COMMERCIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
PHOTOGRAPHY FOR WEBSITES
Jewellery photography for Polly Gasston (Goldsmith)
Polly worked only in 22ct Gold and her bespoke pieces are influenced by artefacts from antiquity. As such each one is unique and crafted with skills that have been passed down across the centuries.
Photographing her work has been a challenge, but a thoroughly enjoyable one. Finding ways to do justice to the richness of the gold whilst at the same time being faithful to the often strong, always subtle colours and textures of the gemstones, corals, granites and pearls she uses, has been an exciting journey of discovery. I start by taking a photograph of the piece of jewellery as a whole and then take more images from other angles, or go in close to capture specific details. I have also photographed Polly's pieces as worn by a beautiful model.
So... if you are a 'maker', whether of jewellery or other artefacts, who puts quality design at the heart of your work, and you are looking for a photographer to do justice to your objects d'art, then send me an email. I am as happy and confident doing work suitable for magazine advertising, as I am creating striking images for a website.
GLASS PIECES
My glass pieces work predominantly as bespoke lights but can also be used as desk tops, tables, even room dividers. As long as there is the potential to light them so that they glow like stained glass windows do when backlit (and the advent of LED lighting has made this process so much easier), then they can be the centrepiece to a room's design. I like to think of them as a challenge to the imagination and creativity of those who admire them, and enjoy seeing how many different ways they can make a dramatic impact in virtually any room in the house.
PORTRAITS
I specialise in classic Black & White portraits. However, I will, of course, take colour portraits if that is what the client requires.
I have always been a strong advocate of the black and white portrait as the best way to express not only a person's features in sharper relief, but also the character of the person being photographed. Colour, especially skin tone, can be a distraction in this day and age when so many people see heavily made-up or air-brushed models in magazines and seek that 'false' perfection in their own portraits.
I also work predominantly with natural light rather than studio lighting as I find daylight gives the skin greater depth.
Mike morrisonmike33@gmail.com
FABRIC & TILE DESIGNS
I also specialise in the way digital photography can explore various areas of design. I have created a series of tile designs that are deliberately exploit bright colours and sinuous shapes from nature.
Many of my designs can also be used on fabrics for curtains and other soft furnishings such as cushion covers.
MODELLING PORTFOLIOS & HEADSHOTS
As well as studio and outdoor portraiture, I specialise in creating modelling portfolios and headshots for actors and musicians.
For modelling portfolios, I guarantee a minimum of twelve images, which would include head shots, as well as medium and full length poses in at least three different outfits chosen to make the model look his or her best. I have photographed people of all ages - children whose parents hope they might do children’s clothes catalogue modelling, those in their late teens and early twenties whose dream it is to walk the catwalk or show off the latest fashions, but also those who have recognised that models of all ages are now seen in campaigns that some of the big high street fashion names create to sell their collections.
For actors’ headshots, I guarantee at least half a dozen potential portraits. My previous career as a drama teacher and theatre director has given me a very good idea of what agents are looking for.
If you would like to find out more, email me on
morrisonmike33@gmail.com
or text me on
07552 528038
and I’ll get back to you.
Mike
One of my favourite photographic genres is Architectural Photography. I rarely try to capture a whole building, for it is the detail I love to highlight. The way a building uses geometry and balance, shapes and materials, whether old or new, to make its statement. Finding the right angle, the perfect light to highlight what makes each building unique; how to capture the drama, the history of each edifice…that’s the challenge I find very seductive, one might almost say addictive.
VINTAGE CLOTHING SHOOT
Vintage clothing has become hugely popular over the last few years. Ramsgate and Margate have their fair share of Vintage clothing and accessories shops. Occasionally I am asked to do a shoot for their websites to enhance a dynamic visual image, one that reflects the vibrancy of the clothes in their shops and, of course, the ever increasing number of sales made online.
I try to find and employ young models who are looking for a foothold into the modelling world. I feel that unknown faces rather than recognisable models, sell these clothes best as they reflect best the the young people who buy such clothes.
I have recently completed a project for Ramsgate Town Council to promote independent businesses who are filling some of the empty shops in the centre of town.
PAST EXHIBITIONS (A Selection)
I first started exhibiting in 1983. About 50 Black and white hand printed and framed photographs at a gallery in Oxford. That success was followed by exhibitions in Bedford, Petersfield in Hampshire and in the early 2000s, Tonbridge.
