Zorra
I am one of a lucky few to get my hands on these jumpers made by Zorra a.k.a. @emeraldstarfox so me and Hannah had a walk around Shrewsbury and found this graffiti, so we spent a few minutes shooting on film until we woke up a tramp sleeping just a few yards away. He seemed less surprised than us by this encounter but this is a preview from the shoot. I’ll upload more later (I’v been neglecting the blog)
Taken on a Pentax Spotmatic sp2, super takumar smc 50mm f1.4 most likely on kodak ektar 100.
Whixall
Looks like another continent, strange to think it’s somewhere so close to me and a place I have spent so many hours walking around a few years ago when I lived there. I was a bit worried about the location but things turned out good (as they always do with the team!). Anyway, enough of my ramblings, this is what it turned out.
Farrah
On Sunday I travelled to Solihull to photograph Farrah, it was really good to meet the family (Farrah is sister to Zorra who is going out with my cousin Ben). We had no plans and so just went for a wander around the local area as the sun started to get lower in the sky. I switched my old Super Takumar 50mm f1.4 from my Pentax Spotmatic onto my Nikon D300 and shot into the sun using my hand to block some of the light entering the lens. The old lens may not be optically perfect but I think this adds to the images in a way that newer lenses cannot match. Images are straight out of camera with no editing, shot in RAW then converted to JPEG and uploaded here. Enough rambling—
more pics
A couple more as promised, I dont know if I like them as I think they look too strobist and photoshopped when I didnt use any flash, I think I may try changing the opacity on the layers in a few days and see what I think then.
Little red riding hood
I spent Sunday on two shoots, we hired Stokesay Castle in Shropshire as the venue and also used the woods nearby at Bucknell. This shot is from the woods and is a sneak preview of what the shoot was like. It doesnt give the game away, The outfit underneath is not your standard red riding hood, this ones got attitude!!
I’m looking forward to editing the rest of these soon, there should be some good ones to play with. Once they’re done I’ll get them up on here.
Chloe & Phil
Last weekend I was lucky enough to photograph Chloe & Phils big day. All morning it was raining really hard which was worrying as the reception was to be held in a local vineyard with the photos to be taken outside. Luckily for everyone involved the rain held off for all but a few minutes of very light showers and the day turned into a very nice summers evening. I’m slowly working through the pictures, heres just a preview of a few
single frame of a soon to be panorama
Before the ceremony, Chloe just in her dress
Mr&Mrs P sign
Bouquet
Parents of the bride
Outside the church
The reception guests
summer evenings
Driving back from the Stafford College 2011 fashion show on Thursday night and stopped off at this field on the way back. The light was fading quickly so we spent less than 3 minutes there! Just time to take a quick couple pics as the field is quite nice and I didnt want another year to go pass without any shots in a poppy field.
Just an old pic edited
Having a bit of a good time looking back through recent shoots and picking out pictures that I like that didn’t make the cut to send to the client for one reason or the other (mainly that they don’t show the garment off well). I zoomed in and changed to a landscape format during this shoot for just one frame so I had a portrait to give to the models parent. I think I like it.
Toni & Guy
Heres another sneak preview of the shoot from the other week at Toni & Guy. This is the same model as in the other image further down my blog. All credit goes to the other people involved, my job was easy compared! The difference between the different looks is brilliant.
Heres some links to the twitter feed of the people involved, get following! Concept and creation by Hannah, hair by Stacy and make up by Jules.
Adorabelle womenswear
Yesterday I shot three womenswear dresses on location at the river Severn in Shrewsbury. Whilst I had kind of planned for the models to be spread out throughout the day inevitably there was some overlapping which worked out for the best. I have only edited a handful of pics so far but they all fit well with the brief that was requested for the shoot. Heres a few:
Adorabelle
Between yesterday and today I have had three shoots for Adorabelle, a new label from the midlands. All the children were perfect and made it so easy I was done in just a few minutes…..whoever said never work with children obviously haven’t had the luck that I have had lately! These are just a few quick edits as I only just got back a couple of hours ago. Shot in Shrewsbury and Stafford we were lucky with the weather as these are summer clothes and the rain kept off this afternoon whilst we were out. I have four models wearing the womenswear throughout the day tomorrow so I’m looking forward to being able to direct the models a bit more than you can do with children, I think if you give them too much direction they lose the carefree feeling that the pictures should catch.
