Winning Images from the 14th Annual Black and White Spider Awards

I was thrilled to receive two honourable mentions and two nominations in the 14th Annual Black and White Spider Awards at the PhotoShow streamed Saturday, October 12, 2019. 

Two of my images, titled Zazen and Sentinel received honourable mentions in the Architecture category:

Zazen, D.T. Suzuki Museum, Kanazawa

Sentinel, Bean Rock Lighthouse, Waitemata Harbour

The live online gala was attended by industry leaders and the photography community from around the globe. 14th Annual Jury members included captains of the industry from Musee de l'Elysee, Lausanne; The Guardian, London; Contrasto Galleria, Milan; Travel/Discovery Channel, New York; Harper's Bazaar, UK; Portuguese Center of Photography, Porto; Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels; Silvan Faessler Fine Art, Zurich; ADK Creative One Inc., Tokyo; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna; Conny Dietzschold Galleries, Sydney; and Pereira O'Dell in New York who honored Spider Fellows with 758 coveted title awards and 909 nominees in 32 categories.

Two additional images of mine, titled Forum and Waiting, were nominees in the Architecture and People categories respectively.

Forum, Tokyo International Forum - Exterior

Waiting - Anna, Parnell Cathedral

"It's an incredible achievement to be selected among the best from the 6,418 entries we received this year" said Basil O'Brien, the awards Creative Director.

BLACK AND WHITE SPIDER AWARDS is the leading international award honoring excellence in black and white photography. This celebrated event shines a spotlight on the best professional and amateur photographers worldwide and honors the finest images with the highest achievements in black and white photography.

www.thespiderawards.com

Boost your interior design portfolio by working with a photographer

In the same way that you, the designer, take a space and realise its potential, interior photographers convert your designs into a succinct and timeless representation of your creativity and hard work.

Good photography is key to showcasing your design work in your portfolio - it leaves an impression on potential clients, and helps to add to your professional ‘brand’.

Taking your own photos of your projects ‘in-house’ can yield great results, provided you have the right equipment and skills. However, we sometimes find that designers don’t always have the know-how to tackle tricky lighting, compositions and complete retouching to nail that perfect image.

In fact, when your photos don’t look great, or aren’t correctly framed and exposed, the photos can hinder your impression on viewers by looking ‘off’.

Ultimately, the images of your interior design projects are how the majority of people will see your work. Because of this, working with a photographer that creates consistent and well-composed images can be of huge benefit to your business.

Let’s dive in to the details:

Present your work in a way that lands top clients

Being an interior designer is similar to working as a photographer in the sense that it’s not your craft, but your marketing that comes first and foremost. Being the best interior designer out there won’t matter if nobody knows that you exist!

In order for clients to hire you, they have to first see what similar projects you’ve worked on in the past - usually by flicking through your website.

Presentation is key when it comes to marketing - you want to look professional and organised to potential clients - so it’s no surprise that the images you use need to look professional and consistent, too.

Imagine, from a client’s perspective, flicking through a designer’s website to find a gallery of crooked iPhone photos, arranged in no particular order, showcasing their latest project. They’d likely assume that the designer was rushed or disorganised, and the photos themselves would get in the way of the content within them.

Professional photographers help you to present your work in a vibrant and accurate manner. They embellish your own hard work by utilising high-end equipment, supplemented lighting and retouching to ‘craft’ a set of images that document your project.

How does this help you? It lets you present your work in a professional manner and convinces those higher-end clients that you’re organised, you pay attention to detail and you will give them the results that they’re looking for.

Bring in a fresh set of eyes

One huge benefit of working with an interior photographer is that they haven’t been involved with your design from day one.

Seeing a project for the first time, photographers will often find unique and interesting perspectives for images, or bring in fresh ideas and a bit of creativity that you and your team may not have considered.

Interior photography and interior design are two sides of the same coin, they rely on and complement each other, and photographers will often have a new approach to photographing the space.

The skill that many photographers learn is to convert a 3-dimensional space into a 2D image. Whilst a space may look great to the eye, the trick of photography is capturing the feel of that scene in a single image. Often, a range of lenses are used to compress or widen the space in a way that nails the ‘idea’ of the scene .

A photographers knowledge of perspective, composition and balance are essential factors in making your designs look eye-catching and inviting.

Save yourself time and money

Photography equipment is a huge investment. Whilst you can certainly get an entry-level DSLR for less than $1000, they’re going to struggle to yield the best images.

The cost of hiring an interior photography certainly isn’t cheap, but this cost covers a multitude of equipment (cameras, lights, stands, lenses, to name a few), as well as years of practice and hard work to be able to deliver consistent results.

What’s more is that if having a great set of photos ends up getting a new client to convert into a sale, then the photography is an investment that pays for itself.

On top of this, photographers save you time that you’d otherwise spend setting up the camera and shooting, through to editing the final images.

In most cases, you can show up for the photoshoot with your photographer, flick through some of the images, and the rest is taken care of by the photographer, leaving you with a full set of images that are ready to go. The time saved to let you focus on other areas of your work is definitely worth the investment of hiring a photographer.

build great business relationships

As I said earlier, the fields of interior design and photography go hand-in-hand, and one great aspect of working with a photographer is that you can build working relationships with someone in a similar industry, without the risk of competing against each other.

This is great for bouncing ideas off of one another and being able to drum up some more business - referrals are a two-way street between photographers dealing with a multitude of builders, homeowners and renovators, and designers having acquaintances looking for photographers.

It’s important in a field that’s often quite introverted, especially when starting out, to have some contacts that you can see on the regular and talk shop!

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We’re a team of interior photographers based in Auckland, who live for awesome spaces and love what we do. Check out some of our work here. Have an upcoming project in need of some stunning photography? Get in touch!