This Girl Can
This Girl Can is a campaign by Sport England with the aim of encouraging more women to get active, do some exercise, and not worry about what anybody else thinks.
The campaign has gained a huge amount of traction and support. Anu, pictured below, loved the campaign and posted a photo of herself to the campaign website with her tag line, 'Hot and Not Bothered'. The team behind the campaign loved the line so much, they made it into a t-shirt, which can be bought along with other This Girl Can t-shirts at Marks & Spencer.
Before the t-shirts were released at M&S, I went along to Anu's local gym in Deptford, South East London, to take some photos of her wearing the t-shirt whilst casually lifting some very heavy tractor tires.
Some of my favourite shots are below, as well as a screen grab from the This Girl Can Facebook page.
Delicious Annabel Karmel Recipes
A little while ago, as you may have seen on the blog, I went along to take some portrait photographs of well known chef Annabel Karmel for her new recipe book coming out soon.
Following that Annabel invited me along to take some photos for her social media channels. I spent an afternoon there, photographing several dishes before having the chance to taste them too. Needless to say they were all as delicious as they looked. You can see some of them here.
Like A Kid In An Ice Cream Factory
I like ice cream. There aren't too many people who don't!
That's why I was very excited when Unilever Wall's got in touch asking if I was free to travel to their main factory in Gloucester. I don't think I had anything else on that day, but if I had, I think I would have happily moved things around so that I wouldn't miss out on such an opportunity!
Arriving at the factory, I had to watch a health and safety video, before I was issued with a white coat, plastic safety glasses, a hair net and last of all a beard snood. I wouldn't say I have a beard - just some unruly stubble, but you can never be too sure. I certainly wouldn't want some facial hair in my Magnum ice cream!
The aim of my visit was to take a photo to accompany an article in the Daily Mail about Unilever's booming ice cream business, so we wondered around the factory taking lots of different shots, but the main focus was on the number one selling brand, Magnum. It was amazing to see the machines creating Magnum after Magnum at such speed. Hundreds are created every minute.
The Daily Mail opted to go with what you might call the 'money shot' which is the part of the process when the frozen ice cream on a stick is dipped in the melted chocolate.
I was very happy to taste a freshly produced Magnum. It was oh so good.
You can see the photo that was published in the paper here.
Design Ventura Winners
I was invited along to the Design Museum a couple of weeks ago to take some photos of some students from Manchester who had won the museum’s Design Ventura prize.
The competition, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, was to design and create a new product that could be sold in the museum shop.
The students came up with a great product, called ‘Card Cogs’, which are little plastic discs with grooves cut into them that allow you to easily build robust structures out of playing cards. The ‘Card Cogs’ are sold in a box along with a deck of playing cards, so people can start building anything their imagination conjures up straight away.
The students came up to the museum in the morning, picked up the materials that had been manufactured and then formed an assembly line in a nearby restaurant to package the ‘Card Cogs’ up in their packaging, ready to be sold. Later in the day they headed over to the Deutsche Bank offices in the city to set up a pop-up shop in the lobby, with the aim of selling as many units as possible bankers on their lunch break.
My pick of the photos can be seen below.
