"Christ, they'll be bringing those bank machine things round next year!"

Last week were lucky enough to have the photographer Gary Salter come into Uni to give us a talk and tell us about his work. Gary has created images for companies such as Absolute Radio, Shreddies, Uncle Ben’s, Pimms, Bulmers and LG. It was really interesting to learn about the photography industry from someone first hand. I really like that Salter seems to take his inspiration from life and events that happen to him or his friends. He said that he carries a camera everywhere to keep a diary with it and carries a notebook to note down any funny or interesting things that happen that he could use for inspiration. 

For example he went to a show where he saw that they were giving "knitting lessons to grannies" and amongst all these elderly ladies was a young 24 year old man doing some knitting. Salter obviously found this amusing and so noted this down and used it as a starting off point for this next picture of a biker knitting club. I love the attention to detail in his image, like the knitting needles of the wall in the shape of the cross bones, and the cake on the table in front of the figure on the far left was actually a knitted cake that belonged to his set designer. 

He gave a good insight into how you would actually go about organising a commercial shoot. You have to scout locations, find a selection of props and models for the client to choose from, sometimes you have to find several different locations for the same image. I hadn’t realised the extent to which the images are photoshopped together. He showed us his sketches and plans for this advert for Bulmers. The bottle itself was shot in a studio, the fountain was shot at one location, the feet were in a swimming pool at another location, these are all then brought together seamlessly.

I think his work is really funny and people can relate to his pictures. One of my favourite images of his is the one below. He told us that after Halloween he and his friend's had been talking about how greedy the trick or treaters were getting and he had said "Christ, they're going to turn up with one of those bank machine things next year!" and from that came the inspiration for this image. Some of his work remind me of Martin Parr's, in that he takes comical pictures of life in Britain, humorous yet relatable.