Photography during a pandemic

Way back in February this year I was commissioned to photograph a set of five images for a health and safety poster campaign. The concept for each image was to capture important moment of someone’s life but with one person missing, the one who has been injured at work. All was going well with the pre-shoot preparation and location finding, then Covid-19 put an instant brake on it all. When we entered lockdown on March 23rd. I had no idea when I could resume photography. By the time the lock down had eased in June, the locations has stopped allowing access, models couldn’t work less than 2 metres from each other so the whole shoot was looking like an impossible task.

The only way I could continue, was to rethink the whole job, instead of taking models to the five locations, I shot them against green screen at the model agencies offices. The only models who could be next to each other were real couples or people from the same household. The backgrounds were shot separately on a different day then I had the task of creating composite shots using all the elements I photographed.

When taking the job on, there was no way I would have predicted how tricky the process would be, but with perseverance and lots of photoshop we got there in the end.