ABOUT SIMON MURRELL

COLLEGE & ASSISTING

My started my career in professional photography in 1981 after completing a three-year course in photography at Medway College of Design, working as an assistant to Cornel Lucas, who was famous for his portraits of Film Stars.

My main interest at the time was really in still life photography and the challenge of lighting the subject to produce a beautiful 5 x 4 or 10 x 8 transparency. After about two years I stopped assisting and spent months taking my portfolio around the London Advertising agencies, and started to get my own work, luckily I had also been invited back by the college as a part-time tutor, which was perfect as it provided me with an income while I was building up my client list.

THE EARLY DAYS

As often happens, I started getting regular work from a couple of advertising agencies, plus catalogue shoots which kept me busy most of the time, I also met up with an animal handler for a couple of jobs, we got on well together and ended up doing a lot of both commissioned jobs and Library shoots with animals.

LARGER PREMISES

At about the same time, I moved into a much larger studio in Parsons Green, and spent around four very busy years there, still doing a lot of animals, room-sets, a lot of food photography, people, and still life. It’s difficult to really plan a career in photography, you tend to get pushed in different directions by the clients you work for, as you build up a trusting relationship, and they tend to trust you with any job they get.

THE ADVENT OF DIGITAL

The interesting thing is that technically nothing really changed for around 20 years, and films had hardly changed, although Fuji had come into the professional film market, and as a consequence Kodak had got their act together a bit better, making their film batches more consistent.

Digital was starting to appear in the early 90s with the Scitex Leaf back and was adopted by catalogue studios, who benefited by vast savings on film costs, but the images were not very high resolution, although adequate for catalogue.

I finally decided to switch to digital in 2003 with an Imacon digital back, which did produce stunningly clean high-resolution images, and although it was slow to use it was no worse than 5 x 4 and 10 x 8, since which time I have never shot on film.

TODAY

My work is pretty much split between studio and location these days, I am still busy and I really enjoy the mix of different styles of work, and really excited by the latest developments, in the new AI versions of Photoshop.