I’m taking the opportunity to add a few web galleries to this site, which was actually meant to be a backup site for www.davetacon.com. The custom design of this other one is nice and it has some different work to what I’m showing here, but the way it was built basically meant that people were very unlikely to find me with web searches for a commercial photographer in Shanghai or even just a photographer in Shanghai. Also, the blog function had been disabled and I couldn’t post videos. It’s good to have two sites anyway as one of the challenging things about living in Shanghai is the internet. If people in China are unable to view www.davetaconphotography.com, chances are they can view www.davetacon.com.
Anyway, I just updated my website with some work I did with Vanessa, my fiancee, for the W Guangzhou back in July last year. I’ve done fair bit of work for Marriott Luxury Brands, the luxury hotel family to which W Hotels belong. Over the last few years, I’ve shot things for every brand in their stable. This is the kind of work that I’m really looking forward to doing again once things return to normal after the coronavirus subsides. It’s been a total brake on any commercial photography in China besides photojournalism. I don’t expect there will be much in the way of commercial photography in Shanghai this month or even next month and maybe even the month after that.
My work for Marriott Luxury Brands came about from a recommendation from fashion designer Chen Xuzhi who had designed a capsule collection for the opening of W Shanghai: The Bund a couple of years back. I’d photographed Chen (Daniel) for a WWD cover story on the leading young Chinese fashion designers and bumped into him at a couple of parties. A few of the outfits from this shoot at W Guangzhou were borrowed from his. label Xu Zhi from his Shanghai capsule collection which was inspired by Shanghai pajama fashion and the Jazz Age. Shanghai brand Missy Skins also lent us some clothes as did Puma.
This commercial work is shot a bit differently to my normal style of photography. There’s a house style for the brand that favours hard, direct flash. Personally I don’t mind shooting like this and it allows me to shoot pretty quickly. The lighting doesn’t have to be perfect - they’re going for a bit of candid paparazzo glam.
We spent five days shooting at the hotel, which was great, but exhausting. The marketing team was easy to work with and looked after us well.
I mostly shot with a Nikon D3S and a Nikon D850. Almost all the shots were done with a 20mm 1.8, which I’d borrowed off a friend to test drive. Flash was either a single Godox AD360II in a collapsible soft box and an old SB800 Nikon speed light either fired remotely or mounted in the camera hot shoe. I also, shot a little with a Mavic Air drone by the indoor pool, which the drone didn’t like much at all.
On top of this I shot a couple of rolls in a Nikon 35ti compact camera, a film camera that I’ll probably blog about at a later stage.
Here are some of the final key visuals for W Guangzhou.
www.whotels.com
https://xuzhi.co.uk/pages/about
www.missyskins.com
www.puma.com
