Trapeze Creative is a specialist design company, producing large scale three-dimensional display schemes and individual sculptural display pieces.
The company was founded in 2012 by Simon Dews and Iain Kerr. Throughout their careers, they have been involved in creating and manufacturing products, primarily for the Shopping Centre Christmas display market for virtually all of the UK’s major Shopping Centres and also across Continental Europe, North America, the Middle East and Central Asia.
I was commissioned to produce a single “epic” image of the tree that showed its scale and how it worked in its surroundings. Artistically, I was given an open reign and I proposed that the photograph be taken at twilight when there was still some natural light, but dark enough to show the tree illuminations. This gave me a very narrow time frame in which to capture the image – about 15 minutes between being too light and being too dark.
I photographed the tree over a number of days, there being only enough time with the right lighting conditions to photograph it from one angle on each location visit. The image I chose really worked, as it showed the tree in the midst of the surrounding architectural environment as the centre-piece of the Christmas decorations at Liverpool ONE.
Additionally, the bar that was at the base of the tree was not a part of the Trapeze design and they didn’t want it to feature in the image. To achieve this result, I took many, many images during the time I was there and picked the one where the most people were in the camera’s eye line to mask that part of the structure. Inevitably, there were still some gaps in the crowd through which part of the bar could be seen. In order to completely hide the base of the structure, I photoshopped in some people that were in other images I had taken.
Both myself and the client were very pleased with the result and are looking forward to next Christmas already!