Toni & Guy
Here is a sneaky preview of a semi edited shot for our entry into the Toni & Guy lookbook competition 2011. Looking forward to the next one already, learnt a lot on this first shoot as it was very challlenging for me to light the scene as I wanted to so I had to improvise and adapt to the really thin room. I normally like one of my lights to be out to the side by about 6foot but it just wasn’t possible.
Busy!!
I am officially too busy…and so I am blogging :-/ nothing quite like procrastinating.
Sunday I was shooting at Toni & Guy in Shrewsbury for the Toni & Guy lookbook competition and the day before that I was shooting at a friends sons christening. An exam today followed by a 3 presentations and a hand in this week….I can’t see me sleeping too much anytime soon!
Yesterday I used my new backdrops for the first time and was pleasantly surprised with how the images turned out, I had had a quick go with them out in the garden a few days before just to check the backdrops fitted the stands etc. They are 20foot by 10foot so cloth was my only option as I wanted them to be transportable in my little car. Being quite big means I can put more distance between the model and the backdrop thus making it easier to make black backgrounds stay black and to decrease any wrinkles in the backdrop with a large aperture. Not ideal perhaps, but handy if in a rush and all in a package that can be thrown into a rucksack.
I cannot show any of the T&G images yet as we don’t know which ones are being entered yet 
Heres one of the team on the day.
Damselfly
I did a shoot a little while back for Damselfly and have had to wait until the collection was released to show the pictures. The location was in the dairy at Berrington hall, South Shropshire. We arrived early to the dairy so that the heaters could be put on to keep the models warm in the light spring collection. It was hard work shooting in such a confined space as the dairy and required a focal length of around 20-50mm for most shots. I have worked with the models Annie and Grace before and they are impeccably behaved and easy to work with, most adult models cooperate a lot less!!
Here is another screen grab of the website:
Make sure you check it out damselflyboutique.co.uk
Ilya Fisher
Ilya Fisher now has a new website -www.IlyaFisher.com the images are from the shoot I did last month. The shoot was fun, if not hard going seeing as I had dislocated my shoulder less than 48hours previously. The shoot only took a couple of hours as we were in one room and shooting with my studio lights which recycle nice and quickly especially when they are only on low power. Most shots were lit from the large windows on one side of the room and then a softbox on low power pointing at the model from as far away as possible with another light on a higher power through an umbrella and then bounced off the ceiling or opposite wall to broaden the light as much as I could in the room.
Model: Rose Green
Stylist/Director: Elena Garcia
Here is a screen grab of the website
Security troubles…
Todays shoot started off badly when we didn’t manage to make it into the first location which was a semi derelict quarry. We had parked the cars and walked about 50yards when we got collared by security. When I say security I mean a couple of men who looked like they were out of the film the hills have eyes! We were told we had two minutes until we would be locked in so we had to make a quick getaway in the cars, this meant we had to go to our backup location only a few miles away. No security as usual here so I spent a couple of hours exploring and taking pictures for Prototype magazine. The weather was good and after the bad start things turned good. Here are a few unedited outtakes from the day, to see the best ones you’ll need to see the magazine when its out, links will be up here when it its live so check back!
Mothers day
Well I spent yesterday taking photos for Faith Tilleray and then today is mothers day and tomorrow and tuesday are deadline days at uni so I havent had any time for portraits
And as much as I hate pictures of flowers this one does capture perfectly how the weather was this morning as I walked down to the Rocke Cottage Tearoom in the morning sun inbetween heavy showers. I like the lens flare from the old Super Takumar 50mm. This was shot at f2.8.
Back to uni work for me..
Stupid game….
My relatively injury free Rugby season was ended on Saturday with a dislocated shoulder and a night in A&E on morphine and gas and air. Shoulders back in place and so Sunday morning I headed off to London to meet with Ilya Fisher before shooting her new work the following day. Turns out carrying a full lighting kit, camera and lenses on trains with my shoulder was not my best idea! But it all worked out well in the end and I had a good couple of days in the capital including a few hours grabbing candids at Highbury on Sunday for the Scotland Vs. Brazil football match as well as Monday around Trafalgar Square.
