A Taste of Life
- an old project revisited
Back in 2001, I received a phone call, asking if I would be interested in shooting pictures for a book about well known local brewery, Hall & Woodhouse. Famous for their beer and their original names such as 'Tanglefoot', 'Hopping Hare' and 'Blandford Fly', the brewery has been Dorset-based since 1777.
The project, to celebrate the 225th Anniversary, lasted for a year and turned out to be fascinating, allowing me an insight into every aspect of the company and their many pubs across the South and South West of England.
The book was also a technical challenge: digital was in its infancy in 2001; the first usable DLSRs came on the market in early and late 2000 (the Nikon D1, 2.7Mp and the Canon EOS-D30, 3Mp) and processing software barely existed. No Capture One, no Lightroom, and no RAW support in Photoshop until 2003. Yarc and Breezebrowser were the only options and processing these images took around 10 days.
Finally there was colour: I had been using a calibrated monitor since the mid-90s, but colour management was a mixed blessing and book and magazine printers had no clue about ICC profiles, sRGB, Adobe RGB and, more importantly, no interest.
The first draft of the book, printed by 'Britain's Biggest book printers', bore no resemblance to the pictures here. Ironically the cover, printed separately by Stable design, a small, local printer, matched the screen and the proofs to perfection.
A pint of Tanglefoot
The pictures were all shot with a 3 Mpix EOS D30 and a 4 Mpix EOS-1D. they appear in the sequence they were shot in, covering production, pubs, sponsored events such as sport, sailing and shooting, internal meetings and personalities. All this celebrated the 225th anniversary of the family company.
Times have changed and my production values are now dramatically higher, but it has been fun looking back on my first significant digital project from 20 years ago.
David Boag, a well-known Dorset wildlife photographer assembled the book from my images and the text from our sponsor, Mark Woodhouse. David also added in a few of his own images of Badgers and local wildlife.
Let me know what you think in comments, together with any comments.