The following are some of the post-digital age exhibitions:
LOOK AGAIN, LOOK BETTER
Blue Swift Gallery Ramsgate
Friday May 2nd to Saturday June 7th, 2014
Samuel Beckett, the great Irish writer with a reputation for a rather nihilistic attitude to life, once wrote about his writing: ‘Fail again, fail better’, as if that was the best he felt he could achieve when putting pen to paper. It is a phrase that has always haunted me. So, when I was considering what to call this exhibition of my photographs, Look Again, Look Better popped into my head as a more positive expression of how photography forces me look more closely at the world around me.
When I first started dabbling with colour (in the pre-digital age, as much a matter of being able to afford it as for any more artistic reason) I realised that patterns of colour, often by looking very closely at something very ordinary, for example rust on corrugated iron, was what excited me. Flaking paint on wooden walls, the twist and tangle of different coloured ropes on a jetty, brightly painted houses against an azure sky – these were the images I liked to capture.
By the time the digital age arrived, my photographic output was about 70% black and white and 30% coloured slides. For a few years I resisted putting down the traditional film based SLR but slowly, photographic software (the modern equivalent of the darkroom), became a temptation I couldn’t resist. As I hope you will recognise in these photographs, the same principles which determined my early work are still in evidence, but the computer has allowed me to investigate the meeting of pattern and colour in increasingly complex ways, shifting this aspect of my photography increasingly towards design. The glass pieces in this exhibition are very recent and excite me because I can see so many ways in which they can be displayed – as table tops, as wall lights, as stained glass panels, or simply as works of art on a wall.
All photographers will tell you that how the light plays on whatever is their subject is one of the most significant factors to determine the quality of the final image. I never quite imagined that back- lighting a piece of glass within which lies the image would be another way to express this truism.
Above all, photography has taught me to look at things twice, to see behind the seemingly ordinary or discarded, and in that way to appreciate what otherwise I would have walked past, unseeing and unknowing.
BLACK AND WHITE AND GOLD
An exhibition of photographs by Mike Morrison and jewellery by Polly Gasston
At THE UPDOWN GALLERY, 11 Elms Street, Ramsgate CT11 9BW
Friday April 1st to Saturday April 30th 2016
For the month of April, Polly and Mike shared the Updown Gallery in Ramsgate, exhibiting their work under the title Black and White and Gold. Both Polly and Mike relish the way in which their respective genres allow them to blend the skill of the artisan with the vision of the artist to create work that seeks to be timeless, whilst paying a deep respect to those who have influenced them.
Mike Morrison has been photographing for over 40 years, inspired to buy his first camera in his late teens after watching a BBC2 documentary on the work of five seminal photographers, including Bill Brandt and Don McCullin.
An English and Drama teacher by profession, Mike has photographed professionally throughout his career, holding a number of successful exhibitions from the late 1970s onwards, and his work has moved with the times. Early exhibitions focused on classic Black and White darkroom printed images in a high contrast style, set alongside colour work that explored patterns and shapes. Since the advent of digital photography in the 1990s he has become increasingly experimental without ever leaving behind that initial love of the stark B&W image and the abstract use of colour. Recently he has created pieces that can be backlit like stained glass as well as exploiting the impact of infra-red and polarised filtering. Each distinct area of the gallery featured a different style of Mike’s work. He has also always taken portraits, driven by the challenge of capturing not only the look but also the character of those he photographs. As a result, a portable portrait studio was set up in the Gallery on Saturdays during April as an adjunct to the exhibition.
Polly Gasston was born and brought up in Kenya. She came to England in her teens and, after completing her secondary education, was able to fulfil her childhood dream of becoming a goldsmith. Polly completed the 4-year, full-time course at the Sir John Cass College in London, after which she worked in Hatton Garden for 7 years, developing a distinctive style of her own.
Then, for 30 years, Polly’s life put the art of the goldsmith on hold. However, in the summer of 2007, she decided to begin again, setting up her workshop with all her old hand-tools, the very same tools she continues to use so successfully today, regularly selling her work at specialist fairs such as the annual Goldsmiths’ Fair in London.
