Update | 28th February 2011

1. Wedding Portfolio

As well as using this blog as a way to convey my photography be it personal or professional, I would also like to start using it to share what it is that I am currently up to. At the moment I have a few things to report on. Firstly I have been working some time at producing my first wedding portfolio, something which is long overdue and that I have needed to do for some time. I have collected what I believe to be my best wedding photographs and I am narrowing them down. Hoping to show the best of the best of my wedding photographs. But as you can imagine it is a slow process as there are quite a few to go through. Below I have placed a few photographs as examples of what I may put into my wedding portfolio.

2. Shooting A Wedding

To help with my general indecisiveness I am going to be getting help choosing which are the best from a talk I am attending at Zoom In. Zoom In is a popular photography charity based in Oval in London. Zoom In is an organisation that I plan to be volunteering at in the future. As well as talks Zoom In offer darkroom and studio rental as well as a whole host of other services. If you would like to see what it is they do and more of the services that they offer feel free to click the link below that will take you to their website or if you follow the alternate link you can ‘like’ them on Facebook.

Zoom In’s Website
Zoom In’s Facebook Page

The talk is 1^st of April this year and it to be hosted be Leighann Lacey. The talk is entitled ‘Shooting a wedding?’ It that will cover the basics of wedding photography and it will also cover marketing which is the part of wedding photography that I need to brush up on.

As far as I am aware there are still spaces on the talk available if it sounds like something that would interest you. It costs only £7 and all the relevant information on the talk and also contact details to book can be found on the Facebook event page which I shall link to below.

Shooting A Wedding Information

I will be taking examples of the photographs that I want to include in my wedding portfolio to the talk and hopefully getting some feedback and constructive criticism on the photographs.

Also if you would like to check out some of Leighann’s photography below is a link to her site.

3. Video

I am thinking of introducing [in the next few months] a new side to this blog and I intend on doing that by way of video portions to the posts. This will initially present itself in two ways. The first will be that of video counterparts to the mainly text posts that I place on the blog. the meaning of these would be to show equipment, techniques and locations used during shoots. These can be added to the first part of the post as an introduction to the shoot and also covering some of the aspects that will be covered in the text.

The second way that I will introduce video to this blog will be by creating instructional videos where I can. I am not professing to be an expert in all things photography but feel that there would be certain things that I could show or i anyone has any ideas feel free to get in touch.

Doing this will be good for helping me to strengthen my video and editing skills. The videos themselves will be added to my Vimeo and Youtube accounts and then simply embedded onto the post. Below I have included a link to my Vimeo account if you wish to check some of the videos out. The videos aren’t at all exciting as like I said before I am using this exercise to improve my skills in this area also as I did not have the capability to edit any of the videos they are all straight from camera.

My Personal Vimeo Account

4. Focus On Imaging

And for my fourth and final update today I got my tickets through recently for the Focus On Imaging convention at the National Exhibition Centre [NEC] in Birmingham. The convention runs from Sunday the 6th of March to Wednesday the 9th March and it comes to pass once a year and is Europe’s biggest annual imaging show.

Focus On Imaging covers pretty much every step of the photographic process, with stands showing the latest in camera technology and output software. As well as manuactures, there will be talks, demonstrations and workshops. I amvery excited to be going along this year.

If you would like more information or you would like to gather more information for yourself feel free to click the link below.

Focus On Imaging Website

I hope that you have enjoyed this update. If you wish to contact me feel free to go to the contact page for details of my e-mail address and my Twitter account.

General Photography | A Walk With Tom Giddings

I have often been very critical of my photography, which is a good thing I guess because it means that I am always trying to improve upon and out-do my previous work. As well as my photography I am generally critical of my writing which explains the large amount time that elapsed in between the two previous posts.

It had come to my attention that the vast majority of posts in this blog are digital based. And most of those are taken with my DSLR. This doesn’t actually reflect my practice as I have always enjoyed film photography more than digital. So when the opportunity to go out photographing with my good friend Tom Giddings I jumped at the chance.

Tom is a freelance web designer who has been helping me with starting up my website. If you would like to see examples of his work feel free to click the link below.

