“Show Notes”
Abi and Giles have a background in film and TV. Abi as a producer. They met while working on Jonathan Creek. Abi says she does the organising side doing the paperwork, keeping the clients happy and getting the next client while Giles does the creative stuff.
Giles started doing stills photography as an assistant in the movie industry. He then moved into being a movie cameraman. Eventually, they both got tired of the long hours in the movie industry and set up their own business. They ran the company alongside their film careers for about five years.
They now do video. Having done just stills for a long time they are now doing some video. However, they are sticking to short videos and outsourcing to filmmakers for longer work.
Marcus and Giles talk a little about equipment. Marcus says he is quite a technical geek and loves focus-stacking. This also allows him to change the look of an image later on if the client wants it. He uses a Sony mirrorless camera now and thinks they are now good. He has moved from Canon to Nikon to Sony over the years. Sam’s asks how they get clients. Abi says word of mouth has been key for a long time. There are a lot of connections and conversations with people. Their clients tend to stay with them for a long time. Their oldest clients have been with them for over fifteen years. Once they get new clients in the studio or on location they tend to keep them. Also, they work a lot with marketing agencies and they have a high staff turnover. This works well with them as staff they have built a relationship with in one agency move to another and then they get introduced as great photographers to the new agency.
Abi spent lots of time chatting to clients over lockdown as the clients were feeling low. Her day-to-day job is keeping those connections alive. They are also always suggesting new ideas to current clients. Giles likes to run new ideas with old clients and they really like that and like trying them.
Sam asks about their approach to Al. He says it’s here and they love it and want to embrace it, but also he is keeping the enemy close. Giles did do some talks on it but stopped due to the hate mail he was getting. Giles says the generative Al is so much better if you give long prompts giving lots of technical terms to do with the lighting and style of shoot. Giles says it’s great for generating ideas so you are not staring at a blank page. It helps spark ideas.
Marcus mentions Scott Choucino of Tin House Studio who does food photography. Marcus says due to Al he is going to make his photography more organic and doing things like shooting on film. Giles thinks it’s great to go back to film. You can listen to our show on film here. But Giles thinks commercially it’s essential to stick to digital.
As final advice, Giles says to stick to your rates and value your experience. He also recommends working out how much you need to charge hourly as a minimum to survive with the lifestyle you have.
“Show Transcription”
Marcus: Well, hello there, Sam, how are you today?
Sam: Excellent, excellent, very good, Marcus, another sunny day here. How about you?
Marcus: Yeah, and I’m going to say, even though we are in the deepest winter here in the UK, it’s sunny here as well. Yeah, a rare one. Sam: You can’t beat those frosty sunny mornings, can you?
Marcus: Yeah, I almost went sliding over my arse over tit when I was giving my dog a walk this morning. It was very slippery in the park.
Sam: For those who can’t see, Marcus has a matching background studio and outfit, which is very exciting. If he moves too far to one side, he’ll actually completely disappear.
Marcus: I am, I’m all in orange today.
Sam: Today, Marcus, we have some guests, and not only that, we have some guests who very kindly stepped in at the last minute due to, uh, yeah, somebody else dropping out. So, that is very, very kind. Um, so we have, from Giles Christopher Photography, we have the whole team. So, we have, um, Giles Christopher and Abi Cockcroft. Welcome to the show.
Giles: Hi I’m Giles Christopher!
Abi: And I’m Abi Cockcroft.
Giles: we run a company called Giles Christopher Photography. We are commercial photographers and have been doing it for about 22 years now. Our trading company is Media Wisdom Photography, but we were told years ago to make it a little bit more homegrown, so we went with Giles Christopher Photography. We specialize in food and drink, restaurants, hotels—basically, the food and beverage (F&B) industry.
Sam: Okay, and Abi, do you want to introduce yourself as well?
Abi: Um, yeah, I’m the admin side of this glamorous duo. My background is that I was a producer for many years, a freelance producer for TV, film, and commercials. We kind of combined our knowledge and our experience. You know, you say, ‘Okay, we’re going to set up our own business,’ and you think you’re living the dream. So, we combined our skills without having any business knowledge. It’s been a huge learning curve, and we still feel we’re getting there. But I run the business, do all the paperwork, keep the clients entertained and involved, and go looking for the next job, really—while he goes off doing his creative, geeky stuff.
