Hi just wanted to update everyone that I’ve rebuilt my website and as a result have moved this blog you can now keep up to date with my work at the following address https://www.davidsykes.com/david-sykes-photography-news/
See you on the other side.
David
Recently I teamed up with food stylist Olivia Bennett to help me finally shoot an idea that I’ve had knocking around for about 5 years now.
It was a great shoot to work on, Olivia’s designs for the Jewellery was fantastic creating recipes that you could wear on a glamorous night out.
I wanted to keep the set and lighting looking like a classic jewellery shoot to help give the view that double take.
Recently I found some scales that I remembered from being a kid at my local village shop and couldn’t resist buying them for a test.
The result is this series of texture studies, it is also the beginning of a new project that I’m working on.
Watch this space to find out more.
This is a recent personal project i’ve been working on, I’m fond of a cherry or two so this was always going to be a fun shoot to do.
Cherries are such beautiful fruits, they look the same on mass but on closer inspection they all have a unique look of there own, this also applies when you squish them no two burst in the same way!
I didn’t realize until I started to squish them how juicy they can be.
Hope you enjoy my juicy cherry pictures I’ll be selling prints on my new revamped website which is coming soon……
Sad that this week see’s the final ever Mad Men, it’s been an amazing series beautiful shot and well written. I look forward to seeing how it all ends with a large old fashion in my hand!
Here are a couple of my Man Men inspired test I’ve done over the years.
Cheer’s
December 2014 saw the return of my annual instagram project adventgram, Every day in December I look for and photograph the number that matches the date of that day counting up to December the 25th (Christmas day). All the numbers are shot on my iPhone and have to be found and not made by me.
This year was great as I had lots of people join in using the hashtag #adventgram, I enjoyed seeing other peoples interpretation of my project.
You can see all the numbers in more detail here.
Can’t believe this is my first post of 2014! It’s been a busy year so far, I became a dad for the first time in November last year so Poppy has been keeping us busy but I’ve also been busy shooting a mix of advertising and editorial shoots and of course plenty of personal projects.
First off I’d like to share one of the personal projects I’ve been working on with the talented Jessica Dance.
We’ve now finish off our woolly faux food series, a woolly full english breakfast and a woolly hotdog these go with the woolly hamburger we shot last year.
It’s been a great project to work on Jess’ attention to detail making the food is fantastic and it’s been great building the environments the food sits in.
I’ve recently been working with an amazing model maker and prop stylist, Jessica Dance. Her speciality at the moment is creating objects made of wool.
We’ve been working on a few woolly projects together and whilst shooting our ”Woolly mammals” series both of us mentioned that we wanted to create an image for Christmas.
I love shooting food and I always want people to do a double take with my images and spend some time working out what’s unusual about them. Over the past few years I’ve been creating faux food shots; taking classic food shots and recreating them out of everyday objects. This is where I came up with idea of using Jessica’s fantastic wool craft to turn a traditional turkey Christmas dinner into a woolly feast.
I knew the food Jessica was going to produce would look great but it wasn’t until she brought them round the studio did I realise how beautiful they would be. Some of my favourite pieces are the pigs in blankets, with it’s handmade bacon rashers, and the turkey itself with its perfectly designed drumstick. I wanted the photo, at first glance, to have the feel of a classic food shot, with it slowly revealing its true colours as you realise that something is not quite right. It was quite a challenge to light it and show off all the texture whilst keeping the warm and cosy feel of the wool.
Who’d have thought wool food could make you feel so hungry.
We Loved the final shot so much we decided to make it into a Christmas card to send out to friends and Clients. I wanted a unique greeting for the inside of the cards and came up with the line “Have a warm and woolly Christmas” Which was great, but I also wanted it to have a wool theme. So, I asked Maddy from Vue, who has been wowing me with her excellent typographic illustrations for a while now, to design a illustration for the inside. What she came up with was fantastic, and the card was ready to wing it’s way to our friends and clients.
It’s been a great project to work on and a chance to collaborate with some talented makers!
Watch this space for more of mine and Jessica’s woolly faux food.
Over the last year myself and model maker/stylist Jessica Dance have been working on a new collaboration and I’m super happy to now be able to share the results with you.
The project came about when we were having a brain storm over a coffee. I loved the Knit heads Jess had done and thought it would be great to build a bit of a story around some new animal heads she was making for our project. We came up with the idea of them all belonging to one person and having them in different rooms of this eccentric collector of woolly mammals house.
