What a year – a review 2018

We’ve hit the ground running after a well-deserved Christmas break. 2018 was a rollercoaster of a year and 2019 is already shaping up to be another corker with exciting commissions already happening and others in the planning stage for the next few weeks.

We chalked up an impressive 325 photography and film commissions in 2018: from architectural and interior photography of some amazing buildings, event photography of cultural celebrations, art school shows and business corporate events, portrait and candid photography of (literally) hundreds of people and loads of great lifestyle shoots. We created a good few videos too for educational institutions and business clients to use on their websites and social media channels.

We had many a road trip to some stunning Scottish and UK locations, chalking up nearly 30,000 car miles and many plane and train journeys to photograph in London, Birmingham, Halifax, Manchester and even the Western Isles. Needless to say we needed a rest to recharge our personal batteries – and the camera ones too.

If we told you about all our favourite commissions we’d all be here until Easter so we’ve selected a few highlights which the team enjoyed working on and provided some fabulous photo opportunities.

2018 kicked off with photo and video shoot for Marriott Traveller magazine and Contently to illustrate an article about the hotel concierges, the gin bar and other facilities the hotel has to offer, along with video bursts for Marriott’s ephemeral social media content.

We photographed the colourful and glittering Scottish Pakistan Fashion Week in the Spring which you can read about and see more images here. 

We headed over to the Capital in March to Whitespace’s design studios to photograph their fabulous offices and staff for Scottish Enterprise and Scotland is Now.

Our shoot at the Friends of Wilson Glasgow office offered up some great shapes, colours and textures.

A trip to Speyside in the north of Scotland to photograph the cask room and other interior areas of the fabulous new Macallan Distillery provided more great shapes and fine finishes to photograph for a build team client. You can read more about this shoot in the Macallan story behind.

The new Radisson Red in Glasgow at the SEC event campus has made quite an impression on the city. With terrific views of the Hydro looking west and the city looking east, it’s a brilliant location for architectural photography. We visited the location for Radisson many times which you can read about and see more images from the architectural and lifestyle shoots here.

The Morgan Stanley building at 122 Bothwell Street is a significant new contribution to Glasgow’s IFSD providing the company’s second largest office in Europe. We photographed it for interior design architects, Haa. You can see more architectural and interior images from this shoot in this story behind case-study.

310 St Vincent Street is a landmark Glasgow building and we were delighted to be invited to photograph it after its refurbishment.

Edinburgh’s newly refurbished Orchard Brae House now offers its occupiers brand new gym and recreational facilities, office and communal space which we photographed for the managing property agents in the autumn.

Deputy First Minister John Swinney visited the Glasgow School of Art degree-show to talk to the students about their work and we went along to take some press photographs. You can see some of our favourite photographs from the degree show in this blog from September.

We love Vita’s new student residencies at Fountainbridge in Edinburgh, which we photographed for Architects Michael Laird.

The Glasgow School of Art MDes fashion graduates once again produced outstanding collections that they promenaded at SWG3.

We love photographing brand new buildings and in October we did architectural interior and exterior shots of The University of Strathclyde’s new £31m all-singing-all-dancing sports facility for build contractors Graham Construction.

Michael Laird Architects invited us to photograph their new Woodcroft apartment and townhouse residential development in Morningside, Edinburgh. The autumn sun was shining bright, highlighting the crisp finishes on the buildings and casting interesting shadows – always great in an architectural photograph.

That same month Alan headed to London with Scottish Enterprise to photograph the Unlocking Ambition entrepreneurs who are working with SE to develop their businesses in the UK and abroad. We’ve been following them all year and it’s been a great study in candid photography.

The Censis Technology Summit 2018 was an enjoyable, informative and inspiring conference event to capture in still images and reminded us that we really are a nation of innovators.

And later in the month, the team headed to the Scottish Borders for five days to work with Carruthers Associates and Woolmark at Carruthers Studios and Johnstons of Elgin where we photographed and filmed the fascinating and complex process of garment design, making and finishing. It’s intended that the images and films will provide an important educational legacy for textile students.

Glasgow’s Christmas lights are always eye candy for a photographer and we were delighted to be asked to photograph them again this year for Glasgow Life.

We finished off the year by delivering a collection of images and interviews we’d been working on with Historic Environment Scotland. The project took us all over Scotland, meeting, photographing and listening to what people have to say about their historic environment. What an interesting and enjoyable project it was that resulted in a people photography collection of honest faces and an audio collection of honest voices and views. You’ll be able to read more about it in a future Story Behind that will be published in the spring. In the meantime, you can see more portrait photography in our people gallery

Also…

2018 also brought us a fab new team member, Ida who got stuck in from day one illustrating our new website, organising our social media and getting our stock library in shape (watch out for more info in this over the coming months).

We’re really excited to see what interesting commissions are going to happen for the rest of the year, particularly as we’ll get to play with the best Christmas present ever: Santa brought us a Fujifilm GFX50R medium format camera which complements our extensive professional Canon kit.

If you have a commissioning query and would like to start chatting about your ideas for your photography project, give us a call or drop us a line. We’d be happy to chat things over with you and help you shape a brief.