RAMBLINGS, BEHIND THE SCENES, THOUGHTS AND MUSES FROM PHOTOGRAPHER EDWARD FURY
It was great to be asked to shoot imagery for the Serum Cheat sheet event on Lookfantastic recently. Pastel tones, blocks and a hero angle made for a set of striking images. I always love seeing my work in use! Thanks to the guys at Blow Creative for the commission.
Photography: Edd Fury
Stylist: Jaine Bevan
Retoucher: Maria Protokova
Agency: Blow Creative
Client: L'Oréal
I think many of us will agree, 2021 has been a strange year. As we look forward with optimism for the year ahead I wanted to look back over some of the many highlights from the past 12 months that made 2021 an enjoyable year of work.
2021; A year that saw me burn through 2 cameras, 7 modelling bulbs, 2 magic arms, 1 flash tube and a lens.
125 days on set shooting 74 projects for clients. 5.5TB of data. (No wander I was tired by the end of it)
A personal project that has collected 4 awards, 3 overall/ category winners. (Creative Communication Awards; Other / Photography; Winner - Creativepool Annual 2021 Peoples Choice winner, Photography category - Creativepool Annual 2021 Bronze, Photography category - VIPA 2021 Still Life Category Winner)
Id like to offer a huge thank you to all the great clients, crew and retouchers who have made 2021 a hectic, but wonderful year of work.
Last summer we built some sets in the studio and shot some festive drinks, perfect for celebrations, and warming moments of reflection. Here is just a few of the images, getting in close too for some great details!
For two servings, you will need:
50ml Baileys® Original Irish Cream Liqueur
40ml Smirnoff® Vanilla Flavoured Vodka
240ml Milk
2 Cinnamon Sticks
1 generous pinch of Cinnamon
Equipment:
2x Martini glass
1 x Strainer
1 x Jigger
1 x Cocktail Shaker
Method:
Fill a shaker with ice.
Add Baileys Original Irish Cream Liqueur, Smirnoff Vanilla Vodka and milk to the shaker.
Shake until cold.
Strain into a glass.
Garnish with cinnamon powder and a cinnamon stick and serve.
For two servings you will need:
50ml Whiskey
3 tsp of good quality Honey
1 Cinnamon Stick, snapped in half
1 Lemon, half juiced and half sliced
A couple of cloves
Equipment:
2x heatproof glasses
Teaspoon for stirring
Lemon juicer
Method:
Stir the whisky and honey together and split between 2 heatproof glasses. Add half of the cinnamon stick to each, then top up with 200ml boiling water.
Add a splash of lemon juice to each, then taste and add more to your preference. Finish each with a slice of lemon, studded with a clove, and serve immediately.
For two servings you will need:
75ml Gin
Juice of half a lemon
2 teaspoons of sugar
A dash of grenadine
Equipment:
1x Cocktail Shaker
2x Old fashioned, or stemmed cocktail glasses
Method:
In a shaker filled halfway with ice cubes combine the gin, lemon juice, sugar and grenadine.
Shake well until combined and chilled and serve in your glass of choice.
For each serving you will need:
50ml Bourbon or Rye Whisky
1x brown sugar cube (traditional) or 1 tsp of simple syrup
2 or 3 dashes of Angostura bitters
1x orange for peel
Large cube(s) of ice
Equipment:
Muddler
Bar Spoon
Peeler
Old Fashioned Glass
Method:
Place the sugar cube at the bottom of an old-fashioned glass.
Saturate the cube with bitters and muddle.
Add the whiskey and stir well.
Drop in the ice and stir the liquid through well, until the ice starts to give and melt.
Take a slice of orange peel for garnish. You can squeeze to release the oils if desired.
For two servings you will need:
Creme de Cassis
Champagne
Fresh or frozen Blackberries
Equipment:
Two champagne flutes or saucers
Martini picks (optional)
Method:
Pour roughly 1 tsp of the crème de cassis into the bottom of a champagne flute.
Top up with Champagne
Add a blackberry as garnish, you can skewer one onto the martini pick too and rest across the glass if desired.
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Looking forward to shooting more like this throughout 2020 - I might even shoot some more myself and put a little book of festive flavours together in time for next Christmas. Maybe…
I’d love to work on loads more drinks based stuff this year, so if you have a project that might suit, give me a shout - I’d love to work together!
I recently shot a selection of drinks for the Beaufort Bar at The Savoy in London. Such an elegant location, and amazing looking drinks made for a beautiful set of images. My personal favourite was the cocktail specially crafter for the BAFTAs, elegant coupe glass decorated with a blue glaze and a shard of glass like ice placed in the top. Beautiful.
Looking forward to the next time I’m in London shooting cocktails!
