We had the pleasure of having a talk from Ben Stockley at the University of Cumbria who is a very successful commercial photographer. He's worked with companies such as Nike, Audi and Volkswagon as part of their advertising campaigns. He gave us an in depth view into the world of being a commercial photographer and how he became a part of the industry. Once achieving his degree from Blackpool University he began contacting photographers and agencies and began working as an assistant and worked his way up from there to become a freelance photographer himself. His advice was for any of us wanting to go down a similar route to follow what he did, getting smaller work as an assistant to learn the ropes and progress that way.
What was really interesting I found was that he showed us an example of a brief he got from Audi, showing what they wanted the advertisement to look like and mood boards of images from a variety of things for him to take different aspects from in order to create the final images. It was interesting learning how this process works and the team involved in the whole process. Ben would typically work in a small team including a location scout, a producer, 2 assistants and then editors who would be involved in the touch up process after the images were taken.