Valli Opticians, Honley, West Yorkshire

Marketing images for Valli Opticians.
Valli Opticians in Honley, West Yorkshire was one of the businesses which I had to photograph for the Honley website. The Valli group is a fabulous, independent opticians with fourteen practices at the time of writing this.
30 mins and done
Valli Opticians in Honley, is an extremely busy practice so the only time that I could photograph was during dinnertime. I had 20 to 30 minutes to shoot everything I required and then I was out of the door. So, how do I do this? I guess you have to have a loose plan. I walked in and started to capture a few pictures of the glasses on display, just trying to create something to help tell the story.
Models
Moin and Rachel (the owners) fortunately had an army of their kids and mother on hand to help with the modelling and it also seemed that they had done it before which was a massive help. I wanted to capture natural images and try to capture the friendly experience that everyone receives when they visit Valli Opticians. So, I just said to everyone, “just pretend I’m not here and go through the processes that you would normally go through”. This just ensures that I can capture realistic, story telling pictures instead of weird posed set up shots.
Its’ all about the people
As I’ve said many times before it’s all about the people. People buy from people so make them look friendly. Every shoot I do, I just want people to have fun! Which obviously then reflects on the final images. All of the models and staff were absolutely fabulous. They knew that we had a crazy deadline to get the pictures that we needed so everyone just got on with the job at hand.
Let the experts be experts
It’s really important to ask for help from the experts. It may surprise you but I’m no expert when it comes to opticians and I have no idea what any of the technical equipment is called or does. I let the experts tell me and we work together to create the pictures that look natural. This was certainly the case here as some of the models went into a room to have a mock eye test so I just watched and then captured a few shots.
Here’s just a few of the pictures that were captured in the small time frame I had. I would love to go back and do some more pictures which aren’t as rushed but with the limitations I had I’m pretty happy.
If you have a business that you would like some photos for then please give me a shout and we’ll see how I can help – john@johnsteelphotography.com

























