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.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Adventgram 2016

Hope everyone had a great Christmas? I went hunting for numbers throughout December for my Adventgram count down to the big day.

It was a great year this year with lots of people joining in.

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.

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.

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

Adventgram 2014

images © David Sykes 2015 All rights reserved.

December 2014 saw the return of my annual instagram project adventgram, Every day in December I look for and photograph the number that matches the date of that day counting up to December the 25th (Christmas day). All the numbers are shot on my iPhone and have to be found and not made by me.

This year was great as I had lots of people join in using the hashtag #adventgram, I enjoyed seeing other peoples interpretation of my project.

You can see all the numbers in more detail here.

Warming comfort food

images © David Sykes 2014 All rights reserved.

Can't believe this is my first post of 2014! It's been a busy year so far, I became a dad for the first time in November last year so Poppy has been keeping us busy but I've also been busy shooting a mix of advertising and editorial shoots and of course plenty of personal projects. First off I'd like to share one of the personal projects I've been working on with the talented Jessica Dance. We've now finish off our woolly faux food series, a woolly full english breakfast and a woolly hotdog these go with the woolly hamburger we shot last year. It's been a great project to work on Jess' attention to detail making the food is fantastic and it's been great building the environments the food sits in.

A warm and woolly knitmas dinner

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

I’ve recently been working with an amazing model maker and prop stylist, Jessica Dance. Her speciality at the moment is creating objects made of wool.

We’ve been working on a few woolly projects together and whilst shooting our ”Woolly mammals” series both of us mentioned that we wanted to create an image for Christmas.

I love shooting food and I always want people to do a double take with my images and spend some time working out what’s unusual about them. Over the past few years I’ve been creating faux food shots; taking classic food shots and recreating them out of everyday objects. This is where I came up with idea of using Jessica's fantastic wool craft to turn a traditional turkey Christmas dinner into a woolly feast.

I knew the food Jessica was going to produce would look great but it wasn’t until she brought them round the studio did I realise how beautiful they would be. Some of my favourite pieces are the pigs in blankets, with it's handmade bacon rashers, and the turkey itself with its perfectly designed drumstick. I wanted the photo, at first glance, to have the feel of a classic food shot, with it slowly revealing its true colours as you realise that something is not quite right. It was quite a challenge to light it and show off all the texture whilst keeping the warm and cosy feel of the wool.

Who’d have thought wool food could make you feel so hungry.

We Loved the final shot so much we decided to make it into a Christmas card to send out to friends and Clients. I wanted a unique greeting for the inside of the cards and came up with the line "Have a warm and woolly Christmas" Which was great, but I also wanted it to have a wool theme. So, I asked Maddy from Vue, who has been wowing me with her excellent typographic illustrations for a while now, to design a illustration for the inside. What she came up with was fantastic, and the card was ready to wing it's way to our friends and clients.

image © Madeline Macrae 2013 All rights reserved.

It's been a great project to work on and a chance to collaborate with some talented makers!

Hope you all have a warm and woolly Christmas and I look forward to sharing with you all of the new and exciting projects I have lined up in 2014!

Watch this space for more of mine and Jessica's woolly faux food.

Woolly Mammals

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

Over the last year myself and model maker/stylist Jessica Dance have been working on a new collaboration and I'm super happy to now be able to share the results with you.

The project came about when we were having a brain storm over a coffee. I loved the Knit heads Jess had done and thought it would be great to build a bit of a story around some new animal heads she was making for our project. We came up with the idea of them all belonging to one person and having them in different rooms of this eccentric collector of woolly mammals house.

So over the next few months we sourced various props furniture and wallpaper and created these little slices into the life of this collector.

It was such a great project to work on and Jess was great fun to work with her amazing skills with the knitting machine are second to none. I love all the little touches she brings to the project, the knitted log is one of my favourites.

The moose head set was massive and took a day to build, the moose was a huge full size moose and was 7 foot from antler tip to antler tip, and stuck out from the wall about 4 foot!

Whilst shooting we came up with lot of knitty ideas so watch this space for some more woolly madness.

Party's over

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

Recently I was asked by folks over at iGNANT to take part in their on going feature called two of a kind. They ask an Artist and a photographer to take part each time, they send them the same 3 random objects and ask them to create something from them. After looking at the previous entries and their lovely site I jumped at the chance.

So I waited for the package to arrive to find out what objects I would be having to use. When it finally arrived I opened the box (with some apprehension) to find a pair of rubber gloves a packet of party streamers and a set of wooden utensils.

Recently I have been working with the fantastic Jessica Dance while we were shooting another project I mentioned that I'd been asked to do this and asked if she would like to collaborate with me on this one too. She said yes and came up with a great way to use the objects using the wool technique that we've been developing on other projects for a while now.

