstaking embroidery of all time

Lowlight: Comparing my clumpy, naive tacking to Claire exquisite, intricate works of art.

Fill-in: The closest I get to a needle these days is when I donate blood, unless you count the rudely sewn badges on Kyle's cub uniform and the occasional bit of felt shaped tacked to a pillowcase for the school fancy dress days. How I wish I'd had Claire's skills when it came to the school's Tudor day. A professional seamstress, currently working at The Globe, she spends hours creating acorns, roses and leaves in authentic, time consuming, eye-watering Tudor style - for FUN. My mission was to show her  work to illustrate an audio of her talking about the art of embroidery Tudor style.

Tech spec: I proudly used my Nikon macro 60mm in anger for the first time. When shooting Macro, depth of field becomes almost nothing, but I used this effect to really isolate the stitch that Claire was working on. I used an LED video light to illuminate using the ambient light to fill so the whole effect was soft but bright, bringing out the colours of the threads and the texture of the embroidery.

Swiss Lips Showcase

Highlight: Swiss Lips - they were refreshingly friendly, professional and grounded.

Lowlight: Yes. As usual it was low light and the basement of The Hospital was black.

Fill-in: This was a showcase of new band Swiss Lips. They were all pretty animated so easy to photograph and the fans were pretty aimable letting me push through them to get from side of the stage to the other.

Tech spec: The hardest part was coping with the backlighting. I shot the best images fromt he side, but it getting the lead singer was particularly tricky as he was so mobile he kept going out of the light. Luckily I had the whole set so just had to wait for him to move into the light and then fire like mad!

Public Sector Leaders Conference

Highlight: Talk by Nicola Millard, Futurologist at BT. She completely demystified social networking for me with a dance floor analogy.

Lowlight: My dance floor social skills are almost as bad as my social networking ones.

Fill-in: This was a conference for Public Sector Leaders themed around surviving the drastic economic climate which is to blow gales around us for at least the next five years. Cheerful stuff. Actually all the speakers were extremely engaging. I didn't feel sleepy even once and came out feel I could lead the nation back to prosperity and enthusiasm with a few deft links on my facebook page and a pep talk with my local councillor on how to use his/her smartphone.

Tech spec: For Conference lighting it was not too bad as the projection was bright enough for the room to still be lit with daylight. I did however have mixed lighting issues with daylight and fluorescent and tungsten all fighting each other. I stuck the LED light on camera for the networking shots to make it a bit easier in post editing.

Royal Marsden March 2013

Highlight: The Sun coming out...

Lowlight: ...for about 5 seconds. The rest of the 6 hours it just rained, rained, rained.

Fill-in: I got the gig working with Kirsten Holst, and a colleague of hers, and the three of us had to capture the 14 mile walk. I thought I had it lucky as I was static at the finish line, getting the walkers at the end and the festivities in the hospital. However, the walkers having trapesed 14 miles in the pouring rain were none too happy and in no mood to give a rousing cheer of delight as they reached the finish line, despite my helpful remarks of 'You've done it!' and 'Give us a wave'. Even the dogs were sodden and despondent.

Tech spec: Rain. This time I had remembered both storm jackets and raincoat for the bag. If you want to avoid sparkly raindrops in your shots then turn off the flash, but if you want to show the full force of the downpour everyone is suffering turn on that flash but make sure it is well protected from the wet.

https://www.icloud.com/photostream/en-gb/#A4JEsNWnJrarhT

Anna Freud Dig Day

Highlight: Hot chocolate and biscuits....

Lowlight: ...as it rained, rained, rained.

Fill-in: My second job of the year in the open air and yet again it rained the whole time. It wouldn't have been so bad but it was a Dig Day for local kids in the Anna Freud Garden and they delighted in finding fat juicy worms and holding them extremely close to the camera shrieking 'Look Miss'. I also had to get soem life-style shots of the clinic and the general ambience of the institution's facilities.

Tech spec: Once again the storm jackets came out. I also used the LED lights for the indoor images.

http://www.annafreud.org/news.php/183/digging-our-way-to-better-health