Alex Smale – Photographer

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Alex Smale

Photographer

Alex Smale is a multi award-winning photographer and trainer with over 30 years of professional experience.

He began his photography career at the age of 16 when he started his career in computer game development.

Alex was a graphics artist and game designer. And digital photography was an essential tool that was necessary to create realistic graphics for games.

For example, if you needed to create realistic grass or bricks in a computer game. That would start with a photograph of those things. Which could then be edited and shaped into a useful texture within a game.

It is for this reason that Alex Smale has always considered raw photographs as simply building blocks for an artistic image. Rather than thinking of a photograph as the final work.

Which is why Alex’s photography has such a unique and interesting look to it. With exciting editing and graphics woven in to each final art piece.

Photography was more of a hobby for Alex over the years that followed his exit from the games industry.

Until he started to receive offers for paid work again while he was working as a pub manager for J.D. Wetherspoons.

At first he worked with e-commerce websites to create exciting and unique imagery for their products.

And then he began photographing weddings. Which he then developed into a highly successful and award winning wedding photography business.

He then branched out into other photography niches, such as portraiture, wildlife, commercial and his particular passion, horror.

Alex also began mentoring other photographers. Helping them to develop their brands, their businesses and helping them to cultivate a unique style of their own.

Alex Smale used his skills in photography for charitable endeavours, including the launching of the calendar for Plymouth Argyle’s Ladies Football Club.

Horror Photography

Alex’s most specialised area of photography is horror.

He truly brings something unique and world class to the genre that is visually impressive, fun, and not too scary!

His work in this genre began when a need arose to create visual art-piece images for one of his marketing agency clients, Tulleys Farm in Crawley, West Sussex.

Tulleys is the biggest Halloween Scream Park in Europe, and attracts tens of thousands of visitors every October and November.

It’s a very exciting experience, and it can be very difficult to convey that feeling within one image.

So Alex Smale set about developing a unique style based on complex lighting setups, atmospheric effects, high-grade equipment, and advanced graphics techniques to develop stunning images to use for promotion.

His work quickly caught the attention of other Halloween attractions across the UK, which gave him more experience and different subject matter.

Eventually making him the leading horror photographer in the United Kingdom.

If you would like to browse Alex Smale’s Horror Photography Portfolio, please click here.

Wedding Photography

Alex Smale’s first main venture into the world of professional photography was with weddings.

This happened simply by chance, when one of his friends at work asked him to photograph their wedding.

He explained he’d not photographed a wedding before. But his friend loved his other work and felt confident he could do a good job.

So Alex spent a lot of time researching the best practices for wedding photographers and brought all of his photography expertise and graphic artist wizardry to the job.

The first couple absolutely loved their wedding photos, as did their friends.

That led to an EXPLOSION of bookings.

Which in-turn, enabled Alex Smale to become a full-time photographer.

The most popular part of his wedding photography was his ability to create unique art pieces for each couple, using his years of experience as a graphics artist in the computer games industry.

His unique selling point was that he would get to know the couple, how they met, what they loved to do together, what their favourite movies were, what their hobbies were together.

And then on the wedding day, create a mind-blowing graphical image related to that connection, that would be shown to the wedding guests in the evening of the wedding on a big screen.

If you would like to see Alex Smale’s Wedding Portfolio, please click here.