Sam:It seems to work amazingly.
Giles: I could be wafting around.
Sam: That sounds like every photographer’s dream, doesn’t it, Marcus? Because there are so many photographers, and that’s the bit they’re not keen on—the accounting, the marketing, the paperwork. And look at that, a perfect team!
Marcus: Yeah, it’s a great idea to do it that way. I was just looking through your website here, guys, and I’ve got to say, the work in here is really top-notch, beautifully technical, very well lit, very technical, and lovely compositions. As you say, mainly food—though you’re not exclusively food. You do interiors, but there is a connection there towards the hospitality industry, for sure, throughout the work. Giles, where did it all start? Tell me about the beginning.
Giles: Um, well, the beginning of my career—I was a stills assistant in the movie industry, a publicity stills assistant for a photographer, David James, doing lots of big films. I got the love of photography before that at college, but that’s where I ended up being an assistant for three years. I really stress on the assistant part because I think that was a real grounding for where I started working with. I worked with about three or four other photographers and another advertising photographer as well. Then, I got the bug for the movie industry, so I went into movie cameras for more than 16 years. While I was doing that, we sort of met Abi on Jonathan Creek. We kind of, um, Abi’s production skills—we were both getting a little bit disenchanted with the film industry: the long hours, never being able to plan anything. So, we decided to pull resources together. We got married, and decided to spend more time together, as we were in previous lives in the film industry. We’re always passing on the stairs. I was doing one job, right? We never saw each other, so we pulled our resources. We started running our business, called Media Wisdom, which was basically doing everything, really. Um, probably a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, in those days. Um, and then we sort of… I was doing food commercials at the time, being a cameraman and an assistant, and I thought, ‘This is something I’d quite like to do a bit more of.’ So we started to get more and more into food, and that was the kind of base direction of our company. We set up, so we ran the company alongside our film careers for about five or six years, was it? Um, and then we decided to knock the film industry and the media side on the head, and then go purely into photography. And here we are now, 22 years later, and, uh, still married,
Marcus: Still shooting. Not each other, though!
Sam: Yeah, and I saw on the website, you’ve got the animation photo, so it’s not like you’ve moved back to the movie industry, but there’s sort of that little bit of moving stuff coming back in.
Giles: It’s a work in progress that way. I’ve, because I did so much moving image, I kind of stepped away from it, didn’t want to go back to it. But now, obviously, the competition is all starting to shoot more video, and it’s something that we didn’t want to market too much because we didn’t want to go back into that world. We know how involved it is. Like, I think it’s a little bit of ‘ignorance is bliss’ in that side of the industry. If you don’t know, fantastic! If you know too much, you know how many… I mean, you take photography and you take movie making, movie making—there’s a lot more pitfalls you can get into with sound and stuff. So, I think we kind of stepped away from that. But we’re realizing now we’ve really got to up our game and get more into that. And with my knowledge and Abi’s knowledge, we’ve really got a head start on everybody. We just don’t market it enough when we need more of it.
Sam: Okay, and then, so when you’re talking about doing that stuff, are you doing more longer film work, or is it more kind of the short social media little snippets for people?
Giles: We, I think we’ve done longer stuff. We’ve done interviews, we’ve done corporate films and things. They just take up so much time, and it’s a bit like, I think, you know, you understand semi-long website design. We, when we first started our business, we were doing website design as well. I had a bit of knowledge in that and courses, but it’s very similar to that in the fact you come up with the idea, you conceive the website, and then you don’t get paid because people are just pushing around ideas. They keep calling you up and saying, ‘When’s it going to be ready?’ And it’s a bit like video—you do the video, and they say, ‘When’s it going to be ready?’ We’ve got to edit it, we’ve got to process it, we’ve got to colorize it, we’ve got to perfect it—all these things. It’s such a long process. We found the long-form video was just taking too much time and taking away from our stills. So now, we just concentrate on short-form content for the internet, social media, hotels, sort of intranet advertising, and that kind of thing.
