ABOUT
Mel Yates is a London-based interiors and portrait photographer/video director who works internationally

I discovered my love for photography a long time ago whilst studying product design at London’s Central St Martin's, and it seemed inevitable that the worlds of design and image-making would always be entwined for me. 

Although in the early days I was purely a photographer - shooting portraits, products and interiors - these days my work is roughly 50/50 stills/video, or is it video/stills??

In 2010, whilst planning a stills shoot at one of their projects, yoo Interiors asked me to also make a short film with the designer Kelly Hoppen. Kelly is super professional, passionate about her work, and only needs just one take for any film talk - so being my very first video it was kind of “in at the deep end”! Fortunately it went really well and led to loads more moving-image commissions. 

Although long past the '100 commercial videos' mark I still find each new project extremely exciting to work on, and want it to be different to anything yet done - to be our "best yet" - and I have a video production team, 'Reel Curious', made up of the fantastic group of collaborators that have come together over time.

It's quite common for us to create on the same shoot a set of high-end stills, plus a fully edited video in various formats, plus a variety of social media content...  with the intention that a compatible and harmonious look and aesthetic comes through across all. 

With a very long A-Z client list running from Architectural Digest to the ZoologicaI Society of London, I value having long-term working relationships and there are several clients I've shot with regularly for well over a decade. 


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