Bryn Griffiths, came in this week to give us a talk on his own professional practices. As a BIPP Award winner, his knowledgable experience was very influential and helped to get an insight in to the professional world of freelance photography. His initial start off in to the creative world was through auto-motive photography, something extremely different to my own practice. Despite this, his commercial experience was eye-opening, to see the amount of work and determination he has had to get to where he is today. Like many, his choices were split on where he would preferably want to take his future. At the age of 15 he was unsure on the route of photography or accountancy, showing, that even those who have really excelled in their practice struggle at the start on where to take themselves.
His work often needs around 70 separate images, to enable himself to be able to get to the final successful shot. This is especially when he comes to photographing cars, proving in his work, that you don’t just settle for an average image, you need to push yourself in the post-production of creating a photograph. Two factors of his work that attracted me to his imagery, were his explorations in colour, using both colour popping and colour zoning. Colour popping ensures that you as the artist can direct the viewer to the parts of the image you want them to, however colour zoning matches the foreground and the background of the image, as for aesthetic reasoning.
With the vast amount of freelancing experience has had, he told us that you often have to juggle your clients, in the sense that he has occurred communication problems in the past with few companies he has worked for. Therefore you would need to be artistic and use your initiative to change things around slightly, so to please the client. Griffiths showed us that a professional image is an investment in to your career, so you may spend a large amount of money on the imagery you are shooting, however you are going to earn that extra bit more after the process, but also feel a sense of reward when you see these images in magazines and in the public eye.
The comparison between Bryn’s commercial and documentary-style work was incredible, to look at the way he chose to style them together. He used raw imagery from Chernobyl to present his work at a different level, however still found a way in which he could showcase his photography together. This is something that won him a BIPP Award.
Tyler Bishop-Harris 