About...
Harry Tyler Photography is owned and run by Harry Tyler, with the able help of young livewire assistant Jakes Bloemhoff, who not only handles the stuff on top of 3 metre ladders but is also very handy with Photoshop.
Harry started off his career as a press photographer with the Cape Times (Cape Town, South Africa) in 1960, rising to the position of chief photographer, before resigning to start his own studio in 1965. He had become interested in fashion photography, and from there progressed to all forms of commercial and advertising photography. He rapidly became one of South Africa's leading commercial photographers.
His range of experience is very wide: aerial photography (usually for property developers), portraiture - particularly of the business and political elite (including the State President), interiors, including the entire House of Assembly of the South African Parliament (members and all), and art works for archival purposes, and in recent years he has concentrated on mail order catalogue work.
For the catalogues, he photographs kitchenware, appliances, consumer electronics, linen, shoes, and luggage; his speciality is the lighting of shiny objects such as stainless steel cookware, glassware, and jewellery.
The studio is in Woodstock, a Victorian-era suburb of Cape Town, now favoured by artists, sculptors, photographers, writers, and other creative people, adjacent to the city centre on the Eastern Boulevard motorway. The ground floor studio is about 550m2, and parks about 6 or 7 vehicles inside under cover, but is not currently a car-photography studio. The studio is equipped with a fully fitted kitchen for the preparation of food props for the kitchenware shots, as well as an "adjustable" kitchen set on wheels (4,5m x 3,5m) for appropriate backgrounds.
The camera equipment consists of Sinar 4x5inch (65mm to 360mm), Fuji GX680 III, Mamiya RB67, Pentax67, and Mamiya 6x4.5cm. A recent addition is the Canon 20D for some digital work. The lighting is Broncolor flash and comprises many generators (Grafit), 2 Hazylights (1mx1m), 2 large area (2mx1m) lamps on overhead rails and several further heads and softboxes on stands.
A note on digital photography: Digital is not yet used for the main product shots because the clients' general requirement in most cases is for the absolute minimum depth of field, i.e. very out of focus backgrounds. At present this is not practically feasible due the very short focal lengths employed in digital photography.