Winter can be all a little bit gloomy, especially once the Christmas and New Year festivities have been and gone. Going to work in the dark, going home in the dark. Especially after the great summer we had in 2018. Football, beer and lots of BBQ’s. Well, not all beer - so I shot a few of my favourite summer drinks to get us looking forward to the longer warmer days again.
Aperol Spritz. A summer classic.
Ophir Gin, tonic with lime and ginger.
Gin and tonic, with Elderflower and cucumber.
Here are a couple of test images from over the summer months when I decided to shoot some Whisky. Both based around a pour, one a more clean cut studio image, and then the other a more lifestyle based image.
Both came with some challenges, the pour into the glass being the most difficult. Getting the pour to meet the glass in the exact spot I wanted proved testing, but with some patience and persistence we got there in the end. Thats what still life imagery is all about!!
When I was younger, I remember my mum saying things like "I've just thrown a cake together." I'm not sure what it was that jogged my memory about that, but it got me thinking about how that could be bought to life in a visual way. Maybe I should have started with throwing a cake together, or, maybe thats something for another time. I thought about the idea for a few weeks and then threw myself into it.
After I'd sat on the idea for a bit, in December 2017 I started to shoot what would turn out to be a long and testing body of personal work.
Starting with breakfast. A full English to be exact. This image would set the framework for the project and how I would execute more of these thrown together images. The trouble was, at this point I wasn't sure how many I wanted to do, or what was going to be next. Things seem to work nicely in three's, but I've got a bit of a habit of shooting series of work that always come out with three final images so I wanted to go further with it than that.
The first image took me two days to shoot. There was a lot of tinkering as you can imagine, but I wanted to make sure that this could be an elaborate and real talking point within my portfolio. As is always the way with the first step of a series or new body of work, you have to find the best ways of doing things. A bit of trail and error, probably lots of swearing as things didn't quiet work out and a bunch of patience goes a long way with this kind of thing. Everything had to be shot near enough where it is positioned in the frame in the final image. Perspectively things wouldn't line up otherwise, something might just look odd about the images, but it would be difficult for the viewer to figure out what if they weren't "visually trained". It was the perfect challenge for me, offered up plenty of problems to solve, which in turn appeals to my precise way of doing things. I guess thats what really makes still life photographers tick.
I can't remember which image I shot next, but after doing so it started to become clear to me that I could do a whole days worth of food. Maybe an indulgent day, but that seemed like a logical way to go with and it would give me a natural order for the images. Now not only did I want to do the dishes, but I wanted to throw in a drink for each stage too. This obviously started with the brew on the breakfast which I didn't really have to think about with a fry up, the rest went from there.
After about 6 months I'd ended up with the images you see below. A little bit of an epic, but worth all the tinkering and eating all the food afterwards!
Sometimes the best work just seems to grow organically.
Full English Breakfast
Smoothie
Cheese Toastie with Tomato Soup (very American)
Surf and Turf
Trifle
Cheese and Biscuits.
Myself and Braddan at Skylark agency recently got together to shoot for Bristol based beer powerhouse, Moor Beer.
We wanted to give each beer it's own distinctive 'location' to help show the variety of beers that Moor brew. We chose a select few beers that showed the range of beers that Moor produce and varied up the environments that we shot them in. A mix of pale ales, IPA's and stout was a concise enough selection to show just a snippet of the 22 beers that they offer.
We changed each set as well each glass used to help distinguish the beer's differences.
Each beer was carefully lit with a stunt glass until I was happy with my overall lighting. Once we were there with the lighting it was time for a few little tricks to get our hero beers ready whilst in situ.
Here are some of my personal favourites.
The guys behind this new, cool game, Sensible Object came to me needing a hero imagery that was going to grace the box of the game as well as a set of other images that would form assets for other parts of the game packaging and marketing.
The brief was that they wanted to show what the game was about in one single image that would sit on the box. The game is played with a tablet, and the game pieces are stacked on the plinth until they eventually fall. A more modern and technical jenga. Maybe.
It seemed pretty obvious that we needed to show the tablet and then the stack falling as that would help encompass the game in a single image.
A super technical and fun couple of days in the studio and we managed to create a pretty killer image for the box alongside a full set of hero images of the characters in the game too.
Looking forward to hopefully seeing some of these boxes on toy shop shelves soon.
There are a few behind the scene's images from the shoot too!
Check out there website at www.beastsofbalance.com
Back in the Autumn I shot a new campaign for Bristol City Councils Better by Bike initiative (with Stuff Advertising) where they want to encourage people to cycle around the city to help reduce congestion and make Bristol a greener place to live.
We shot on various locations around the city for a couple of days using people who actually live and cycle around the city as our subjects. Using real people who cycle around Bristol was an integral part of the shoot as opposed to using models.
The campaign was launched with a door drop targeting households around the Bristol to Bath cycle track and is now live on the Better by Bike website - www.betterbybike.info/.
