Talland Bay, Cornwall Weekend 15th October 2011

When I started this blog my intention was to use it to document all of my photoshoots, but I have decided to include other activities where I have my camera with me and am able to take photographs and I think the tales will interest my readers.

We have some friends living in Dorset and as they had just moved house we decided to have a long weekend with them. One night staying at their new house and then driving down to Cornwall to stay a few nights in Talland Bay.

When we go away I don’t tend to take all my photographic kit as I never have time to wander on my own and find locations for doing landscape photography. I enjoy Landscape photography a lot, but like to have time to just explore and find locations and the right light, before setting up the camera on a tripod. I find this most relaxing and will as winter comes upon us go out and do a few shoots in my local location. So I just took my Canon G9 which is a great very portable camera, which allows me to shoot in RAW format.

We stayed in the Talland Bay Hotel which was an amazing hotel, with amazing views out over the sea. Also the people that own the hotel are massive collectors and have their collections all around the hotel, which consists of everything from stuffed, china & paintings of cats, at the same time having this great collection of erotic art on the walls around the hotel. We had a great time just wandering the corridors of the hotel looking at all the paintings and strange ornaments dotted around. In the grounds you find brass sculptors of fairies hanging in the tree’s and even a sculptor of a tramp asleep under a tree.

I have included an image, not very good I must say of a painting and I wonder if any one has any idea of the artist’s name? As the owners where away when we stayed at the hotel and none of the staff there could tell me.

I grew up in Devon and spent a lot of time touring Cornwall on Motorbikes and it’s an area I love, so it was a joy for me to visit places with lots of childhood and teenage memories. We had a trip wandering around Looe where I spent many Sunny days as a child as my parents took us to the beach there more times than I can remember.

We also walked along the coastal route from Talland Bay to Polperro, which is a lovely fishing village, and spent a lot of time wandering around the art shops and even bought a painting by a local artist, that will soon be on display in our home, once we have found the right frame for it.

All in all it was a great weekend away with great weather for October and made me want to spend much more time in Cornwall, maybe next time with the whole idea of exploring and taking Landscape Photographs. Below is a photograph of Polperro Harbour I took as we walked down the coastal path to it.

Photoshoot with Cheryl 12th October 2011

Cheryl and I have been discussing doing a shoot together for what must be two years, but with so much distance between us it has been difficult to arrange. We finally managed it though and here are the results.

Cheryl had booked herself into a local hotel and so we decided to use the hotel room to start with and then move onto do some shots in a local wood.

This was the first time I had done a shoot in a hotel room, but I used my normal technique of under exposing the background and using one strobe as fill in light. While shooting I noticed that the wall lights and experimented with them on behind Cheryl’s head which gave of a sort of halo effect. Don’t think Cheryl is an angel thoughJ. I tried various shots using these lights with various different poses and below is a few of the resulting images.

We then went off to the woods with no plan in place for what we were going to do. I had previously noticed while looking at Cheryl’s portfolio that she had very few art nude shots. So we discussed and agreed to try some utilising the trees as a backdrop. Again underexposing the background slightly so as not to burn out the detail in the images created by the Sun coming through the branches.

I really must shoot more images like this in woods as it throws up so many possibilities.

Photoshoot with Juliet & Nick 8th October 2011

I did a shoot with Juliet & Nick April this year and can't believe it has taken us so long to arrange another shoot, but we finally managed it.

All the ideas for this shoot came from Juliet & Nick and it was down to me to capture their ideas. The whole theme was around Beauty and the Beast, with Juliet doing all the makeup on Nick and I have to say she did an amazing job.

We wanted the images to have a background of dereliction so used one of my heavily frequented locations and I am very pleased with how it all worked out.

All the images are captured with my normal set-up on location of using natural light and one strobe for fill in.

I was very pleased with the final results and was it very interesting taking someone else’s ideas and trying to capture it in a way that they would be happy with. Most of my shoots start off with an idea or theme I have and then just develop as the shoot progress's rather than having very specific images in mind before the start of the shoot and almost shooting to a menu.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the images and thanks again to Juliet & Nick for their amazing efforts on this shoot.

Photoshoot with Leanne 3rd October 2011

I had an email from a young lady who was looking to try modelling after having a couple of kids and was very body conscious due to this. Funny as request was through Purestorm where I have had very few requests from in the past.

We did the shoot in the evening so used the my home studio and I have to say for her first time Leanne did brilliant and got even better as the shoot progressed and her confidence increased. I hope the shoot helped her feel better about herself anyway.

I found myself while editing the images getting carried and playing with adding different backgrounds into one of the images so rather than spending my normal 10 minutes editing each image I spent 3 hours and even then I am not sure it completely works. So I thought I would let you all be the judge by showing the edited image without background and the one with.



Anyway I hope to work with Leanne again in the near future as I really enjoy working with models that are just starting out and helping them learn as well as gain the confidence that’s required to really make something of modelling.