Polly works only in 22ct. gold and semi-precious stones, which, she says, forms a direct link with the ancient goldsmiths who used the same materials: high-carat gold and vibrant, bright stones such as lapis lazuli, turquoise, garnets, amethysts and coral, as well as the subtler tones of pearls and agates, jaspers and webstones. Her strongest influences are the jewels of the Ancient Near East, from deep antiquity to the end of the Roman Empire. Each of Polly’s pieces is a new design; to own one means you will have a wear a jewel to wear that is not only beautiful and dramatic, but unique.
A MIRROR UP TO NATURE
The Jarrow Gallery, Oundle
Saturday September 30th to Saturday October 14th, 2017
Finding suitable titles for exhibitions is always a challenge. One steers a fine line between the banal and the pretentious. I feel on reasonable safe ground with Mirror up to Nature…not least because it is the name of my website. The fact that most cameras have mirrors embedded in their optics helps to give that aspect of the title a literal as well as a metaphorical purpose, and nature. Well, I use the word in the Shakespearean sense – not just nature as in the countryside: flora and fauna, lake and seascape, but also the human eye that composed the photograph, or that shaped the nature being photographed.
Water dominates the large colour prints downstairs. I live by the sea and an early dawn walk has become almost routine. From October through to March, as Turner discovered when he painted Thanet skies, dawn can be a very spiritual experience. I decided to take a series of photographs of pre- and post-sunrise dawns from virtually the same spot on the beach at Ramsgate. Out of the 30 to 40 exhibition images this project produced I have whittled them down to six.
I returned from a stay in St Petersburg recently. As many will know, it is sometimes called the Venice or Amsterdam of the North as it has rivers and canals running through it. One of the most photographed cities in the world, I was looking for a way to capture its architecture and colour and opulence without resorting to cliché. I had also been contemplating how to enhance the water theme. The result is a series of large colour images (virtually the same size as the Ramsgate photographs) of buildings and bridges distorted in the waters of the canals and Fontanka river.
I have always been interested in HOW photographs can be displayed. When I started to create very abstract images (often from photographs if ordinary things like rusted corrugated iron fences or piles of decaying autumn leaves, I found a way to give them the feel of stained glass windows. Hence the light box pieces. Printed in to thick acetate and then vacuum sealed between two 4mm panes of glass, they are back lit. I like exploring the borders between fine art and design, between the traditional and the experimental, so looking for new ways to exhibit photographs was a natural consequence of that process.
ALL THAT GLISTERS IS…
Burgh House, Hampstead
Wednesday January 23rd - Sunday February 4th, 2018
An exhibition of St Petersburg photographs and 22 carat gold jewellery by Mike Morrison and Polly Gasston
Mike Morrison and Polly Gasston have successfully shared an exhibition space before, most recently at the Updown Gallery in Ramsgate.
Polly’s bespoke, hand crafted jewellery inspired by the great goldsmiths of ancient times, is made exclusively in 22 carat gold, sometimes incorporating a wide range of precious and semi-precious stones. Each piece is unique. She is a frequent contributor to the annual, exclusive Goldsmith’s fair in London.
Mike's photography is an eclectic mix of many styles from portraiture to modernist creations inspired by, amongst others, the abstract impressionist painters of the 20th century. In this exhibition he is showing images that were taken in St Petersburg over the last 18 months. Most are from his Canal Reflections collection, photographs which capture the sumptuous beauty of a city often called the Venice of the North, in a manner that pays homage to impressionist paintings.
WHERE THERE IS WATER…
Nice Things Gallery, Ramsgate
Wednesday May 8th to Tuesday May 28th, 2019
From the moment I took my first SLR photograph over 45 years ago, an image of the Thames flowing under Hammersmith Bridge, my camera has been in love with water. Its seemingly magical powers to mirror, distort, shape and play with the landscape around it, the sky above it, has been an inspiration. Whether in a puddle, a lake, river, canal or the sea, it challenges my vision.
The photographs in this exhibition are a small selection from what will be, in the future, a larger show entitled The Poetry of Water.
HOMAGE TO…
Nice Things Gallery, September 2021
I have always loved abstract 20th century art (especially Rothko), as well as the way the Impressionists changed how we looked at landscapes. This exhibition was a collection of images I had created to show that love and appreciation of the way in which these artists altered our perception.
THE INVITATION 2021
My photography book, Look Again Look Better, published in an individually numbered and signed limited edition of 100 copies, was launched in London in 2021. It has a foreword by Johnny Flynn.
Profits from all sales of the book go to the charity I support: www.cecilysfund.org