Tom Giddings

Tom and I spent the whole day walking around various parts of London intermittently taking the tube and buses when the distance was too great to walk. I used two complete films during our entire day and coming back to the point that I made at the start of this post I must say that I found myself only liking two of the seventy-two photographs I took that day.

On that day I had two cameras with me, my Olympus OM-10 and my Lomography Fisheye 2 camera, the latter of which has been featured quite a bit on this blog. I have work on this blog from both cameras which I have included links below. This first link has photographs taken with the Olympus and the following two links are from the Fisheye.

Music Photography | Jason Olveira
Date Posted: Saturday 30^th January 2010

General Photography | Lomo Fisheye 2
Date Posted: Monday 16^th August 2010

Wedding Photography | Rick And Joanne Squires
Date Posted: Tuesday 8^th February 2011

And although the Lomo Fisheye 2 is one of my favourite cameras I have to say that I did not like any of the photographs that I produced with it on this day. This means that all the shots featured on this post are from the Olympus OM10.

Although there were only two photographs that I would say I was happy with I am going to put a few more photographs up in this post as I don’t want to only display a singular photograph in a post on this blog. This brings the total of shots in this post to seven photographs. The last two photographs in this post are the ones that I am fully satisfied with.

The first four photographs in this post were taken in and around the underground the first of which includes a reflected portrait of Tom Giddings.

The next three shots were taken above ground with two of them taken around Liverpool Street station.

The final two shots are the ones from the day that I am happy with. The first was taken walking towards Brick Lane whilst the second was taken at Borough Market.

Wedding Photography | Rick and Joanne Squires

This blog entry is long overdue and not through lack of trying or holiday laziness but mainly due to the fact that I’ve never been happy with the previous drafts that I have previously produced. Expect to see more posts on this blog and a higher quality of writing that I shall try and deliver in future.

The first blog post of 2011 will cover the photography that I produced at the wedding of Rick and Joanna Squires. This was the last wedding of 2010 that I photographed and I found it very enjoyable as I do with most weddings. Although, this particular wedding was different as I personally knew the majority of the wedding party as well the bride and groom.

I have found recently that the majority of my paid work does come from weddings and I am happy about this. I enjoy all of it. Meeting up with the couple, location scouting [this is important so that you are prepared for where you will be photographing the group shots] and the all-round preparation make weddings enjoyable to photograph.  As always I met up with the bride and groom to discuss what photographs they wanted in terms of group shots and whether they had any special requests. Which they did, they requested that as well as using my standard wedding camera kit which consists of my Canon EOS 50D digital SLR using a combination of the Canon 28mm f1.8 lens, a Canon 50mm f1.8 lens, a Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 lens and my Canon external flash. They also requested that I take a few photographs after the reception using my Lomography Fisheye2 camera.

If you are a reader of this blog you may have seen my post on the Lomography Fisheye2 camera that I wrote some time ago. The post mainly consists of general shots taken whilst out with the camera and I have placed a link below.

General Photography |Lomo Fisheye 2
Date Posted: Monday 16^th August 2010

The Lomo Fisheye 2 is very versatile for a toy camera and the hotshoe atop of it allows me to use my Canon Speedlite 430EX [which I had taken along with me as part of my standard kit for a wedding]. The Lomo 2 also has the ability to take bulb exposures and whilst in this setting the flash goes off when you let go of the shutter as opposed to when you first press it down. This allows for some great low-light flash photography from this camera.

This wedding was a lot more fun and informal than weddings that I have photographed previously and this was why it was easy to experiment with the Fisheye camera later in the night without seeming intrusive to the guests.

As I have done with previous weddings, with this post you will see quite a few diptychs and triptychs as I find this the most effective way of telling a story through photos and also a really convenient way to get more photographs in.

The wedding took place at the Clarendon Hotel in Blackheath and I took the group photographs on the heath itself. There are 17 photographs in this post including one of my favourite wedding photographs so far. This photograph consists of the lovely couple and a 53 bus. The Fisheye shots are quite distictive and are the last two hots on this post.

Please enjoy the photographs, if you have any questions feel free to get in contact via Twitter or the Contact page. Or feel free to leave a comment page on this blog post. Thanks.