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
At the beginning of the summer Tatler Magazine asked myself and Jessica Dance to collaborate to produce their luxury watch shoot for the October issue. They had the idea to create sock puppets to wear the watches, so Jess created the 8 characters to star in the story. It was a busy days shoot with a lot of watches to feature but with the watch and puppet wrangling skills of the Tatler team it all went smoothly. When we came to the end of the shoot we worked out that at one point we had around 8 million pounds worth of watches in the studio that’s definitely a studio record!
Last month I was asked by Monocle to shoot their May cover.
Richard Spencer Powell came up with a great idea to illustrate their ‘Survey on the best villages and hamlets to set up shop in’,by using Playmobil figures to represent the different trades, I had forgotten how good they were the attention to detail is fantastic! I’ll be adding those to Poppy’s Christmas list as soon as she’s old enough. I’m convicted we also did the worlds smallest beer shoot for the shot of the hand holing the beer stein, We wanted that authentic look so we used real lager in the tiny plastic steins I had to use a syringe and a staple blade to get the frothy head on top!
Another fun cover all in all!
Last month I shot a great feature for Monocle Magazine on things to sharpen up your desk. They found some fantastic products to make your desk the envoy of the office.
Suffice to say all the items we shot were lovely and I wanted to take them all home!
As well as that I shot my regular inventory shoot with lots more lovely products.
Before Christmas Friends & Co asked me to produce a series of photos to promote the ARCHITECT@WORKs exhibition in London.
The shots were a series of studies of materials that some of the exhibitors produce. They enlisted the talents of stylist Despina Curtis to help me bring it all to life, it was great to work with Despina she created some lovely sculptures with the materials we had.
A few months ago I got to work with my old friends at Adam & Eve DDB Tom and Nick shooting some new press work for president cheese.
We had a great day shooing lots of yummy cheese dishes with lots of leftover cheese at the end so no one left hungry!
One of my favourite Monocle shoots of the year is the annual Christmas Gift guide, we always have lots of fun sorting through and shooting all the great products the team find for the gift guide.
This year there were quite literally pallet loads to work with. There are some great products in the guide the one I was most tempted by was the new star wars toy the Sphero BB-8 great fun to play around with in a big studio (I’m a bit of a sucker for all things tec and Star Wars!)
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.
Sorry it’s been so long since my last blog post it’s been a rather busy 3 months.
At the end of the summer my second cover for Monocle magazine was on sale and again it featured toys! This time is was sylvanian families.
It was a fun days shoot getting the models to look there best!
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.
Earlier this Year monocle asked me to shoot the cover for the Japan special. It was a fun one to shoot it was a vinyl figure of Doraemon a flying robot cat from the future!
It looked great on the news stands and was one of their best selling issues ever, so I was delighted and honoured to have been a part of it.
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
My latest work for Just Eat has been up and around the country for the last few weeks, it was shot for the lovely guys at The Red Brick Road.
The shoot was lots of fun with a studio full of popadoms and the smell of cooking king prawns! We all snacked well that day!
The just eat app has been very useful too as we moved into our new house recently and finding the best takeaways was great as it’s taken a while to unpack all the kitchen stuff!!
Happy New year to you all, so here we are another year, hope everyone has a happy and prosperous one!
The end of last year was a very busy one work wise, so much so I didn’t get a chance to blog much so after this one I’m going to post all my latest news in a flurry of posts, so i apologies in advance!
So Kale is the latest super food and I was delighted to help promote Florette’s new salad baby kale for the Now agency.
Creative director Lee Smith came up with some great ads and when I saw the layouts I knew they were right up my street.
It was a fun and very healthy shoot with lots of lovely baby kale left over for us all to have lots of very healthy salads in the days that followed!
The finished ads are running now in magazines and on 48 sheet posters. Grab a bag and help that healthy start to the new year 😉
Before Christmas I was asked by BBH to shoot a Christmas poster for British airways. It was great to work with Harry Orton and Robin Warman again, they came up with a clever idea to use the belts as a bow.
The poster was used on their 96 sheet poster site that welcomes people as they arrive at Heathrow airport as well as 48 poster sites.
Last year I was asked to shoot for my favourite issue the double issue with all the inspiration for christmas in it.
This year was slightly different it was a called ‘tools for life’ taking different places in our everyday life and helping out with the best tools for each situation. As always it was great to see all the fantastic things that Josh found from all over the world.
I also shot the cover for the travel top 50, a lovely paper craft aeroplane.
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.
So August turned out to be a chocolatey month, I shot for Toblerone and wispa in the space of weeks.
I can’t share my Toblerone work yet as it won’t be out until later in 2015 but I can share my Wispa work.
It was great to work with the guys at Fallon again having shot some work for George earlier in the year.
