Author:

The Big Frog can attend conferences and trade fairs, when all the members of your organisation are under one roof, and take corporate portraits, group shots and the like. Here are a couple from a recent conference in the City of London, for a trade association working in the UK food safety industry.

Name badges have been Photoshopped for commercial confidentiality reasons.

 

 

This image was taken for a Marston’s brewery company report cover in Burton upon Trent in about 1995. The older man in the image (who passed away in 2017) was retiring, leaving the only surviving cooper in Staffordshire, his apprentice, who in turn had just finished his apprenticeship.

The photo is taken in the ‘Union System’ room at the brewery, all those huge barrels in the background having been built or maintained by the men pictured.

This image, pre-photoshop once again, was hand coloured (with diluted Parker ink!) from a 16″ square fibre based print (on Agfa Record Rapid paper, hence the ‘warmth’ of the whites).

The original capture was on Ilford Pan F via a Hasselblad 500cm. As the rules stated that the image had to be taken on a Pentax, I also took a Pentax 6 x 7 camera to the shoot and exposed one roll, but the (cropped) image that won the prize was from a ‘Blad.

Note that the negative was printed through a glass carrier in the enlarger, which gives the ‘rustic’ full frame film-edges.

The Model, Lena, was a photography student at Derby University at the time; the image won the photographer a Pentax camera and the model a pair of Levis jeans and a Denim Jacket!

This image won the ‘digital’ category of the Fuji professional portrait awards in about 1997, when Photoshop was still in its infancy.

To create the tableau, I obtained a sheet of plasterboard and cut an aperture in it with a jigsaw, then fixed that picture frame around the hole with a couple of screws. The young woman was an administrator in the office at Derby University, where I was working at the time. I asked her to stick her head through the frame, photographed her in colour on a Pentax 6 x 7 rollfilm camera and produced a colour print.

I scanned the print, then using Photoshop, dropped in a snow-scene background, desaturated everything within the wooden frame, but blended the colour outside the frame so that it appeared the woman was reaching out from a black and white photo. It would take 20 minutes now, back then it was about a day’s work.

This image was taken by The Frog in 1999 as part of a series of portraits of people who had attended his infant’s school, back in 1968. The colour is deliberately ‘cold’ and was scanned from a 16″ square EP2 paper  exhibition print.

This particular image was featured as a full page in the British Journal of Photography as a feature on the Photography Masters Degree course that The Frog was attending at the time.