The price of food.

While I was prepping and researching this project I realised how expensive the individual food Items I was shooting had become. On researching this further I was surprised to see  food prices had risen by 4% last year alone.  This project not only represents an arresting visual representation of the food in our basket but also acts as a physical time capsule, freezing the Jan 2018 price of each food item as a future point of reference. 

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A dozen dead roses

It’s soon Valentines day, a day for which 250 million roses get produced and in the UK alone around £1.9 billion gets spent on flowers. So I thought it apt to share my latest personal project ‘A dozen dead roses’.

It’s a study of how the beauty of roses remains even after they’ve died. Shot at the end of the day as the sun sets the light change brings warmth back into the rose petals.

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Tasty treats with shortlist magazine.

At the end of last year shortlist magazine asked me to shoot some lovely food for them. A super tasty bibimbap perfect for the detox in the new year and some alternative BLT sandwiches invented by Max the genius behind Max’s sandwich shop. The shoot was great fun and I got to work with the talented Rob Morris who styled all the food, his stack of BLT sdwiches was a feat of engineering!  

SAINSBURYS NEW LAUNCH CAMPAIGN

Widen and Kennedy London asked me to photograph the food for the agency’s first advertising campaign for Sainsbury's after wining the new account last year. 

We had lots of fun making all kinds of food dance, the blueberry smoothie was a messy day having to build a tent to catch all the flying blueberry smoothie, who knew a blueberries could fly that’s far?!

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One in a million sock puppets

At the beginning of the summer Tatler Magazine asked myself and Jessica Dance to collaborate to produce their luxury watch shoot for the October issue. They had the idea to create sock puppets to wear the watches, so Jess created the 8 characters to star in the story. It was a busy days shoot with a lot of watches to feature but with the watch and puppet wrangling skills of the Tatler team it all went smoothly. When we came to the end of the shoot we worked out that at one point we had around 8 million pounds worth of watches in the studio that's definitely a studio record!

images © David Sykes 2016 All rights reserved.

Hallo!

Last month I was asked by Monocle to shoot their May cover.Richard Spencer Powell came up with a great idea to illustrate their 'Survey on the best villages and hamlets to set up shop in',by using Playmobil figures to represent the different trades, I had forgotten how good they were the attention to detail is fantastic! I'll be adding those to Poppy's Christmas list as soon as she's old enough. I'm convicted we also did the worlds smallest beer shoot for the shot of the hand holing the beer stein, We wanted that authentic look so we used real lager in the tiny plastic steins I had to use a syringe and a staple blade to get the frothy head on top! Another fun cover all in all!

images © David Sykes 2016 All rights reserved.

desktop delights

Last month I shot a great feature for Monocle Magazine on things to sharpen up your desk. They found some fantastic products to make your desk the envoy of the office.Suffice to say all the items we shot were lovely and I wanted to take them all home!

As well as that I shot my regular inventory shoot with lots more lovely products.

images © David Sykes 2016 All rights reserved.

Architect @ work

Before Christmas Friends & Co asked me to produce a series of photos to promote the ARCHITECT@WORKs exhibition in London.The shots were a series of studies of materials that some of the exhibitors produce. They enlisted the talents of stylist Despina Curtis to help me bring it all to life, it was great to work with Despina she created some lovely sculptures with the materials we had.

images © David Sykes 2016 All rights reserved.

President cheese

A few months ago I got to work with my old friends at Adam & Eve DDB Tom and Nick shooting some new press work for president cheese.We had a great day shooing lots of yummy cheese dishes with lots of leftover cheese at the end so no one left hungry!

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Pallets full of ideas from Monocle

One of my favourite Monocle shoots of the year is the annual Christmas Gift guide, we always have lots of fun sorting through and shooting all the great products the team find for the gift guide.This year there were quite literally pallet loads to work with. There are some great products in the guide the one I was most tempted by was the new star wars toy the Sphero BB-8 great fun to play around with in a big studio (I'm a bit of a sucker for all things tec and Star Wars!)

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Stylish Comfort Food

At the beginning of the year myself and Jessica Dance were asked to collaborate on a cover shot for the London sylist magazine. The theme was Comfort food so we shot Bangers and mash and some beans on toast. The shots looked great and the cover went down very well to the point where it went viral the following week!

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Delicious jewellery

Recently I teamed up with food stylist Olivia Bennett to help me finally shoot an idea that I've had knocking around for about 5 years now. It was a great shoot to work on, Olivia's designs for the Jewellery was fantastic creating recipes that you could wear on a glamorous night out.

I wanted to keep the set and lighting looking like a classic jewellery shoot to help give the view that double take.

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Sizzling success

Sorry it's been so long since my last blog post it's been a rather busy 3 months. At the end of the summer my second cover for Monocle magazine was on sale and again it featured toys! This time is was sylvanian families. It was a fun days shoot getting the models to look there best!

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Weight of the world

Recently I found some scales that I remembered from being a kid at my local village shop and couldn't resist buying them for a test.The result is this series of texture studies, it is also the beginning of a new project that I'm working on. Watch this space to find out more.

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Flying Robot Cat

Earlier this Year monocle asked me to shoot the cover for the Japan special. It was a fun one to shoot it was a vinyl figure of Doraemon a flying robot cat from the future!It looked great on the news stands and was one of their best selling issues ever, so I was delighted and honoured to have been a part of it.

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Life is just a bowl of cherries

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

This is a recent personal project i've been working on, I'm fond of a cherry or two so this was always going to be a fun shoot to do.

Cherries are such beautiful fruits, they look the same on mass but on closer inspection they all have a unique look of there own, this also applies when you squish them no two burst in the same way!

I didn't realize until I started to squish them how juicy they can be.

Hope you enjoy my juicy cherry pictures I'll be selling prints on my new revamped website which is coming soon......

Mad grand finale

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Sad that this week see's the final ever Mad Men, it's been an amazing series beautiful shot and well written. I look forward to seeing how it all ends with a large old fashion in my hand!

Here are a couple of my Man Men inspired test I've done over the years.

Cheer's

Takeaway time.

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

My latest work for Just Eat has been up and around the country for the last few weeks, it was shot for the lovely guys at The Red Brick Road.

The shoot was lots of fun with a studio full of popadoms and the smell of cooking king prawns! We all snacked well that day!

The just eat app has been very useful too as we moved into our new house recently and finding the best takeaways was great as it's taken a while to unpack all the kitchen stuff!!

Happy and healthy new year

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Happy New year to you all, so here we are another year, hope everyone has a happy and prosperous one!

The end of last year was a very busy one work wise, so much so I didn't get a chance to blog much so after this one I'm going to post all my latest news in a flurry of posts, so i apologies in advance!

So Kale is the latest super food and I was delighted to help promote Florette's new salad baby kale for the Now agency.

Creative director Lee Smith came up with some great ads and when I saw the layouts I knew they were right up my street.

It was a fun and very healthy shoot with lots of lovely baby kale left over for us all to have lots of very healthy salads in the days that followed!

The finished ads are running now in magazines and on 48 sheet posters. Grab a bag and help that healthy start to the new year ;-)

Christmas all wrapped up.

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

Before Christmas I was asked by BBH to shoot a Christmas poster for British airways. It was great to work with Harry Orton and Robin Warman again, they came up with a clever idea to use the belts as a bow. The poster was used on their 96 sheet poster site that welcomes people as they arrive at Heathrow airport as well as 48 poster sites.