RB And The Dress!

Ellie’s wedding day was the 7^th of July 2011. 2 days later we drove to the stables in the wedding graffitied car, where she once again donned the wedding dress and collected her Horse.

Royal Blue is an Irish Draught, gorgeous dapple Grey colours, and Ellie wanted to do a photo shoot of her in her dress with him. I was privileged to do this, and we had fun at the same time, I guess I was more relaxed about these as it was a laid back situation, no time limit, unless RB said so!

We went into one of the horses fields, and had RB being held by Ellie. Trying to get good shots of animals is difficult and needs patience, and when I did get a good one of RB, Ellie was talking or facing the wrong direction, but after a while we got it, and tried doing some photographs without the harness on RB so he looked more natural and at home. We got some nice shots of him walking by her side, but in all honesty, I think he was only interested in the food we were rattling to keep him happy!

My favourite set of shots was when Ellie sat on the ground, set her dress out, and we convinced RB to stay around by using feed and letting him eat it of the dress. This worked, even though at one point RB started to eat the actual dress, despite this, the dress remained intact and we got some photos of the occasion I was happy with, and most importantly, Ellie was happy with.

I only used Monochrome for these photos, feeling it would give the images a more personalized and timeless feel about them. I did once again, have problems with lighting… it seems to be my downfall! Some images turned out too dark, and once again had to be Photoshopped brighter. This led to the photos having noise, and I had to work on a fine surface blur in order to cover up the noise without softening the focal foreground.

I’ve yet to print the photos, choosing to concentrate on Uni work first. But these images will be printed and sent on!

Ellie And Howard Reads wedding day!!

I was so nervous. I really wanted to get some really good photos for the married couple, and didn’t put the camera down all day and all night. I took 1685 images. Sorting through them was very time consuming, and considering many of the photos turned out dark, needing a tad of Photoshop to brighten them up!

The day started the night before. Bride, Bridesmaids, mother and I had manicures and pedicures, drank champagne until late night and prepared ourselves for the next day.

Ellie was awake before the rest of us, and by the time we got downstairs she was already having her hair curled and prepared by her Aunty. I tried getting a couple of these shots but the lighting inside was difficult, so I decided to leave it until we arrived at The Matara.

Things started kicking off when we got there. The Bridesmaids got dressed and had their hair done, The bride got ready last, the flower girl came to join us, and so did the official photographer for the day. We managed to get the dress and take it to a room in the housing area. Hung the dress up on the four-poster bed and started taking what was an attempt at an iconic photograph for the occasion.

The ceremony came and went, and we all got put into the hall for lunch. Bangers and Mash! We ate while listening to saxophone, and being entertained by the same guy.

Time for the speeches, and I was lucky to be seated right in front of the main table, giving me an uninterrupted view of the Bride and Groom and the family. Unfortunately, my social anxiety got the better of me on this occasion, and I found myself unable to move from my seat in order to get different angles. I settled my nerves by remembering I wasn’t priority photographer, and that she most probably had the shot already.

The evening was difficult as everybody was on the dance floor, and nothing is really distinguishable! Yet you still get the essence of the day.

I hope Ellie and Howard will like the photos. I will be the first to admit I feel I failed in getting some iconic good ones that they would’ve liked as their professional, so for me it concludes that I’m not ready to start doing wedding photography professionally yet, until I have more of the right experience and kit with me. This is not my best work by far, but it’s defiantly a start!

tango's growing

Due to unfortunate events, I've got to admit I've been neglecting tango quite abit! So he's been getting to come out of his viv alot more and gets free roam of the bedroom! He likes coming out when we've got people around, only as long as they're okay with him and don't get too excited!


He's enjoying his food, it seemed like we were over feeding him a little to compensate for the lack of handling, so he's been on a mini diet... this seemed to encourage 'hunt mode'!!


He's over 3 foot long now, so different to the tiny worm we got over a year ago!! Must say I do enjoy taking photogarphs of him, however, it's tricky in low lighting situations, and he's never keen on staying still for more than an 8th of a second!


Good Tango! :)

off to southwold again

One of our trips to Southwold, and after a long break I started to pick up the camera again. Just using standard Canon 50ml lense!



The beach huts are renowned in Southwold, one of the better views of the North sea!



Just a couple of days away from home made us feel alot better and helped get me back on track with my work... resulting in hand and camera surgically attatched!

bugging the drift slag!

