Adnams

Adnams is about as Suffolk as it gets. A brewery and distillery on the coast at Southwold, family-run since 1872, with pubs and hotels across the county and beers and spirits in supermarkets nationwide. If you live here, you know them.

I have photographed for them on a number of commissions. Board portraits, a pub interior, and their products out in the town they come from.

Board portraits at The Swan

In November 2019 I photographed the eight members of the Adnams board at The Swan in Southwold.

The images were needed for the annual report, the website and press use. That is three quite different jobs from one set of frames, and it sets the brief before you arrive. A portrait that works full page in print has to survive being cropped to a small square on a website, and a press office needs something a picture desk will actually run.

The requirement underneath all of it was consistency. Eight people, photographed one after another, who then appear side by side on the same page. If the light shifts between the third portrait and the fourth you can see it immediately, and the set stops looking like a set.

Two things made that harder than it sounds.

The first was time. This was a board meeting, not a photo shoot. Eight directors came out one at a time between other commitments, and there was no version of the day where anybody was waiting around for me. The setup has to be finished before the first person sits down, and it cannot be adjusted between portraits without the whole set drifting.

The second was the room. It was not built for photography, and it threw a colour cast that I had to deal with rather than pretend was not there.

I brought my own light. I keep a portable studio ready to go, a selection of lights I can set up on location that gives me the same setup I would have at Rendlesham. That is the whole reason it exists. A room I have never been in before, with a colour cast I did not choose, is not a place to start improvising with whatever light happens to be coming through the windows.

With my own lighting in the room, the cast stops being a problem. I am no longer at the mercy of what the building is doing, the eight portraits match each other, and they match the ones I would have taken in the studio. Which is exactly what a set of board portraits has to do.

The Plough at Wangford

In March 2019 I photographed The Plough at Wangford, an Adnams pub a few miles inland from Southwold. They needed three things from one visit: interiors, food, and publicity images.

I used flash inside the building, but only as fill. The point was not to overpower the room, or to end up with images where you can tell a flash went off. A pub has a particular quality to it, warm and low and lived in, and if you light it like a studio you photograph a room nobody recognises. The flash is there to lift the shadows just enough that the camera can see what your eye already can. If it announces itself, it has failed.

The shoot was done out of hours, with no customers in the building. That was deliberate, and it is worth explaining why, because it is the part most businesses do not think about.

Why it was shot with nobody in the building

Businesses often assume that because they own the building, they can photograph whoever is inside it. They cannot. An identifiable person in a photograph is their personal data, and using it to promote a business needs a lawful basis, which in practice means consent and a signed release.

The Plough was photographed out of hours because that is the cleanest way to avoid the problem entirely. If a pub wants images with customers in them, that is a different shoot and it gets planned properly.

I have written this up in full, because most businesses have never been told any of it: photographing people in your business, and what UK law requires.

Product photography in Southwold

I am also commissioned to photograph Adnams products around Southwold itself, out in the town rather than in a studio. The mini kegs, and the Spirit of Broadside, their eau-de-vie de bière, distilled from the Broadside ale.

This is a different discipline from a bottle on a white background, and in some ways a harder one.

A studio product shot is a controlled problem. I decide the light, the angle and the background, and I keep working until it is right. Nothing moves unless I move it.

Out in Southwold, almost nothing is under my control. The light is whatever the coast is doing that morning. The sun is the single biggest difficulty, and the time of day decides the job before I have taken a frame. Turn up at the wrong hour and the light is flat, or hard, or coming from the wrong side of the street, and no amount of work afterwards will fix a photograph taken in light that was never going to work.

The background has its own demands. It has to say Southwold, because that is the entire point, and it has to do it without swamping the thing being sold. Adnams and Southwold are the same story. An image of a keg that could have been taken anywhere is no use to them at all.

The two products also pull in opposite directions. A five-litre mini keg is a solid, matt, chunky object and it wants to be photographed like one. A 70cl bottle of spirit is glass, and glass in daylight on a coast road does whatever the sky tells it to. The same morning light that flatters one of them will put a hard white streak down the side of the other.

The images are used across their social media, which sets the brief in a way people often miss. A photograph destined for a social feed has to survive a square crop, and it has to read at the size of a thumb on a phone. Composition on that job is not about what looks good in the viewfinder. It is about what is still there after the platform has finished with it.

Test shoots: Ghost Ship and Copper House Gin

These two were my own test shoots, not commissions. I want to be clear about that, because it matters.

They were technical exercises, and the subject of both was the same thing: glass. A pint of Ghost Ship, poured, in the studio. A bottle of Copper House Gin.

Neither is really a photograph of a drink. They are photographs of light behaving itself on a surface that does not want to co-operate.

Glass is the hardest thing in product photography, and it is hard for a reason that sounds simple and is not. Glass does not have a surface you can light. It reflects, it refracts, and it shows you everything in the room including the photographer, the ceiling and the window. Point a light at it and you do not get a lit bottle. You get a picture of your light source sitting in the middle of the label.

So the work is not lighting the object. It is deciding, precisely, where the reflections and the highlights are going to fall, and then building the light so they fall exactly there and nowhere else. A highlight down the edge of a bottle is what tells the eye it is glass and gives it its shape. In the wrong place, that same highlight destroys the label.

Which is the other half of the job. The branding has to read. A product photograph that is beautiful and has an unreadable label is a failure, because the client is not selling glassware. They are selling the thing with their name on it. The label has to be clean, legible and the right colour, and it has to stay that way underneath the highlights that are making the glass look like glass in the first place.

A pint glass and a bottle are two different versions of that problem. Beer in a glass has a head, a colour to hold, and condensation if you want it. A gin bottle is a shaped object with a label wrapped round a curve, and a spirit inside it that has to look like the right spirit.

Nobody commissioned either of these. I shot them because I wanted to know I could do it properly before a paying client put a real one on the table and asked. That is what a test shoot is for.

What this kind of work needs

Look at those jobs and what they have in common is not the subject. Eight directors in a hotel meeting room, a pub interior at seven in the morning, a bottle on a shingle beach. Not one of them is the same photograph.

What they share is that in every case the room, the weather or the clock was against me, and the client still needed images that matched each other and did what they were bought for.

That is the actual job. It is why I carry a portable studio rather than hoping the light is kind, why I shoot a pub out of hours instead of pointing a camera at somebody’s lunch, and why I ask where an image is going before I take it. A photograph that looks good and a photograph that works are not always the same thing, and for a commercial client only the second one counts.

If your business needs images that can survive a website, a brochure and a press desk without falling apart, get in touch and we can talk it through. You can also read more about my commercial photography and headshots.