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| Featured Photographer - June 2010 |
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AsukaBook is proud of its customers and the different ways that they use AsukaBook products. Each month, we will be talking to one of our active customers and finding out what they love about AsukaBook and how they use our books to help grow their business. Check the 'Book of the Month' page each month as well!
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Andy Le Gresley, principal photographer, CKP Lifestyle
“ We love what we do. We love our images and we want to display them in the best way we can to our clients, that's why we use AsukaBook. ”
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Jersey cream
Travelling the world at someone else's expense just isn't enough for some people.
Six years ago Christian Keenan, a successful documentary photographer, turned his back on globetrotting for agencies
and newspapers to set up his own photography business, CKP, in Jersey.
Initially he shot weddings, using his documentary background to create the “ fly-on-the-wall ” style images that so many couples now crave. But more recently, aided by principal photographer Andy Le Gresley, a lifestyle arm has been added to the business, which applies the same documentary principles to photographing children and babies.
We spoke to Andy about CKP Lifestyle and how AsukaBook fits into it.
  
AsukaBook:
Where did the idea to take documentary photography principles and apply it to child portraiture come from?
Andy Le Gresley: There's always been a trend towards posed and stylised studio shoots for children where you've got a white background and a cardboard box for them to sit on. We don't offer studio photography in any way, so we looked at ways in which we could transfer the documentary style to other types of photography and saw lifestyle as an option.
Has it been a success for you?
It's a harder business to push. Wedding photography is a necessity whereas lifestyle photography is more of a luxury. We push our work to clients who have more money; they're the type of people who can afford the luxuries.
Describe your photographic style.
We have a warts and all style. It's everything that would remind the parents of what their kids were like when they were young. Children get up to all sorts and they change from month-to-month and year-to-year, so our aim is to capture them being themselves and they'll appreciate it when they're much older.
A lot of your work involves shooting at wide apertures - why is that?
We shoot with fast 85mm and 50mm lenses using an aperture of f/2.8 or wider. One thing that you're fighting with in this industry is that everyone thinks they can take a nice shot of their child, so you've got to look different. One way to do this is to use equipment and techniques beyond the reach of most amateur photographers. By shooting at f/2.8 or wider, you're always going to get a very different shot with soft, out-of-focus backgrounds and really sharp details on the eyes or eyelashes. Using this approach gives a beautiful sense of what the child is like.
Tell us about why you chose AsukaBook.
The products really suit our lifestyle business. The colour reproduction is fantastic, the front cover quality is excellent, the sharpness and the detail everywhere is great. We offer two AsukaBooks; the Book Bound Hard and the NeoClassic Book™, the latter has fold flat pages and is great for viewing the work.
How do you market AsukaBooks?
When we send the images to the client they can access our online ordering system where they choose the products they want; prints, canvases, box frames or a book. If they go for a book, they select the images to put in and we'll produce a first draft design in Photoshop using a template downloaded from the AsukaBook site. They'll then get a web link to view the layout and can make changes until we've got the final design.
What other benefits does using AsukaBook give to your business?
We love what we do, we love our images and we want to display them in the best way we can to our clients, that's why we use AsukaBook. The printing for us is key. We have to have the images exactly as we want them, what we see on screen is what we're seeing in the final product and that's perfect - it's one less thing to worry about.
   
www.ckplifestyle.com
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