Peter Fenech meets Jon Parker Lee to discuss the logistics and planning needed to shoot large-scale commercial assignments in challenging and sometimes hazardous industrial locations

Pictured Group activity “One challenge is that your subjects often don’t know why you’re there,” Jon says. “You have to get them to buy into it.”

All main images ©Jon Parker Lee

There’s rarely a dull day in professional commercial photography – every shoot is different and the range of subject matter covered means that you can find yourself shooting in the office of a CEO one morning and on the roof of a new skyscraper in the afternoon. As someone who spends a great deal of time working indoors on a laptop, it sounds exciting to me. Of course, it’s not all fun and the variety means there’s lots of pressure to be adaptable and a huge scope for excessively ambitious client expectations.

This morning, I find myself on an early train from Manchester heading into the Peak District. I’m due to meet photographer Jon Parker Lee for a shoot with one of his corporate clients. We’ll be visiting a cement works, shooting in and around the on-site quarry from which they extract the raw materials.

As the housing estates of Greater Manchester turn to green fields and wooded embankments, glistening in the morning sunlight, I consider how much planning has gone into the project already, what kind of obstacles we’ll face on the shoot and, most pressingly, what I will look like in a hi-viz and hard hat.

Jon picks me up from New Mills Newtown station and we set off for the quarry. As we wind our way down the gorgeous Hope Valley, I ask Jon about what we can expect on the shoot and how he has prepared himself for it.

Jon Parker Lee

Long-established as a trusted photography and video producer in and around Manchester, Jon cut his teeth in the high-pressure world of press photography. This equipped him with the skills to direct high-profile people and work in fastpaced environments where efficient image turnaround is a priority. Today, Jon’s business focuses on everything from industrial commercial imagery to conferences, portraiture, drone photography and video. For more information on his work, visit jonparkerlee.com

@jonparkerlee

Pictured Job satisfaction “Matching your clients’ expectations is critical and you have to be realistic with them,” Jon says

“For the shoot today, context is important – we’ve got to ask if there are sensitivities that need to be considered, why are we shooting the things that we are and what we are hoping to achieve. Today it is all about reflecting the culture of their brand,” he says.