Well, RIP golf, we'll miss you, but you've gone to a better home... Welcome, Skippy the Bush Bug!! what a classic, '69 WV beetle imported from Australia, shes awesome!! Needless to say getting her in such good condition was an absolute mission! we've been looking for a car for about a month, Tom had his heart set on a Beetle, so ebaying it up, we went to look at a couple, There was a black one in Manchester that, by the photos, looked in good condition, the description was good also, so we went to have a look one evening... They guy was abit of a knob really, said the car was running not long ago and the car had been moved... so what was with the 2 inch thick layer of moss underneath and gaping big hole in the floor on the passenger side... yeah, so that didn't happen, after a while we were starting to loose hope. Then Skippy came along on ebay, the guy was looking for about a grand for her, which was our budget.. lovely... so, we phoned him up and asked, if we drove from Wrexham to London to look at the car would he accept £1000 there and then? he said yes. So me, Tom and Paul drove to Swindon,(to drop off the car we were borrowing) where Toms dad drove us to London, we got there, brand new 1300 engine, really good nick, hardly any rust, (just the right amount though to make the car look nice and rustic.. old school!!) the bottom was fine, and the car ran... but this geezer decided he wasn't going to take the £1000 for it and wait for ebay to finish... needless to say we weren't happy, so we drove back to Swindon to think about what to do... Then, said geezer decided to let us have it for £1600, so off we go again, arrive in London at 11pm and pick the car up, only to drive it back to Wrexham at a maximum of 50mph all the way!! No problems with her at all, and touch wood, she hasn't let us down yet!! What an awesome car! We got back at 5am.

And introducing Pauls car, Drifto Slago... she lives up to her name, that car goes sideways... really sideways... alot!! We done a photo shoot at night just for the fun of it, with some lighting techniques, inspired by the guys... this is what we came up with! The only problems was finding somewhere with no light whatsoever in order to make more of an impact, and a little help from Photoshop...!

For this shoot I used standard Tripod, Standard lens and Canon digital SLR 1000D, 2 torches and 2 people running around like fools!

These 1st photos were done in the cash and carry car park, very limited lighting and out the way of roads, we just finished doing these, then lights came on and we had to move to another location.

Here are the ones we did at the side of the road. It was completely dark, yet sometimes a little bit of light did manage to get through, we also had the problem of passing cars, but these were few and far between leaving us able to work efficiently. The camera was left on long exposure for a maximum of 5 seconds, and a minimum of 1.5 seconds, varying between the 2 for each image.

The above was a failed attempt where Tom got too close to the car in the 1st 2 seconds of the open shutter!

These are the better photos I took with a portrait view, and decided to concentrate more on blacking out the backgrounds via Photoshop!

Final Drifto Slago;

and final Skippy;

With the torches we were trying very hard to get the line of the vehicles as they're very distinctive... we ended up with some very interesting shapes, I'm very happy with the end results!!

Ten Of The Best

This was a car show that Tom got asked to go cover... We traveled to york with a couple of mates. I was asked to come with so I could take some photos of cars for Polybush, I got told if I made an impact there could be a possibility of me getting commissioned work in the future, so i jumped at the chance. We went early in the morning on the Saturday, it took a good couple of hours to get there, and when we did we were slightly dissapointed, we thought it would be alot busier, turns out that the main day to go on was the Sunday, nobody told us, so we had to make do with what was there!! Still, it was pretty impressive and we had a great day out! As soon as we got back home I was on Photoshop editing the images and lifting the contrast, (on some photos maybe too much) and sent them off straight away to Hayley at Polybush. Here's some that I came out with...

The main events happening was the drag strip, a quarter mile, where people were trying their cars out on their own for the next day, or just racing with other cars that where there.

Heres a few I took from just walking around the event,







With the colour image I tried out some photoshopping, and got rid of everything distracting in the background, the blue tent is missing and a slight disturbance on the left hand side f the picture aswell, both of which you can see in the black and white picture of the same car taken at the same time! I'm currently looking at Photoshop tutorials in order to improve my editing skills!

Then there was the handling course. This was going to be tricky for the drivers as it had been raining for half an hour previous to them opening up the course.. The main car that had an impact on this run was the RX7, a rear wheel drive car which drifts nicely on wet tarmac. For these shots I used my 300mm Sigma lens, and I was stood in the stands 50 yards away from the front line.





So there's a narrowed down selection of photos sent to Polybush, I've been having ideas of contacting the event organisers and seeing of they want to use any for future promotions. We'll see!!