Abi: But it’s there, and if we do have a client who says they want to do something longer, we’ve got great people that we work with. They’ve got the skills, they’ve got the equipment, and the team right. So, we work with… you know, we collaborate with a lot of video makers that use—that’s their skill, yeah? And our skill is somewhere else, so we work together.
Sam: But I guess you guys have the advantage, if you do that. Some other photographers who don’t know the industry, you know, it’s a bit more… you have to let them completely do it. Well, you kind of, you must, in the back of your mind, know what these guys should be doing, if you know what I mean, and kind of be able to keep more of an eye on.
Abi: Definitely. And I can then schedule the shoot for stills and video and sort of leapfrog each other, but knowing the reality of how long something is going to take. And then I can guide the client through that as well. These are the questions, this is the time, are we going to have this? So, we do a lot of hand-holding for clients, because normally the phone call is, ‘How much do you charge for video? Yeah, and then you just… what kind of video do you want? Do you want models on this? Do you want that? And there’s so little thought in it. It’s just this kind of knee-jerk, ‘We’ve got to have video. So you just get in-depth about what they really need and how we can really help.
Marcus: That makes quite trendy, doesn’t it? Video at the moment, isn’t it? It seems to be… you know, when you speak to marketing people, they’ll get video out there, etc., etc. Um, so you started off in college and assisting, you were saying, and you did that for many years. And obviously, you got a great grounding technically from that with your photography. Um, so let’s dive into that topic on the technical side just a little bit. We don’t normally go there with this show, but… so tell me, what camera are you shooting on? What kind of lighting do you like using, stuff like that?
Giles: Um, hold on again, I’m not scared of movie lighting, so I love constant lighting where possible. Um, if we’re doing raw with real lighting, if we’re doing products or things with big depth of field, I will result to flash. A bit of a mixture with sort of Profoto heads and, uh, Elinchrom heads. Um, I tend to go for the really powerful ones because I need that, of course.
Marcus: Your stuff is very sharp. You do that—I would say your work has a very strong depth of field. You’re probably shooting very high numbers there.
Giles: I do, but I also… I’m a bit of a technical geek. I love the stacking focus. And that’s partly… partly most of our subjects are inanimate, so I can stack. But I have a lot of clients that they’re kind of not sure whether they want to go the shallow focus route or the long, or the, you know, the full depth of field. So, I do find stacking’s quite good because people quite often say, ‘We want to really shallow focus because it’s the trend, and we want to do this.’ But then what happens is they say, ‘Oh, didn’t you get the bottle in focus? Didn’t you get this?’ So, it’s nice to be able to offer that if I need to, and it is… it is hedging all my bets a little bit, and it does great work for myself, but I like having that control.
Marcus: just to interrupt there on Joel… sorry, I just had to say this and put my university lecture head on. Do you know when the first focus-stacked photograph was ever done?
Giles: No, I don’t.
Marcus: It was done by a photographer called Gustave Le Gray, um, in 1854, two years after photography was invented. Is that incredible? So, they were doing it… it’s been around for a long time. Obviously, they didn’t do it in the way we do it nowadays with a digital camera, but it was done in a different way. But focus-stacked, nevertheless.
Giles: We did a very… I’ve changed something slightly. We did a fabulous Abbey Treaty with my birthday for a tintype course.
Marcus: Oh, yes.
Giles: Headings and photographic near where we live, and, um, it was… it was a modular college I missed out on. I can’t remember why, but I always wanted to do it, so I’m glad I went back and did it. And they said to me, ‘What do you want to photograph?’ And everybody photographs, you know, their shoes or a picture of themselves, and I thought, ‘You know what? I want to do a focus stack. I wonder if you could do it?’ So I took one of my old Leica cameras in, and we did this focus stack of a Leica camera on plate… camera on… and did it, and did it as a for instance. And that was… you know, you realize how much work it would be to do it and having to move the camera back slightly to work out the depth of field. It’s something different.
