Acumen Images Ltd

Providing photography for businesses, government organisations charities and individuals for over twenty years.

The traditional progression is from Photographer to working on a Picture Desk (usually once the knees and/or back goes!) ; Sam took the reverse route in his journey in Photography. Starting as part time archivist on the picture desk for The Times Educational Supplements. In his 5 years there, he rose to Acting Group Picture Editor for The Times Educational, Times Higher Educational and Times Literary Supplements. At the time, News International’s most profitable stable of titles. Maintaining it’s reputation for high quality photography, his life long love for taking pictures meant that inevitably, he would end up taking the pictures , not commissioning and editing them.

That gave him a strong editorial portfolio of education and children’s photography. “It’s quite challenging”, he recalls, “working with children in schools, often with limited shoot time. Especially the younger ones, there’s only so much you can get them to do, to shape the shoot, and once they’ve lost interest, that’s it. So make sure you get the pictures that fulfils the brief” Sam still keeps his hand in the education world, photographing in schools and colleges for prospectuses and website.

Meanwhile, it’s in the PR and events & conferences industry that Sam has carved a niche. ‘There’s definite similarities (to photographing children) .. you can’t ask speakers to move a bit to the left to take the water bottle out of shot, or into the better light, and you can’t stage speaker shots either!”. Extensive experience working with blue chip corporates, big tech such as Meta and YouTube, and charities & the third sector means Sam consistently deliver’s high quality images that showcase the best of the event, whether that’s a conference, brand experience or activation, or headshots and portraits.

The world has changed since I was a Picture Editor, says Sam. “When I started at The Times Supplements, we had one networked computer on a dial up modem. That was for the foreign pic from the wires each week. We’d send couriers to picture libraries for transparencies and prints for any other non commissioned photography. Our photographers would also send us rolls of negatives and transparencies which we’d process in house, review the film on a lightbox, then mark them up with the images for scanning to get them in our newspapers. Seems archaic now!”

That’s because it is. The speed of the technological revolution we’re living through
is unprecedented. Information, and pictures are now everywhere, for everybody, instantly available on their phone, so visual impact has never mattered more. The technology in digital cameras, has also advanced apace with smart phones. “Our staff photographer was one of the news photographers to go digital. As I recall, it was a Kodak body, that shot relatively low resolution Jpegs only, had no LCD screen and cost an arm and a leg!” These days, the cameras that Sam use have a low light performance, focus ability and feature set what could only be dreamed of a relatively few short years ago. This has made event and reportage photography considerably easier and in most cases eliminated the need for flash, which can still be used as a creative choice, when appropriate, but its silently shooting as a fly on the wall with no flash that’s at the core of event photography. On the flip side, modern lighting means you’re very frequently face with an array of colour temperatures (the ‘warmth’ of the light); good old tungsten (warm), digital or projected screens (cold) and LED lighting (usually colder still).. at least neon (green!) is less encountered these days. Balancing all these for good skin tones can only really be learnt through experience.

But whatever the technologies used and encountered, the essence of photography will never change – capturing a moment with a strong composition. As well as the technical knowledge to problem solve, that’s what you pay a professional for.

To see Sam’s work why don’t you head over to his blog as a good place to start, and then see his Children & Education portfolio to see where it all started. See if you can spot which images were captured on film!