Photo shoot for a Brighton independent clothing label

This was a lovely & fun little photo shoot for a small independent Brighton business called The Emperor’s Old Clothes. I met owner Cecily years ago when she was working at a local hotel and we have kept in touch ever since. When Cecily started her own business she asked me to take some photos for her. That was two years ago. Now Cecily has a few people working for her so she wanted to have a new photo shoot including portraits of the staff. We had a limited time so we simply hung up a white background in the shop and I took the photos mostly in natural light, with a little bit of fill light from a single flash gun.

Bish bash bosh, individual portraits done – and then we headed out for a group shot. It was a cold and drizzly day so we tried to do this one as quickly as possible on a street round the corner.

I was very impressed how they managed to look like it wasn’t freezing cold! The hard bit of the shoot done, we headed back indoors for a group shot inside The Emperor’s Old Clothes studio.

Posed photos are fine, but I always want to take some “action shots” as well. We had a bit of fun with these ones – just because I always want to take some fun shots at every shoot, if at all possible.

Next it was time for some general photos of the studio without any people in them, and detail shots that they can use for social media marketing etc.

While I was taking detail shots I saw Cecily’s reflection in the mirror and thought it’d be nice to have her out of focus in the background in some of the photos, working away as she normally does.

The third and last type of photography on our shoot list was “action shots”.

We planned the shoot well beforehand and managed to do all this (and more) in less than two hours. It wasn’t a high production photo shoot with plenty of time for setting up lights, moving every single tiny detail into place or out of the frame, etc. – but the photos are good for the purpose and didn’t cost too much. Small businesses don’t necessarily have a massive budget for photography, so this kind of ‘quick and ready’ photo shoot is perfect for them.

This is what Cecily said after seeing the results from our shoot:

“I absolutely love all the photos, you’ve made the room look lovely and huge – super happy with everything.”

A happy client makes a happy photographer! :-)