The end result was the Wooly morning after the night before.

Apologies for a drought in blog posts It's been a busy few months shooting lots of personal work and commissions more to be revealed soon.

Immaculate conceptions

images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

Last month I was approached by Ryan Watson, from Shots magazine, to see if he could interview me, I jumped at the chance! Shots is a great Magazine. It has featured some of best photographers and Directors of the past few decades, including some of my favourites.

It's always a bit nerve wracking being interviewed, but I had nothing to worry about it - it turned out to be a lovely piece and, I am very pleased with the end result (thanks Ryan).

It's also nice to have so many of my shots featured, both new and old.

When the article's on their website, I'll add a link - in the meantime go get a copy! ;-)

Wood chips

image © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

I was very lucky to have this beautiful wood burger and chips made for me by my good friend and model maker Wesley west.

He's a very talented chap and when he said he'd made me the wooden burger I jumped at the chance to use it in a shoot, the hardest thing was deciding how to shoot it!

Leaving idlewild

image © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

Here's one of my latest personal shots it's a scene depicting Idlewild airport in 1961, now known as JFK. The idea came about after I found a folder with the Pan AM ticket in it whilst helping to clear my wife's grandma's house last year, after she had sadly passed away. Caroline's Grandfather had taken a business trip to the states in 1961 and had kept everything from the trip, from the letters to and from the travel agent, to the match books and drinks stirrers from all the bars and hotels he visited. I love the fact that the trip was such a rare and exciting event that he kept all the momentos from the trip. I even found a ticket from a visit to the empire states building (see if you can spot it in the shot) it's a stark contrast to the disposable and online way we live our lives now.

sacred hearts

image © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

Here's my recent valentines inspired test. I found these hearts in my local art shop and couldn't resist getting them, a bit of red spray paint later and voila!

This lady has been stealing men's hearts for years who's next?......

Adventgram final 25

All images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

Happy New year!

Thanks to all of you that contributed to this years adventgram and followed the project. It was great seeing all the different ways people interpreted the project. I look forward to doing it again at the end of this year.

Hope you all had a great festive break here's to a great 2013

All images © David Sykes 2013 All rights reserved.

The proof of the pudding

All images © David Sykes 2012 All rights reserved.

This Festive season I decided it would be good to create a Christmas inspired shot that I could send out to the people I've worked with over the years, so I started to think up ideas and came to the conclusion that everyone loves festive food and presents at christmas so why not combine the two. That is how I came to create my sock christmas pudding, for those that have followed my work over the years you'll know that I have liked to create food images but not using food but everyday objects to create faux food. So I dusted off (and repainted) my giant 4 foot plate and went about creating my giant sock pudding, the pile ended up being 3 foot high and nearly 4 foot wide and Katie Cordell the stylist had to source over a hundred socks. It took us the best part of a day to create the perfect sock pile and at the end I was tempted to go for the flaming Christmas pud and set fire to them! But I couldn't as I needed them for the next part of my mailer.

All images © David Sykes 2012 All rights reserved.

I thought it would be fun to send people one sock from my pudding as a memento and as creative inspiration, I custom made some sock tags with a challenge on them to make the lonely sock into a festive stocking or christmas character. To help them on there way I supplied a starter kit of some fake fur some red and green felt, googly eyes and some buttons. (see below) I'm asking them to send pictures of the results so I'm looking forward to seeing the festive creations.

All images © David Sykes 2012 All rights reserved.

This will probably be my last post of the year so I'd like to wish everyone a merry christmas and a happy new year thanks for following my blog.

Adventgram 2012

This is adventgram from 2011

All images © David Sykes 2012 All rights reserved.

We are surrounded by numbers every day as a result they tend to go unnoticed, there are 1000's of different typefaces out there, some beautifully crafted some not so. I've decided to celebrate the humble number, and what better month than December the one month that most of us count down to an event, Christmas day. I'm shooting my adventgram project for the second year running. Every day I find and shoot the number of the day on my phone using instagram to publish it. This year I'm being joined by some fellow instagramers using the hashtag #adventgram

All the fun of the fair

All images © David Sykes 2012 All rights reserved.

For my latest piece of personal work I had the pleasure of working with Stylist Carrie Louise on this project we wanted to look at the great textures and objects you get at a fun fair and shoot them in an abstract way. It was a fun couple of days shooting, if not a little messy as we hired a candy floss machine for the day. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to eat candy floss again probably the stickiest day in the studio I've had so far, and rest assured that no goldfish were harmed in the making of this project just a couple of coconuts!

An object of desire

My Light breakfast was selected to appear in PDN magazines objects of desire competition it's in there November issue of the magazine out right now!