About Me

Editorial Portrait Photographer London Based

Yiğit Günel is an award-winning editorial portrait photographer London-based creative director, who concentrated on people-based stories with his images. His meticulous approach to lighting and focus on capturing genuine moments can be seen through his personal projects and editorial portrait photography and advertisement photography. As a creative director and editorial photographer, Yiğit’s lifestyle photography evokes emotion and tells compelling stories.

He is one of the photographers taking part in the London Creative Network Artist Development Programme in 2021 with Four Corners.

Can you explain your creative process?

There are a couple of steps for me before creating anything. First, you need to fuel your engine and as we all know it’s quite boring and dull to wake up early in the morning cold and drive to the gas station waiting for the pump to fill your tank. But if you like to make a journey you need to pass this process. Usually having a research phase before starting helps a lot. I would like to listen to some music that will put me in the mode for the brief and read some books or text.

Looking at images online is not my preferred method for research. That keeps my mind clear of making prejudice visual decisions. I prefer my images based on ideas rather than visual stimulations of past works. Also usually giving it sometime right after reading the request and letting the brief sit on the back of my head clears my mind.

I never just sit and start my mood board. In these fast-pacing businesses that sounds like a luxury. But what I learned from giving fast responses and starting without thinking, always ends up with correcting more mistakes or getting more amendments from the client and therefore wasting more time. Because of this reason creatives forced to create mediocre work to catch the deadline and that’s worst.

So, the next step for me is to mood board each shot or video frame that I’m working on. That’s meticulous work for me I put more than %70 of my energy into planning and thinking about all details I need. Such as framing, lenses, lighting, colour, props, models etc. Rest is the shooting; it goes so fast already having a strict plan on my head relaxes me on set.

I prefer to shoot fast but sure and less. So, I don’t end up wasting time on selecting images. As Herzog said “We’re not garbage collectors.

” When finish shooting all frames outlined in my initial mood board I start experimenting, trying new ideas and try to stretch the creativity muscles to other way. The third process is selecting. If I’m shooting for an agency or a magazine there is usually a creative director or an art director for a certain campaigns or editorial image selections. We usually choose roughly half of the images on set. That also gives us a great perspective on seeing images side by side before editing.

So, if anything needs to be updated, I prefer to do it on set rather than afterwards on editing software. That extends from major light changes to picking up a hair strain on my model’s shoulder. The next step is editing the images roughly to give a brief idea to a retouch artist or sometimes to myself, making general adjustment during the shooting on Capture One.

I usually share these images with a client before starting and going deep into editing. Upon approval of images, I start editing and finalising the project.

 

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Editorial portrait photographer London

Editorial portrait photographer London

Editorial portrait photographer London

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