Liverpool photographer has a busy start to the year

Published on Wed Mar 2, 2022 by David J Colbran

The month of February proved to one of my busiest as a professional photographer ever. I guess a lot of businesses are emerging out of the pandemic to find the staff portraits out of date. I've worked with an architect's practice, a stock brokers and a facility management company, bringing in the mobile studio and getting some crispy new images for their team pages. Also helped out 3 individuals, all at different points in their careers, looking to update their LinkedIn profiles, as part of their job hunting. Let us just say, they each wanted a completely different photographic style !

And great to be back on the conference scene as well - spent a busy couple of days with a national venue cleaning company, at their conference at the ACC Liverpool centre. I will blog about that in a future post when I get a chance. Really interesting company with big and positive plans for the future.

And on top of that, lots of commissions in the construction sector - which as you can imagine on sites at this time of the year has been quite muddy ! I can't blog about these at the moment, as unpublished by the end client - but two very interesting commissions which hopefully will result in repeat business in the next couple of months. The first was at the new Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescot, Merseyside and the second for a major engineering project locally at Old Swan, which required time-lapse videos, as well as traditional photography.

But rather than not include any images, here are a few from a fantastic art installation last year, that I had forgotten about and has gathered virtual dust on a hard drive until now.

It was part of Abandon Normal Devices festival 2021. Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is a nomadic commissioner and digital platform that hosts art and creative experiments beyond traditional galleries or disciplines on an annual basis.

This was a real time event in the Hydraulic Tower, Birkenhead - an industrial building designed by engineer Jesse Hartley. Bombed during World War II, the iconic nineteenth-century Grade II listed building has been left unused for decades.

The festival used it for an immersive audio experience by American composer Kali Malone featuring musicians Stephen O'Malley and Lucy Railton. The piece entitled 'Does Spring Hide Its Joy' was created and recorded in the empty Berlin Funkhaus & Monom during the lockdown of spring 2020. Visitors were invited into the main hall of the Hydraulic Tower building to listen, walk, sit, and be immersed in the vibrations of the durational audio installation.

It was loud and made parts of the old building vibrate. This combined with the then strict pandemic restrictions make the experience unsettling and strange. On reflection a brilliant experience.

Author: David J Colbran