Tag: Portrait photography

New Direction – Portrait Photography

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Up until recently, I’ve always concentrated on nature photography, with a mixture of wildlife and landscape. I’ve photographed in a variety of places, including the local area in Somerset and my native Devon, as well as my spiritual home of the Scottish Highlands and the Lake District while in transit to Scotland. While I’ve done a little carnival and event photography and some architectural photography, that’s pretty much been it.

Recently though, I’ve been stuck in a bit of a rut. Some of that is down to the pressures of work, leading me to feel too tired to do anything other than recover and recharge my batteries at the weekends. The trip to Finland would have been my only shoot this year, apart from odd things here and there, if it wasn’t for a couple of events organised by Sydenham Camera Club.

Now, I’ve never really been interested in portraits, beyond photographing family special occasions. However, the camera club have organised some interesting photo shoots. The first was back in July, when a shoot was organised on a farm in the Quantocks, owned by one of the members. Not only was I able to photograph some horses, but we also shot with four different models, Cerris, Leigh, Roxy and Sophie. Lighting was difficult, as it was one of the hottest days of the year, but we were able to find some shade and some filtered light, allowing my creative juices to start flowing.

Next up was a very ambitious project at Hestercombe Gardens, just outside Cheddon Fitzpaine, near Taunton in Somerset. This was an evening shoot involving 18 photographers, 8 models (Hannah, Leigh, Sophie, Roxy, Emma, Portly, Zoe and Maxine), plus make-up artist and hairdresser (who also modelled later), with an extra helper, in 7 separate locations. This allowed me to use flash, something I tend to avoid, but also one shoot allowed me to shoot with a model on my own, in perfect warm, late evening lighting, the sort of light I like. This really allowed me to be creative, with my penchant for narrow depth of field, as well as some contre-jour shots. Make up was by Indie, from Vanilla Skin.

All in all, they were both successful shoots and I particularly enjoyed the shoot with Hannah. I think the combination of Hannah’s natural poise, the lighting, the lack of flash and being able to shoot alone, really opened up my mind to some creative shots.

Glastonbury Carnival 2011 Photos

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It took some time, but I’ve finally finished processing the photos from Glastonbury Chilkwell Guy Fawkes Carnival from Saturday. The weather was fine all day, in fact it was probably one of the nicest days of November so far. This meant perfect conditions for the carnival. A cold wind did pick up for a while before the start, but it soon died down again.

While there were a lot of shots I wasn’t happy with (there always is), thanks to two participants, I was able to get some of my best ever carnival photographs. The first performer from Vagaonds Carnival Club turned to the camera to do her routine, while glaring intensely at the camera, perfect for the tone of the cart. While that was good, perhaps even more surprising was the performer from Centurion CC, who gave a brilliant smile. Many not familiar with carnival may not find that very surprising perhaps, but Centurion is a tableau club, where the participants stay frozen for the whole procession, but again, it fit in well with the theme. My sincere thanks must go to both of these two performers. Carnival photographs are always going to be dynamic by their very nature, but it isn’t always possible to capture the atmosphere. I felt that the relationship between them and the camera really lifted the photographs to another level. I’m not a portrait photographer normally, so it is probably one of the few occasions where I have had a buzz from photographing people, normally it’s confined to my nature photographs, when I get what I was looking for.

Like last year, I had taken note of some of the features of the carts that I had wanted to photograph, so I concentrated more on different angles (mainly portrait formats of the carts), portraits of the performers and closeup and detail shots. Not all of them were successful, as many of the performers were in higher positions than last year, which caused focusing and depth of field problems that had to be overcome. Again, this is something to note for next year.

Despite some failures, overall it was a success for me and as usual, plenty of money was collected for local charities, although not as much as you might expect, given that there are usually around 50,000 spectators.

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