Marcus: Okay, let’s get back to the cameras and lighting, and sorry, I did interrupt you. That was my fault. Sorry, sorry for the…
Giles: For the sort of probably the top-end advertising, the sharp stuff. Um, and then, but a lot of people obviously want video as well now. And it’s… I did start to change the lights around during shoots, but now I’ve got some very powerful, uh, Nanlite Forza 750s and 1200s and 500s, which allow me to, you know, give me very crisp daylight, um… you know, um, video really, so I can do both. I tend to go for daylight heads because I’d rather have the brightness. A lot of these heads, a lot of these LED lights, they—unless you spend a lot of money—you get half the array’s daylight. So, when you’re… oh, right, so you don’t get full brightness, and I find out… so, I go for all daylight heads. It’s much easier to gel them if I need to change the colors. And so I’d rather do that. It’s called… it’s my old-fashioned roots in the film industry, but I’d rather have a box full of gels that I could just control the lighting. So, that’s my lighting setup. A lot of softboxes. I tend to use square soft boxes or rectangular soft boxes purely because of bottles—lots of bottles and glassware. So, if I had a round light.
Marcus: that’s just for people who might not understand; that’s for the reflection of the lightning or the catch light, whatever you call it.
Giles: Exactly—you need to have straight reflections. For the camera gear, I shoot now mostly on a Sony A7R5. I’ve got members when it is now—I’m an A1, and we rent a Phase One as you know, 140, when we need to, like for the large jobs. But I have to say, quality-wise, I’m getting pretty good stuff out of this mirrorless Sony gear now. I think their colors were a bit off for a while, but I think their new cameras are really, really good on the colors. I’m a bit of an anorak with my color charts. I tend to buy new color charts every year because I do think they may be right, and I’m very critical with that color work.
Marcus: Yeah, of course. What lenses are you using? Tilt shift?
Giles: I do. I do have shift lenses. I have a 17, 24, and a 90 Canon. Yes, I use an adapter with the Sony. I used to shoot Canon—I was actually Nikon to start off with, then I went over to Canon, then I’ve gone to Sony, only because their service and their pro support were amazing when I had some problems. And yeah, so I use those shift lenses with adapters. And that’s kind of the gear, really.
Sam: I think that’s very interesting. So we’re going to have to move on to something else. I was looking at your website, and you’ve got some amazing big clients. So, whose job is it to get those, and how do you go about that?
Abi: A lot of it, we’ve been very, very… not lucky, but I suppose it just works. Word of mouth has been our marketing for a long time. It’s not good enough. It’s not good enough. So I am on the case, doing a lot of research and development into finding, you know, the next people that we want to approach. So, there’s a lot of conversations—yeah, a lot of conversations with people and connections, and just working on them. And again, handholding in the early days. What is lovely is when we do get a new client, they say our clients stay with us. Which is lovely. So early clients have been with us for 15–20 years.
Sam: That’s amazing.
Abi: That’s a long time, and they grow with us. We’ve just done spring summer for a bar group called Drake & Morgan, who’ve been with us from their very first bar—17 years now—17 people there, which is lovely. And then new people just keep coming. They do come back, which is very, very lovely. Once we’ve got them in the studio, or we go on vacation and show what we’ve got, and that we’re not… they tend to stay, which is lovely. But it’s word of mouth and hard, hard, hard work finding people.
Giles: We also work a lot with marketing departments. So, the turnaround on staff in marketing departments is great for us because they tend to go into another company, and they take us with them. So…
Sam: Okay, so almost as they… yeah, that kind of helps as they’re all moving around to spread who you are.
Giles: So, there’s a lot of… there’s a lot of effectively networking,
Sam: and I don’t mean going to a networking meeting and meeting the butcher and the baker, but a lot of conversation, lots of staying in touch with people, that type of thing, making sure they…
Abi: Definitely. And I think, yeah, it was something I was advised over lockdown: ‘Why don’t you speak to your clients that were coming into you but aren’t now?’ So I did that, and that was fascinating that they needed to be talked to. They needed a chat because they were just as low. So, while we did do a couple of… you know, loyal customers we’d work with a lot, we invited them into the studio for half a day and just did a session to pep them up as well. It really helped everybody’s mental health. So, there’s a lot of give and take, but it was a great thing to do. Conversations are great.
Sam: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it is a lot of your job then, Abby. Almost like staying in touch on LinkedIn, having lunch with people, having coffee with people, just that type of thing.
Abi: Yeah, definitely. Just seeing what’s coming up and suggesting things. So, we’re always kind of suggesting things to the regular clients because we know them, and new clients—new clients—it’s just getting them involved, right? And thinking about what they want, getting them excited about it.
