A new experience for me now – flying abroad for a photoshoot. I travelled to Essen in Germany with SMRS for a commercial photoshoot for RWE. Essen is in the West (and slightly Northern) part of Germany in the Ruhr area, close to Dusseldorf. RWE is a multinational energy company that generates and trades electricity across the world. This photography was all about what makes RWE a great place to work and several people had been picked out to be featured as case studies. I took both posed portraits of them in their work environment and also office lifestyle images of them at work, collaborating and interacting with other people. Fortunately everyone spoke wonderful English as my German is pretty much limited to Hallo, Auf Wiedersehen and Danke – which I very much overused. This type of office lifestyle photography and portraits using the location, involves hunting around for nice locations and thankfully RWE’s buildings are really modern with lots of attractive areas for me to make use of. Very nice leafy areas outside to play with as well. Flying abroad for work for the first time was quite stressful and I spent a long time planning the trip and working out where to hire equipment from. Luckily the camera shop I use in Manchester (Wex) is linked to a company called Calumet. They have a site in Essen and after a few emails and phone calls, I arranged for the equipment to be delivered to RWE so it was ready and waiting for me when I arrived. It all went very smoothly and now I’ve done it once it doesn’t seem quite as daunting. Where to next?
