Welcome to the second in the series of A portrait of Thame, where this time I visited the awesome high street butchers Newitt’s of Thame. This behind-the-scenes looks at how the portrait was taken for the Thame Hub website.
Newitt’s of Thame is conveniently located in the High Street close to the town hall and is easily the stand-out shop front on their part of the street. When I arrived for the portrait, the shop was incredibly busy with many impressive-looking cuts of meat being sold to Thame’s hungry shoppers and some of Newitts’ famous sausage rolls.
Upon looking at the interior of the shop, it became clear that the best place to take this image would be with Tom behind the counter. I wanted to portray and leave the viewer in no doubt that this is a butcher’s and felt the best way to do this was to position Tom in front of the meat cabinet whilst he also showed off one of Newitts’ finest cuts of meat.
Just as I was setting up for the photograph Tom was called away temporarily to talk to the judges who were visiting from The Great British High Street, a competition that Newitt’s are firmly behind (have you voted yet..?)
Due to the incredibly dull and rainy day, little light came in through the large window to the side, so I knew I would be relying on the shop’s own lighting for this image.
Conveniently there was a spotlight right above the part of the counter that Tom was standing at; however, it was casting some horrible looking shadows across his face. Asking Tom to lean forward into the light ensured there was even illumination across both Tom and the fine piece of meat he was holding.
As the shop was busy, with a constant stream of people coming in for their weekend supplies, I didn’t want to take up too much of Tom’s time or, indeed, space in his shop. So, once I had the image I quickly packed up and left.
Back at the studio, the edit was fairly simple to do. A quick tweak of the White Balance to neutral (those shop lights gave a horrible colour cast), a little image crop and a levels adjustment later, the image was ready to send off to Tom and Thame Hub. The minimal amount of editing fits with my philosophy of ‘get it right in camera’.
I loved meeting Tom, visiting Newitt’s of Thame and creating another image in the A portrait of Thame series.
I welcome comments below. For more of my work, please have a look at my dog photography and cat photography galleries by following the links.
Until next time …