Sam: Alright.
Giles: yeah, I said I love technology, so whenever I have a new idea, I kind of run it past our older clients that we’d been working with. Quite often, they pick up on it, like, ‘Let’s try it.’
Abi: A lot of our clients say it’s very good coming to us because they always feel they’d have to go and buy the toys that Giles was talking about.
Sam: But that’s really interesting. So, a lot of photographers, I think, will wait for their client to need the next thing, while you’re talking to them constantly, even suggesting new ideas to them. You’re going, ‘Well, with you know, there’s this next thing we think will work really well for you. Do you want to give it a try?’ Sort of thing. Really engaging with them.
Abi: Well, yes. Yeah, I mean, it’s based on paranoia. I think that if we don’t get feedback, we feel a bit low. Yeah, you know,
Marcus: You want feedback as an artist.
Abi: You do, don’t you? Otherwise, you think, ‘Is it me? Where have they gone?’ So, it’s to help us as well—just to go, ‘So, how was that? Was there anything else you’re thinking about? We discussed it when we had a new client in the other day. I didn’t get anything back from him at all. I’d seen he’d seen the photo, but nothing. Then, only yesterday, I got a message going, ‘I love them. They’re fantastic. I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you.’ You want to go.
Sam: , Yeah, I know that. From building websites, you’ve really thought about this, and you get it right. It’s the first time they’ve seen the design, and you’re waiting for them to go, ‘That’s amazing!’ or something, and they’re like, ‘Oh, there’s nothing.’
Abi: It’s awful, don’t you think? Because it’s your creativity, created from nothing, you know, whether there’s a brief or not. They could just go for it. So, you creatives—I’m admin, remember?—you creatives do need that nurturing, something, right? And I think that, yeah, it helps clients know that we’re interested in them. So, yeah, definitely.
Sam: Amazing. And I’d be gone, Marcus… Well, I was going to talk about AI because you’ve got AI on the website, which sounds really interesting. So many photographers really are negative about this, and there’s the positive side in terms of, you know, it helps cut down time in Photoshop type of thing, but in terms of other sides, there’s a lot of negativity. Photographers are saying, ‘It’s going to take our jobs. It’s going to be rubbish.’ While you, it looks on your website like you’re kind of really going, ‘Right, this is here. How can we use it? How can we embrace it?’
Giles: Yes, to all of that, really. Abby’s father was a commercial photographer, and he said to me, when the Olympus trip came out, ‘Everybody became a photographer overnight.’ And we’re going through a phase of… And it’s like, I do think with AI, you have to jump on the bandwagon. You have to learn it. If you walk away—I’ve got a friend of mine who doesn’t want to talk about it, says, ‘I don’t agree with it.’ And you think, ‘You’re not going to survive.’ It’s here, isn’t it? And I’m a great believer in it. I would say it’s more that I love it, and I think it’s exciting, but I am kind of keeping my enemies close. It’s keeping my eyes really, and I keep my eye on it. I’ve done some talks on it, so much so I stopped because I was getting… It’s something that you have to embrace. And I think, as a creative, if you know the photography terms, you know how it works. This is generative, I’m talking about. You are better than most people because you know how—what to put in your—just got to learn how to interpret what’s going on in your mind with words. And then you can come up with some amazing stuff. I use it.
Marcus: You take that for… Sorry, you take that for granted, don’t you? You think, ‘I know ideas, that’s easy.’ But really, that’s the hard part. That’s the bit that we’ve got, that’s the skill.
Giles: But in some of these generative terms, if you put in things like ‘volumetric lighting,’ which is like, you know, your rays and the mists and stuff—even that pulls out a whole different look. Cinematic—those sort of terms come up. I think it’s… I tend to use it a lot for coming up with concepts, and I don’t think anybody has an excuse now for staring at a blank cursor, whether you’re a web designer, a writer, a musician, an artist, or a photographer. I think because if you’ve got an AI that can generate an idea, it’s a great starting point. So, you don’t sit there going, ‘Oh, I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to do.’ I’ve put several things in—I’ve put in, you know, ‘A man walking through a restaurant with a tray of food and volumetric lighting, cinematic,’ all these things, and it’s come up with this thing. ‘This is quite a good starting point for an idea,’ and then I start working on the idea. Presenting stories or ideas to clients.