So over the next few months we sourced various props furniture and wallpaper and created these little slices into the life of this collector.
It was such a great project to work on and Jess was great fun to work with her amazing skills with the knitting machine are second to none. I love all the little touches she brings to the project, the knitted log is one of my favourites.
The moose head set was massive and took a day to build, the moose was a huge full size moose and was 7 foot from antler tip to antler tip, and stuck out from the wall about 4 foot!
Whilst shooting we came up with lot of knitty ideas so watch this space for some more woolly madness.
Recently I was asked by folks over at iGNANT to take part in their on going feature called two of a kind. They ask an Artist and a photographer to take part each time, they send them the same 3 random objects and ask them to create something from them. After looking at the previous entries and their lovely site I jumped at the chance.
So I waited for the package to arrive to find out what objects I would be having to use.
When it finally arrived I opened the box (with some apprehension) to find a pair of rubber gloves a packet of party streamers and a set of wooden utensils.
Recently I have been working with the fantastic Jessica Dance while we were shooting another project I mentioned that I’d been asked to do this and asked if she would like to collaborate with me on this one too. She said yes and came up with a great way to use the objects using the wool technique that we’ve been developing on other projects for a while now.
The end result was the Wooly morning after the night before.
Apologies for a drought in blog posts It’s been a busy few months shooting lots of personal work and commissions more to be revealed soon.
Last month I was approached by Ryan Watson, from Shots magazine, to see if he could interview me, I jumped at the chance! Shots is a great Magazine. It has featured some of best photographers and Directors of the past few decades, including some of my favourites.
It’s always a bit nerve wracking being interviewed, but I had nothing to worry about it – it turned out to be a lovely piece and, I am very pleased with the end result (thanks Ryan).
It’s also nice to have so many of my shots featured, both new and old.
When the article’s on their website, I’ll add a link – in the meantime go get a copy! 😉
I was very lucky to have this beautiful wood burger and chips made for me by my good friend and model maker Wesley west.
He’s a very talented chap and when he said he’d made me the wooden burger I jumped at the chance to use it in a shoot, the hardest thing was deciding how to shoot it!
Here’s one of my latest personal shots it’s a scene depicting Idlewild airport in 1961, now known as JFK.
The idea came about after I found a folder with the Pan AM ticket in it whilst helping to clear my wife’s grandma’s house last year, after she had sadly passed away.
Caroline’s Grandfather had taken a business trip to the states in 1961 and had kept everything from the trip, from the letters to and from the travel agent, to the match books and drinks stirrers from all the bars and hotels he visited.
I love the fact that the trip was such a rare and exciting event that he kept all the momentos from the trip. I even found a ticket from a visit to the empire states building (see if you can spot it in the shot) it’s a stark contrast to the disposable and online way we live our lives now.
Here’s my recent valentines inspired test.
I found these hearts in my local art shop and couldn’t resist getting them, a bit of red spray paint later and voila!
This lady has been stealing men’s hearts for years who’s next?……
Happy New year!
Thanks to all of you that contributed to this years adventgram and followed the project.
It was great seeing all the different ways people interpreted the project.
I look forward to doing it again at the end of this year.
Hope you all had a great festive break here’s to a great 2013
This Festive season I decided it would be good to create a Christmas inspired shot that I could send out to the people I’ve worked with over the years, so I started to think up ideas and came to the conclusion that everyone loves festive food and presents at christmas so why not combine the two.
That is how I came to create my sock christmas pudding, for those that have followed my work over the years you’ll know that I have liked to create food images but not using food but everyday objects to create faux food.
So I dusted off (and repainted) my giant 4 foot plate and went about creating my giant sock pudding, the pile ended up being 3 foot high and nearly 4 foot wide and Katie Cordell the stylist had to source over a hundred socks.
It took us the best part of a day to create the perfect sock pile and at the end I was tempted to go for the flaming Christmas pud and set fire to them! But I couldn’t as I needed them for the next part of my mailer.
I thought it would be fun to send people one sock from my pudding as a memento and as creative inspiration, I custom made some sock tags with a challenge on them to make the lonely sock into a festive stocking or christmas character. To help them on there way I supplied a starter kit of some fake fur some red and green felt, googly eyes and some buttons. (see below) I’m asking them to send pictures of the results so I’m looking forward to seeing the festive creations.
