About Target Studios
Based in Leicester, Target Studios is a spacious and well-equipped photographic and video production studio.
They provide everything a business needs for a professional and stress-free shoot with top quality results.
We go behind the scenes for a conversation with its Director and Creative Photographer, William James, to find out more.
I feel lucky in that I’ve always known what I wanted to do - photography has always been my passion. I started my formal training at 16, and it was a natural progression from there to set up in business when I was 19.
Our photographic studio has now been running for over 20 years, which has flown by! In that time, as well as continually honing our craft, we’ve got to know what our clients like and we do everything we can to make sure they’re happy and comfortable.
We even provide welcoming fresh coffee and pastries for early morning shoots!
Being placed literally in the centre of the UK, we can flexibly cover the length and breadth of the country, regularly travelling from Scotland to Brighton and everywhere in between.
Our location is perfect for what we do and for giving our clients maximum flexibility when we’re delivering to their brief.
We are conveniently based next to the A46, off the M21’s J21a. It’s handy that our clients can avoid getting gnarled up in city traffic, and we have plenty of parking.
Our studio is a spacious 260sqm with an 11x14m main shooting area.
We also have good access into our studio, with a drive-in, 3.8x4.7m roller door for you to unload in the dry or roll in bigger items.
In terms of facilities, we have a client area where you can set up camp and make yourselves comfortable.
We also have a workshop, kitchen, changing facilities, prop store, mannequins and a variety of backgrounds.
And, of course, most importantly, an abundance of lighting and photographic equipment.
I would say that it’s a combination of three elements.
1) Having a good studio.
2) Having the best equipment.
And 3) Having the expertise and the experience to get the best results out of the first two elements!
Our enthusiasm is infectious. We genuinely love what we do and our clients love the atmosphere and the buzz that our enthusiasm creates; they really enjoy the shoots, too.
We confidently provide a guarantee to all our clients – if you don’t like the results of our video production or the photos we create for you, you can hand it all back and walk away without paying a penny. We mean it, but we would never let a client be disappointed in the work we do with them and are proud to say that no client has ever called on us to honour that guarantee in 20 years!
The photographic services we offer apply to two different sectors.
Our traditional client base is the creative teams working within advertising and marketing agencies.
The other side of our business is business to business. We work with some amazing global brands, as well as our fellow SMEs, and a huge variety of companies in many sectors.
In recent years, video production has become increasingly in demand, too.
As well as the photography and video shoots, we provide post-production services, like editing and re-touching. We also have a range of freelancers we know and trust, to add specialist services like styling, hair and make-up, food economics, set builders and so on.
Whatever you need, when we work on your brief, we will bring the right team together to achieve the perfect result for you.
Creative agencies come to us to produce the high quality photography they need for their range of clients’ websites, campaigns or brochure content.
This is our core business. Agencies come back to us with repeat business, knowing that we will give them high quality photographic results for the large, prestigious brands they are representing.
Often, they use us for all the photography and video production across a whole campaign, start to finish, which is very satisfying to work on.
This work is hugely varied and crosses multiple sectors. It could be any product you can think of, or a service that is being promoted. We work with everyone from an individual who has created one single product they are taking to market, to global companies launching new products they need visual imagery for.
High quality product shots need good lighting, clever composition, accurate colour representation and clean, sharp images.
Some clients simply send a box full of products to us which we prepare, photograph, re-touch if required, and then send them the finished photos online, ready for them to upload as their ‘selling imagery’. These are generally deceptively simple shots, often on a white background, giving people enough detail for them to make their final buying decision from.
We also do lifestyle photography which more ‘sets the scene’, enticing customers to buy. We might create more emotive images using models who are the brand’s target customers, or design a set that increases the perceived value of the product, capturing its essence by creating the right mood to resonate with potential customers.
A full service photographic studio really has to offer video production hand in hand with still photography these days. Stills are still (!) very much needed, but video is often a necessary addition to support that photography, particularly for social media.
We have worked hard over the past few years to ensure that the quality of our video production techniques equals the high calibre of our photography.
We produce various kinds of videos for our clients. Sometimes, it’s a corporate video for that company to use internally, or it could be a video asking someone to endorse what they do. It could be an instructional video that supplements a product, showing someone how to use it correctly.
Our job is to understand what the client is trying to achieve and to execute their needs professionally and creatively, always to the highest standard.
Target Studios would love to work with you. You can email them
here or contact them via their
website. Or, as William suggests, why not pick up the phone? He finds it’s the best way to clarify if they’ll be the right fit for you. You can call them on 0116 270 1666.