Earlier this year I had a great little run of commissions for Serco's Corporate Responsibility Report. The work came more or less out of the blue, I got a phone call from an art director who'd seen my work at least a year before. Initially we talked about one shoot, then two and in the end I had three in the diary. If only that happened more often. These three jobs were great, not just because it's a financial boost to work at corporate rates for a few days but because they were challenging and interesting and most significantly they made me work to produce the strongest possible images. I had great art direction from Ian Dutnall at Sunday Publishing, who gave me a brief specific enough to let me know what I was aiming for and vague enough for me to feel I could approach the shoots in a documentary style. It's nice to have a brief that says "reportage" and means it.
The first shoot (above) was at the International Fire Training Centre in Darlington, run by Serco. I've added a set of images from that shoot to my website here. The other two were a day in the life of the London Cycle Hire scheme and a shoot with Serco's dive team at work in Devonport dockyard. All very elemental with the fire, water and, erm, pneumatic tyres is air right? I was really pleased to be given an excuse to shoot in the water again and I had a most excellent day with the dive team. We were initially scheduled to do the shoot in the Kyle of Lochalsh, which would have been glorious, but it wasn't to be. I borrowed a dry suit from one of the team and tried my best to look like a seasoned diver in front of the engineers we were working with but I don't think anybody was fooled when I managed to flip over in the water, flailed around like a cow on a lilo and had to be put right-side-up by the real diver.
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