Simon Ridgway Photography

One of the most common PR photo shoots is the “competition winner” and one of the most common photos sent out as a press release is the “competition winner is presented with giant cheque” picture. Picture editors hate these – or at least the ones I’ve worked for do.

I was asked to shoot some PR shots of a student who had won a competition titled “Win Your Rent” run by Rileys snooker club.

So, we did the obligatory cheque handover and also did the same shot with a wad of cash. But neither of those pics was likely to make its way into a newspaper as a PR handout. So I had to come up with something else.

My first idea was to have the winner shooting a cue ball into a big pile of money, but the cash we had available wasn’t enough to make this work, so I went with the next option which was to throw the money in the air over the table as the winner pretended to break off. Here’s the shot that worked best…

Now, as you can probably imagine, this was one of many attempts at throwing the money and catching it in a good composition. There’s no Photoshopping of extra notes – this is as it was shot.

It took about 30 minutes extra to get this one shot set up correctly but it was well worth the extra effort. The shot sums up the story nicely as well as being interesting to look at. Most importantly it will stand out in the crowd of mediocre PR handouts when it lands on an editor’s desk.