The model for Ilya was Rose Green, couldn’t have asked for better. It’s not very often that you never hear one complaint or request from a model but this was definitely the case on Monday morning. The pictures aren’t from the shoot it’s just a quick snap I grabbed for here after the shoot before Rose left.
Oh yeah, heres my arm, before and after 
Can’t complain
I had my interview to get on to the design and technology PGCE course at Staffordshire University on Tuesday so all my time lately has been spent reading up on educational issues and such like. But, I got a conditional offer so all is very good in the world as I don’t really know what else to do!
Anyway, back to the pictures. These were taken 9days ago at the train graveyard. Whilst none of these images are in my favourite list it was a good day and Chloe Nicole is good in front of the camera! I look forward to some fashion/editorial shots in the future with her.
Films are to be developed soon, got a vintage film in the Pentx Spotmatic and some beautiful beautiful beautiful Kodak Ektar 100 in the Mamiya.
I’v got a busy time ahead with 3 weeks of placement to do in a school, a 2 week subject enhancement course and to finish my degree by September. Not to mention a product shoot in Shropshire, a childrenswear shoot down in London and shooting a Dyno day for charity in Birmingham!! Never mind rugby three times a week, can’t complain though, it’s best to be busy!!
Chloe Nicole
Another trip back to the train graveyard but this time with Chloe who I found on Purestorm.
We only spent a couple of hours nosing around, it wasn’t very warm at all and I’m really really starting to *hate* digital, I did manage to take a couple of images on my Mamiya and a couple on my Pentax Spotmatic but that has an experimental film in it so I’m not counting those until I see it (approx 1970s film). I’ve got to edit the images I took yet as some will need some work as the light and conditions are hard to work with down there. Not my usual style to do anything more than tweak the white balance slightly, sharpen, curves and maybe a vignette if it needs it. This image has had these four things done to it and so it can be uploaded! Just a quick picture so you can see who I was shooting today, was a good day, even if I decided to get glass stuck in my hand from a smashed window as I was hanging out of a window about 8foot up over the tracks lol. Places like this are so strange, I find it weird that in this day and age a use cannot be found for items and buildings that are just left to rot. ..
Urbex time
I managed to sneak a few hours to head off with a friend to a train graveyard and to a semi derelict quarry. Needless to say it was a good afternoon spent looking over my shoulder waiting for security to collar us but we didn’t see any sign of them!!
Didnt get many shots due to it raining and me feeling particularly uninspired with digital but here are a couple so you can see where we were, can’t wait to get back there with a model, it should produce some amazing shots. I’v got a couple from the quarry on medium format, I just need to scan them in but I’v been busy editing images from the childrenswear shoot.
Paris
I’v been in Paris for the past week and took my Mamiya and D300 with me, it will be a few days until the films from the Mamiya are developed but I have managed to edit a few of the 750 pictures I took on the D300! Time to catch up on uni work now that I’m back so I think that it will take me a couple of weeks to edit the ones I want to
I mainly shot candids whilst I was there as I really enjoy this, and you do get some funny looks when people realise they are the subject of your photo, not the tourist attraction behind them!! The girl in the blue coat is a prime example, sitting on a bench at the Arc de Triomphe with hundreds of cameras around taking photos. I wonder if anyone else took her photo like I did though.
Here are the first few anyway
All about the light
Its true what they say, it is all about the light. Driving back from uni and the light turned really nice, burning all the fog away instantly so we pulled into Copmere End and took a few quick snaps. I only had my old Takumar 50mm f1.4 on my D300 so I was constrained slightly by the fixed focal length but the 50+year old lens flares madly (which I consider a good thing) when shooting into the sun. Below are a few technical outtakes but I kinda like them and they will serve as ideas to work on.
On a personal note I got accepted onto the Student Associate Scheme today so thats a nice £600 for 15days work in a school in the summer. More importantly it will also look very good on my PGCE application.