It was also great to get to work with the talented Paul Baker who has help me out in the past with his wonderful chocolate and food creations.
It was a fun shoot to work on and as wispa was always one of my favourite chocolate bars when i was a kid, so having a few left over at the end was great!
Earlier this year I was asked by Adam & Eve DDB to shoot a new campaign for ebay.
Nick and Sam from A&E DDB came up with some great and funny ideas showing how ebay can turn a bad situation into a great one!
It was a lovely shoot to do, the funniest one was the Goldfish we had a goldfish handler from Amazing Animals to help keep the star of the show under control!
BTW no animals were harmed in the making of this as he was a trained stunt goldfish!
Monocle have produced a second book, The Monocle guide to good business, and they asked me to produce some images for a couple of the chapters.
Creative director Richard Spencer Powell wanted the pictures to be shot in black and white, which I thought was a great idea. It’s been a while since I’ve shot in black and white, so it was a refreshing change to not be shooting colour. It’s a great medium to shoot in, it’s all about textures and tones and I’m really pleased with the results.
The book looks great and if you run a business or are thinking of doing so it’s definitely worth a read.
During last year’s Marmite ‘Neglect’ campaign, one of the stars of the TV commercial was the ‘Baby One’ jar of Marmite. So much so, that Marmite produced a limited edition run of Baby Ones.
Nick and Tom (the creatives behind the campaign), thought it would be great to take a series of pictures showing how loved and cared for the Baby One is now, post rescue.
They asked if I wanted to help with their personal project and I jumped at the chance, and, with the styling talent of Caterina Gobbi, we created a series of little scenes of life after rescue. The result are these lovely, heartwarming shots of Baby Ones that have found new, loving homes.
I also had some great news at the beginning of the summer the ‘Neglect’ campaign I shot last year won some Gold Lions at this years Cannes advertising awards for best outdoor and best press advert.
It’s been a great year working with Monocle this year, and I’ve shot some great products.
For issue 72 I had to shoot a fashion accessories special which was lots of fun, at one point we had over a quarter of a million pounds worth of watches and bags in the studio!
I also shot two more shots in the series of Grundig features (see above).
Monocle celebrated their 7th year this year and I’m lucky enough to say I have had work in every issue over the last 7 years, it has been a privilege to work on such an inspiring magazine and with such lovely people here’s to another 7 years(at least)!
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.
Issue 69 of Monocle is out now and it’s their Christmas gift guide issue.
It’s always one of my favourite issues to work on, so I was very pleased to be asked to contribute again this year.
Richard Spencer Powell came up with a great idea to use the fantastic vitso shelving units as the backdrop to display all the lovely gift ideas that Josh had found.
I love using the vitso system it really appeals to my graphic still life side, it’s super precise and adaptable to any situation because of it’s simple timeless design.
As usual we had hundreds of items in the studio to choose from and managed to fill one of the big hire studios with it all!
I always love getting a sneak peak at all the new gifts and gadgets that are around this year.
This year I also shot all of the stylish merchandise that Monocle put their name to and sell, it was great this year to shoot the products in little sets to create a Monocle house that the products live in.
The double issue is alway a busy time for everyone involved and this year Monocle also had a tie in with Grundig for me to shoot. I’m really pleased with the double page spread image that I created for them.
I recommend picking up this bumper issue, as always the articles are interesting, well written and if you’re struggling for gift ideas there’s something for everyone in this issue.
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.
Last month I was asked by Karmarama to shoot their new campaign for Hartley’s jam and jelly. When the layouts came through I was super excited as they wanted to make a type ad but it was to be all made out of their jam and jelly, it was right up my street!
They wanted it to be shot in camera as much as possible, which is just the kind of challenge I like.
I asked Peta O’Brien to help with this challenge. Peta and I have been working together for years, and I knew her extensive experience would be invaluable with a project like this.
Peta came up with an ingenious way to shoot the jam and jelly in one, and we asked model maker Paul Baker to help work out how to make it a reality. I knew that the job was in capable hands and when the forms arrived to fill in the jelly I was super excited, they looked like a work of art before we’d even begun to fill them with jam and jelly.
Hartley’s sent over more jam than I’d ever seen in all my life, but it was all needed, and it took most of the prep day for Peta to fill the mould for the jam.
The actual shoot was lots of fun, a couple of long sweet and sticky days, but it was all worth it as the end result looked fantastic. It was really good to work with such a fun creative team and client, Robin the art director kept us entertained all day.
The big jelly Letters Peta made were amazing, they had a great texture to them, everyone enjoyed playing around with them once we had wrapped (a little too much, as quite a bit ended up stuck to the studio celling!)
The finished ads are out and about in the UK press right now.
Here’s some behind the scenes photos from the shoot.
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! 😉