Photo feature in Modern Barber Magazine: Fella Hair Ft. Copperfield clothing

May 24, 2021 Peter Sladen

It was one of the last glorious days of summer. The shoot was an epic collaboration between our friends at Fella Hair and the amazing Canterbury based clothing shop Copperfield. The theme of the shoot was inspired by the 1990s skate scene.

We met up over in the lovely seaside town of Folkestone, home of Fella’s 2nd barbershop. The town has a strong creative community and a tonne of cool shooting locations. Barber’s; Alex, Tommy, Jayson & Hollie had sorted out our models with some great cuts and we were joined by Pete from Copperfield clothing for the shoot. Copeperfield provided us with a great range of clothing from Carhartt, Needles, Danner boot, pop trading and the list goes on.

The images went on to be published in an advert in Kent’s very own ‘Cene' magazine and had a full feature in the collections section of Modern Barber magazine!

The pictures are also featured on the brand spanking new Fella website on their Lookbook section. You can check the full shoot out here.

Anyway, that’s enough talking from us here is a little animation all about the shoot, enjoy!

A huge thanks to everyone who was involved:

Hair colouring and styling:

Clothes styling

Peter - Copperfield’s clothing

Models

Charlie Gordan
Soren Paillou
Sam Gill

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Product Photography: Sword and Stone

January 22, 2021 Peter Sladen

Last year we were sent on a photography mission by Tim, the founder of Sword and Stone. Tim’s aim with the brand is creating exciting and edgy (pun intended) high-quality products for budding home chefs! We were lucky enough to photograph his latest product, codenamed “The Spitfire”. We wanted to create a range of environments to show the knife in all its glory.

The Spitfire Chef’s knife in all its glory.

Creating the scenes

Product photography in Kent — **Autumnal Veg**

We decided to make the autumnal scene fairly rustic looking, so we popped down to the Goods Shed in Canterbury to hunt for some truly earthy looking and photograph worthy veg. We picked out some lovely looking squashes, radishes, shallots and pears, which all had lovely colours and textures, perfect for the scene.

Canterbury product photographer — The Beach bar

Moving away from the moody scene we wanted something more fresh and summery; an image which invoked the feeling of a beach bar or warm summer afternoon spent in your garden with cocktails and fresh salad.

Kent product photographer — The Christmas dinner

Tim also wanted some shots of the knife in action. This one was based around Christmas dinner preparation. We went for a moody atmosphere with a main focus on the knife.

Kent product photographers — The New Year’s party

As the knife is also a show-off piece we felt a dinner party setting was perfect to help illustrate this. Orange and an old-fashioned cocktail felt like the perfect props for this winter evening party scene.

The launch of the knife!

Canterbury photographer reviews — We wish Tim all the best with Sword and Stone in 2021!

Canterbury photography products — The new knife has now officially launched!

be found featuring the images over on the Sword and Stone website: https://shopify.swordandstone.co.uk/products/spitfire-chefs-knife

Many thanks for checking out this blog!

We are Block Art Media! A Kent based photography and video production house with a passion for image making. We help brands, artists and businesses on their journey by taking their content to the next level.

Behind The Shots: Fella and the All Star Challenge 2020

April 5, 2020 Peter Sladen

We couldn’t believe a year had passed already. We packed up all our gear into the car and began our evening drive over to Folkestone.

It was our shoot day for the All Star competition; an annual hairstyling and portraiture competition hosted by men’s hair and skin care brand American Crew. The founder of American Crew, David Raccuglia, is not just a talented barber, he is also a highly skilled, self-taught photographer with a love for classic black and white images; reminiscent of classic 1940-60 Hollywood portraiture. From this combination of photography and mens hair styling skills, American Crew was born and a competition celebrating both of these passions was created.

Last year we came very close to reaching the finals, with our photographs of model Soren Paillou and our good friends at Fella Hair were eager to enter again. This time they had organised two models each with distinctive looks, styled by barbers Alex Wakefield and Jayson Black.

Last years images which made it to the top 20.

The Models and the looks

This year, both barbers had come up with a back story and personality for their look. Jayson styled model George Blake into a Harley Davidson-riding rocker with a glorious beard and a love for rock bars and neat bourbon. Alex had gone for a Mod culture inspired look, a sharp looking young man with a chip on his shoulder portrayed by fashion model Soren Palliou.

The Final images

Here they are! Our final front and side profile shots for the competition:

Soren rocking the Mod look with some amazing textured hair as styled by Alex

George with his glorious beard and hair styled by Jayson

Closing thoughts

Unfortunately our images didn’t make it to the finals this year, but they were spotted on the judging table in one of the videos American Crew streamed and we received some encouraging comments:

We were really happy with our shots and were blown away by the efforts made by the barbers and models. A huge thank you to Alex, Jayson, Bobby, George and Soren. We already can’t wait for next year!

Behind The Scenes

Our basic lighting setup for the shoot was a large octabox as the key light, a small softbox as the hair and rim light positioned behind and a lot of reflected and bounced light was played around with to get the look just right.

Our basic lighting setup

Editing

We were shooting tethered to keep an eye on the images as we went and everyone was pretty chuffed with the shots straight out the camera. After we got home we cracked on with some high end editing. Our workflow was firstly to get the image looking right in Lightroom by adjusting the tones, clarity, highlights and contrast to give them a bit of punch. Then we took them over to photoshop for our high-end final touches. The 3 stages of the images are shown below: