Wakefield Personal Brand Photography | Gareth Boot
Twenty minutes personal brand shoot in Wakefield, West Yorkshire
On Friday I headed over to Wakefield, to have a little personal brand photo shoot with my good friend Gareth Boot. I always enjoy photographing Gareth as he is the most impatient model in the world ever. I know that If I can create great pictures with Gareth then I can photograph anyone, so I know that the shoot is going to take about twenty minutes and then it’s a wrap.
A little bit about Gareth Boot
Gareth in his own words says “I am an Entrepreneur, Author and Personal Development Specialist. I help people become the best version of themselves they can be”. Let me just say that he is so much more than that. Gareth helps sort people out, he is one of the kindest men that I ever met and has done so much for me it’s unbelievable. The last four years he helped out so much with the stuff that’s been going on in my life and I am coming out a much stronger, better, more confident person than I ever was. I cannot speak highly enough about the man. Basically, if you have something to sort out be it business, personal stuff, then Gareth is your man. Check out his website at https://www.garethboot.com/ – he may be a great man but he’s blooming hard work to photograph.
Location
Being Gareth, he doesn’t give me a brief. We’re usually deep into something, this time it was creating branding with story and then he’ll spring it on me. “Right, I need a few pictures”. Fortunately as I’ve spent so much time with him I understand how he works and know what pictures are required. For the business that he is working on at the moment I knew that he needed something kind of dynamic and business related with a twist. I said we need some steel or black windows. So, he whizzed me off to some building on the outskirts of Wakefield City Centre. As soon as we parked, I got into photography mode and started to see locations everywhere.
Harsh light
Obviously, Gareth isn’t going to let me have beautiful sunset golden light, instead he makes me deal with middle of the day harsh light. Fortunately I absolutely love working with this kind of light, it’s always a bit of careful positioning but we can always create something. It also doesn’t help that Gareth is ginger, which means he doesn’t mix well with sun, I know that as I’m also a secret ginger.
Snap and move on
This shoot was a matter of find a location, take 30 seconds of snaps, have a look at them, if they’re not right, position model repeat and move on. No messing about, I shot Gareth loads of times and he actually has massive trust in me which helps speed things up.
Start with the end goal
We parked 1 minute away from the building that we had in mind. Whilst walking to the building I made a mental note of other locations that we could hit on the way back. But, I knew we had to start with the picture we had come for. I had in my mind, steel and City so that’s what we went for, then from there it was just playing.
Know when to end
It’s important that a shoot is fun and high energy. As soon as the energy drops it’s time to end. It takes a bit of confidence and a decade of experience to do this but as a photographer I knew that he had plenty of pictures that was going to tick the boxes. I knew that Gareth was going to use them for his website and he only needed a few. The second the energy dropped it was time to end. The whole shoot took between fifteen and twenty minutes and I reckon in that time we got over one hundred images that I consider to be keepers.
If you are interested please get in touch.