Marcus: We were talking, uh, before the showcase, we started recording, about how we both follow a guy called Scott Ciccino. So, I’m sure most of our listeners will know. He goes under the name of Tin House Studio, and he is a food photographer, but at quite a high end—McDonald’s, etc.—and it’s for advertising companies. He’s recently changed tack with his photography due to AI, and he was saying he’s going to try and make his photography more organic as a sort of countermeasure to AI, and start shooting on film, for example.What are your guys’ thoughts on that?
Giles: I’m 100% with him. I think it’s fantastic. You know, having done this tin cycle, of course, recently, and I shoot, and I bought a Hasselblad a couple of years ago, and I just thought, ‘It’s lovely to go back to that.’ I think anybody that’s into photography should go and get yourself a film camera and just rekindle this, because you forget what real black and white looks like. You forget what… Yeah, my first Hasselblad pictures came back all soft because I’m so reliant on autofocus. But I think it’s really good to keep that analog artistic side. But I don’t think clients want everything immediate now, and they want us to come up with ideas and concepts. I’ve done a load of stuff for, um, ARI Media. For their LED volume, where they have the LED volume—if people don’t know what it is, it’s a massive 60-foot, or more than 150-foot, LED screen, which they shoot things like The Mandalorian on, all these kinds of productions. And I’ve done some stuff for them, and it’s like, and I’m thinking, ‘This is kind of the future. I need to keep my eye on that as well.’ So that’s where AI is tied in. We’ve got a small LED volume we use, um, for some of our photo shoots. We can recreate backgrounds.
Marcus: What size is that?
Giles: That’s 85 by 85 inches. It’s tabletop, we shoot everything. But that’s a future, again, as a thing that we’ve kind of taken and moved it on to another level, uh, with the photography, which gives us much more scope to give our ideas to clients. And we can change backgrounds quite quickly, as long as they’re out of focus. If everything’s too sharp, it doesn’t look too good. So, again, back to the AI and with Scott, I think he’s fantastic. And, you know, I’ve kept my eyes on him for a long time as a competitor. He’s going one route with his—he’s obviously fully into that advertising, which we’re not. I used to work in that world—in TV commercials and McDonald’s—and it is very all-encompassing. It takes your mind, every bit of your mind, thinking to work that world and deal with the people. Um, and so, I can totally see why he would backlash against the analog photography and maybe come up with something more organic. I’m kind of the other way. I’m too technical-minded. Everything has to be too…
Marcus: Yeah, that’s a great answer. Thank you.
Sam: We are, I think, running out of time, unfortunately, because we could… Well, you could easily go on for another hour here having a chat. There’s so much we can learn from you two. Um, it has been amazing. But yes, thank you so much for joining us on the show. We’re going to put all your contact details in the show notes. Any you want to just share now with the listeners?
Giles: I would say, though… I mean, I would say stick to your rates. It’s a quiet time. We’ve had a quality start to the year, which is unusual for us, and I would say that, you know, stick to your rates. And I think that’s the whole thing with photography now. I think you’ve got to value your experience. And I always give a test. I said to you earlier, I always do a test to our assistants. I say. Well, the first thing you’ve got to do is sit down and work out all your monthly expenses. Write everything down to the fact you want to put some money aside for holidays, servicing the car, shopping, everything—your insurance. Um, and work out that you work on an average of 16 days a month. Um, and work out what you need. Um, and that is your minimum. Um, so you need… I mean, I need almost 100 pounds an hour, 100 pounds a day for that. Don’t get too bogged down here because it is a day. It’s the person behind the camera. I know it’s an old-fashioned phrase, but it’s so true.
Abi: Well, thank you so much. It was brilliant. Thank you.
Sam: Really nice to speak to both. I say we’ve gained lots from that. We’ll put all the contact details in the show notes so people can find you and get in touch. And, um, Marcus, I will speak to you next week.
Marcus: See you next week, Sam. Thank you very much, guys. Take care.
Giles: Thank you. Thank you. Love you guys. Bye.
