Flash Photography Workshops in London & Glasgow

There's a couple of workshops coming up that I thought i'd tell you about.

I'll be in London and Glasgow as part of the brilliant Photography Farm Elements. I'll be teaching both of them with Lisa Devlin. 

The first one is the normal Photography Farm Elements in London on 17th & 18th September, where i'll be training people all about on and off camera flash and giving people the essential skills that they need to know in order to master their flash and take the fear out of using a flash gun.

The second workshop is the Advanced Elements workshop in Glasgow on 7th & 8th October. This is geared towards people who have already done the standard workshop and want to take their flash photography to the next level. We'll be looking at getting really professional results with the most basic of kits. So if you've got the foundations and want to become a lighting Jedi this is the workshop for you.

If you're interested in any of these workshops, please do give me a shout here.

Why every photographer should update their website.

So the astute amongst you may have noticed that there has been a slight change with my website.

Those of you new to the site....well where have you been?

Photographer's websites are a funny thing. They are basically your shop window. But being photographers we're not usually that good with words, like. So it's all about the images.

It's been a couple of years since I last updated my website.

The history of my website goes a bit like this:

2008 - use an off the shelf photography website template from a company advertised in the back of a photography magazine

2010 - rebuild website using Wordpress as the back end, keeping the same design 

2012 - rebuild website with Wordpress but updating a few things like the homepage and some functionality

2014 - build new site from scratch as technology and the way we use website has changed so much

It's been a really interesting process starting again. (If i'm honest it's been on my list of things to do for a good six months.) Throughout all of the website, i've kept the same clean white background and menu on the left hand side, so it is an evolution, but this site feels like a revolution.

Looking at my stats it seems that around 40% of people are looking at the site on mobile devices. And while the old site worked well on the web, it didn't for mobile. So that needed to change. I also wanted people to get a good overview of all the images. The old site had small thumbnails and cropped them to squares. I wanted the new site to display images in the way that Pinterest does, as lets face it, people are lazy and have shot attention spans. So the chances of them clicking though all the images were small. So this way with a quick scroll, you can see all the images. The site  also had to be responsive to the screen they were viewing it on, I use a 27" iMac and the old site looked tiny on that. The images were also small and it didn't do them justice. While I know that not everyone will be using a massive screen, I did want the images to fill what ever size screen they were using. Now it does.

So I do hope you like the new site....i'm really pleased with it and just to show you how much it's been updated here are a couple of screen grabs of the old site:

---

Company profile head shots

So I photograph a lot of corporate portraits / company profile / business head shots but I never really follow up and see how they look on the companies website about me pages.

Well I got shown this page at another shoot in London for the business and I'm really proud to see how they all fit together. I normally work on each individual image and see them as one, but not really as a whole. So it's really refreshing to see them together and that they work so well as a whole.

So if you're looking to improve the image of your business and get a more professional about us page, please do get in contact as i'd love to talk to you about what we can do together.

Dick Knight - Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club Chairman

 

So I took this portrait of the fascinating Dick Knight a while ago.

For those of you who don't know, amongst other things, Dick was responsible for saving Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club. His detemination and drive to get the Amex Stadium built should really be admired. I first met Dick over 10 years ago, when the stadium was just some plans on paper and an idea, and i'm very please do see it a thriving reality.

So for  this shot, i've lit him with the blue and white colours of The Albion and I got Dick to stare at an old picture of his parents and think about how they would feel in regards to all he has accomplished. I love that look in his eyes.

Cabaret Practitioner Coco Deville

I remember being struck by how beautiful and stunning Coco Deville's face was when I first met her in the Hotel Du Vin bar in Brighton.

I normally like to shoot people full length and vary rarely do a close up head shot unless they have a really interesting face. Well there was no debate in the matter, this portrait called for a close up. So I looked around the hotel bar and spotted a plain black curtain that I thought would make a great back drop. When i'm doing these editorial portraits I like to work quickly and with minimal fuss with my lighting. So i'll only use one light, or occasionally two flashes off camera. This portrait called for a very simple set up and I knew that I wanted to make it quite a dark image with a bit of shadow. So, for the technical people reading this, I zoomed my flash head in, so that it created more of a concentrated hot spot of light, rather than a broader more spread out light. And bounced it of the low ceiling a few feet above Coco's head.

There is something that I find just so mesmerising about Coco's eyes in this shot. I'm not sure what it is....but she surely has 'it'.

Brighton Film festival Director Tim Brown

Tim Brown runs Cinicity, Brighton's film festival which runs as a partnership with Brighton University and The Duke of Yorks cinema,

What I like about this portrait is the fact that it is so simple.

I shot it at the Duke of Yorks new cinema at the Komedia in the north lanes in Brighton...I say new, its new to me, but has probably been open for ages. Anyway, back to the portrait. My initial idea was to do a full length shot of Tim in front of the red curtain and black and white checked flooring there as that reminded me of Twin Peaks. However as usual it always takes a short time to 'work a portrait'. I never think that your initial idea is the best. It's a great starting point, but it always takes a little while of shooting someone to work out what is their best angle, how much of them to have in the portrait, where to position them in the frame, what to include or not in the background etc. In this case, less was more and all it needed was the sign pointing to the screens and slightly more than a head and shoulders shot of Tim. I love the face that Tim is facing away from the arrow as it just adds that bit of intrigue for me.

Have a SUPER Christmas!

 

So it's the most wonderful time of the year and I wanted to take the opportunity to thank everyone that I've photographed this year, all the clients that I've worked for, everyone that's done one of my workshops all over the country and anyone that i've met in my capacity as a photographer.

This year has been a whirlwind of a year, I've taken portraits of Olympic Gold Medalists, Chairmen of football clubs, solicitors, accountants, media types, transvestites, business people I really admire, burlesque performers and so many more that don't come to mind at the moment. I've been to Bath, Belfast, Glasgow, Cornwall, Manchester, London, Brighton and my kitchen to teach people about photography. I've seen my books in bookshops in several different countries and in the National Portrait Gallery as well. Oh and 11 girls on a hen do have all given me a mooney. I've shot weddings all over the UK and met some amazing people doing so. I've hung out of helicopters to get shots. I've almost been burnt by a science experiment involving fire. I've had an image included in the Magnum Photo Agency archive. Been published in the Times and had tea with a Baroness at the House of Lords all in the name of photography.

Thank you so much 2013, it's been a blast.....bring on 2014.

The photo above is my families Christmas card for this year. We always have a bit of fun and do a Christmas photo and now that we've got seven years worth, it's starting to make quite a collection, so I thought i'd share them with you.

Have a SUPER Christmas everyone and wishing you all the best for 2014.