Bond Street

Bond Street is a new Chelmsford, open-air shopping shopping district between the River Chelmer and the High Street. "Bond Street Chelmsford, an exciting retail and leisure development in the heart of Essex. Home to John Lewis, Everyman Cinema and riverside restaurants and shops."

Website: www.bondstreetchelmsford.com

The Campaign

A 2019 Winter retail photoshoot to entice people for Christmas and New Year shopping, with images to be used for 2020 & 2021 promotions. The target was to capture fashionable shoppers, display the brand focused stores and promote the locally loved annual Apres Bar pop up and ice rink pop up.

Apres Bar  |  Fashionable Shoppers  |  Stores  |  Ice Rink

Chelmsford Photographer

These  Bond Street, Chelmsford retail photographs were taken on two site visits. The brief was created and overseen by DS.Emotion - an award-winning placemaking agency based in central London. While based in London, this photoshoot took place in Chelmsford, Essex. Photographing in Chelmsford is made extra enjoyable by the people who (on average) seem to enjoy being photographed; a helpful trait for photographers.

Address: Bond St, Chelmsford CM1 1GH

Retail Photography of Shops

Photographing on Bond Street is helped enormously by the brands that have been attracted to the area. Among others, photographing top brands like Cath Kidston, Fat Face and The White Company helps the retail photography in two ways:

1. When you see Cath Kidston, it invokes our associations with the brand. It's a brand that interests viewers and draws them in. Having these brands in the photograph helps tell the story of the area and describes the type of shoppers the area attracts. 

2. The window displays. Photographing the window displays of Fat Face and The White Company, particularly around Christmas, make for beautiful vignettes within the photographs, to entice the viewer to look a little longer.

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Apres Bar

Apres Bar brings the alpine lodge bar atmosphere and decor from a Swiss ski resort to Chelmsford. It provides Christmas drinks, snacks and is wonderfully decorated for the festive holidays. In photographing a bar / restaurant like this, the client had two requests:

1. Show the bars location. As it's a three month pop up, photographs were needed that visually show where it is.

2. Capturing the fun, the 'vibes' and the atmosphere of such a cool and unique place that sets it apart from other Chelmsford bars.

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Shoppers

From pop up shops to shoppers, the final brief on this retail photography project was to capture the people on Bond Street. The client wanted candid images of the shoppers enjoying themselves.

Photographically this posed an issue; shoppers would need to give permission for their photograph to be taken and used, but the photographs needed to be a candid i.e. shoppers captured without their knowing.  The solution?  Capture first and ask permission after; the few that said no had their photos deleted on the spot. For everyone else, their email address was taken and handed to the marketing agency to send and arrange the model release forms.

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Ice Rink

Photographing an ice rink has one main challenge to overcome - the giant void of white ice. Ice rinks, specifically the ice, has no colour or texture, making it tricky when trying to produce lovely looking photographs. The solution is to capture the emotions in people's faces. The overriding joy, fear and laughter on the faces of skaters is far more eye catching and draws attention away from the boring ice, and makes the photographs look fun and engaging.

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