Portrait: Val Poole for Legion Magazine

A couple of months ago I received a call from one of my regular clients to head down to Weston-Super-Mare to shoot a portrait of Val Poole for her involvement in the National Poppy campaign.

The initial brief was for an image of Val in a busy high street in Weston with passers by blurred as they walked past. With it being midday and Britain experiencing some fine weather the light wasn't exactly ideal and I felt I needed another option to give to the picture editor.

Having spent some time working on picture desks I know how important it is to be able to give editors some different options, sometimes they are able to use alternate versions for different parts of the magazine, or for print and online.

In the end I ended up with another set of images shot in Val's garden that gave the piece a different feel to the busier shopping street images we shot earlier. You can see a couple of the shots below.

I'll to keep up to my end of the bargain here by posting behind the scenes thoughts and images from my work as an editorial and pr photographer over the coming months so keep checking back.

You can always follow what I'm up to on the usual social media channels, links above and on my Contact page.

Typical photographer blog neglect, catching up...

I'm certainly not the only photographer to neglect their blogs. Since I moved over to a new Squarespace website I've only written one post here...

So I'm taking the chance now to catch up on what I've been up to recently.

Way back in March I photographed some of the Parcelforce workers for their in-house magazine. The story was on how they had helped local communities after the winter storms.  It turned out to be a pretty tricky shoot considering we had zero time to go to any better location and a totally overcast morning!

Still, as an editorial photographer these are the punches you have to roll with at times, here's the tear-sheet as it ran in the mag:

Following that, in a recurring theme of photographing large groups of men at work. I had a commission from the Guardian newspaper to go and shoot a group portrait of some maintenance workers at the local Trinity St Davids college who were involved in a legal dispute (Which they ended up winning).

Here is the frame they used nice and big over two pages:

After that came some architectural photography, one commercial and the other a residential development, both in the SA1 area in Swansea.

Then I met a priest who was shining shoes for the day, this time shot for the Western mail newspaper:

After some wedding photography I had my first UKIP encounter on the streets of Swansea:

A PR job for the Halifax Big Lunch event in Newport:

I also took a trip down to Pendine for the VHRA Hot Rod races. I missed out on a pit pass as I was too slow in registering which meant I had to shoot from the sidelines, next year I'll make sure I get some decent access. 

I made a mini-edit of the images which you can view here.

Still waiting for a couple of other jobs to be published before I can share those. In between all of these I've been busying myself as a documentary wedding photographer, you can see all of that work on a separate website here.

That brings us pretty much up to date, the next post should be more interesting as I'm waiting to confirm access for some pretty big events over the next couple of months and also, some new personal work, maybe...see you here at the same place in 4 months yeah?

New website

Depending on how you have come across this blog, you may or not have noticed I have just updated my website. I had built my old site using Indexhibit, starting with the original and then a year or so ago I upgraded to version 2.0.

While I was kind of happy with its appearance, a few things really bugged me. The lack of dynamic resizing and overall quite a dated look had me searching for alternatives. I wanted a clean, simple and elegant design that allowed full screen viewing along with being able to be seen across all platforms.

I was pretty close to going with a Photoshelter site, but in the end I felt the cost vs what I needed from it weren't right for me and I settled on a Squarespace site instead.

As of now, the new design is up and running. I have changed things around a little too. I've been working on a lot more architectural photography recently and have begun to flow some of this work onto the new site.

Over the next few weeks and months, more images and a couple of new projects will be added but if you come across any bugs please let me know!

Nearly forgot, here is the link!   www.johnwellings.com

Various jobs and news.

I know this blog is totally neglected. In fact it's like a plant someone brought home, fed for a few weeks diligently and then left to wither and die, occasionally receiving the dregs of its owners bottles of water.

But, in some kind of attempt to breath some life into it, here is a small montage of some recent jobs I've found online. Mostly local news along with a couple of agency stock uses in there, from a court grab to a cover. 

You can find me posting a lot more regularly over on my tumblr page, which acts more as a visual diary/scrapbook deal. Click here to go there.

In other news I have an image from "Even the Mountains are Shells" in a group show in Cardiff. The exhibition from the collective/blog A Fine Beginning entitled "Made In Wales" features 17 photographers with work made in Wales.