This will probably be my last post of the year so I’d like to wish everyone a merry christmas and a happy new year thanks for following my blog.
This is adventgram from 2011
We are surrounded by numbers every day as a result they tend to go unnoticed, there are 1000’s of different typefaces out there, some beautifully crafted some not so.
I’ve decided to celebrate the humble number, and what better month than December the one month that most of us count down to an event, Christmas day.
I’m shooting my adventgram project for the second year running. Every day I find and shoot the number of the day on my phone using instagram to publish it.
This year I’m being joined by some fellow instagramers using the hashtag #adventgram
For my latest piece of personal work I had the pleasure of working with Stylist Carrie Louise on this project we wanted to look at the great textures and objects you get at a fun fair and shoot them in an abstract way.
It was a fun couple of days shooting, if not a little messy as we hired a candy floss machine for the day. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to eat candy floss again probably the stickiest day in the studio I’ve had so far, and rest assured that no goldfish were harmed in the making of this project just a couple of coconuts!
My Light breakfast was selected to appear in PDN magazines objects of desire competition it’s in there November issue of the magazine out right now!
I found these whilst Halloween shopping. Thought they were such a fangtastic selection of ghoulish teeth I had to shoot them, I decided that they deserved there own halloween alter.
Which one’s would you pick?
Hope everyone has a Happy Halloween of trick or treating this weekend!
I found this jelly mould by Lydia Leith and knew I wanted to do a test shot with it unfortunately I have been so busy I didn’t manage to do it before the jubilee so to wet your appetite I created this more simple shot for the jubilee weekend.
Here is one of my latest pieces of personal work, and as we’re in the middle of “Mad Men” fever I had to pair it up with my whiskey shot from a few weeks ago I think they work well together.
If the rest of the series is anything like the first episode the hype is well deserved. Hope you enjoy my new work and Mad Men.
Happy New Year!
I hope you all had a good holiday?
January might be known as the month of recovery, and of abstinence from the temptations of the festive period, but in my opinion the long winter nights need a bit of old fashioned warmth. So, for the first post of 2012, I thought I’d share my latest personal work, something traditional to warm the cockles as the cold bites. Oh, and in the spirit of recovery, here’s the antidote as well.
I wanted to promote the relaunch of my website and this blog with a bespoke shot and a mail-out. The QR code is the perfect example of something physical that links to the digital world, so I hit on the idea of building and shooting my own physical QR code and sending out a limited edition mailer. Just the QR photograph; no name, no other links or information, just that.
I wanted to play with the juxtaposition of a physical object linking directly to the digital, so I decided to build a 3D model of the code and create the image in one shot. This is in line with the way I like to work, I try to shoot as many things ‘in camera’ as I can. This meant scaling up and then building the 8 foot square model of the code. To create another link to my previous work I used objects from around the studio to build up the shot. Over three days, I worked with the stylist, Carrie Louise, to source the props, plan out and construct the QR city.
To further demonstrate the ‘in camera’ feel of the code I shot on film. To give the mail-out the sense of being a sheet of 10 x 8 film I retained the full frame of the shot, including studio in the background and rebates. I even presented it in the same bags you would get the film back from the lab in.
So, a brand new website via QR promotion with a traditional twist. An intriguing QR code arrives in the post, would you scan it?
I’ve got the perfect treat for your walls. As it’s halloween today I thought it would be a good time to announce that I’m selling three more limited edition prints.
The prints are from my Skullsicle series and are Limited edition of fifty unmounted photographic prints, they’re signed and numbered lambda prints on Fuji Super Gloss Archive paper.
The dimensions of the paper are 30 inches by 20.
They can be purchased on line here
Happy Halloween!
Here is the first of a new series of personal work I’m working on called “aftermath” looking at the interesting colours and textures that are left behind when the meal is over.
Dutch magazine Linda interviewed me earlier this year see the result below. I’ve been assured by Dutch speaking friends it says nice things!
Last year I was interviewed by a couple of magazine Fricote in France an excellent contemporary food magazine and Zest in China a food & lifestyle magazine.
Here are the finished articles.
Fricote
Zest
I’m very happy to anounce that my faux food series has made it into the Association of photographers awards 2010.
The prints will be on show for two weeks at the AOP gallery 81 Leonard Street London EC2A 4QS have a look!
Don’t forget you can still buy limited edtion signed prints from here.
Here is some new personal work it’s part of a new series I’ve been working on.
