Thought I’d take a break from posting (and processing) wedding to put this one up. Took it a couple of months back in Mongolia by the side of the road. If you haven’t been to Mongolia, it really is an experience. You can quite literally take a photograph composed of green grassland, sand dunes and mountains all at the same time. I challenge you to find somewhere like that anywhere else in the world!

Anyway, yes this was taken on the way out west, about 8hrs drive from Ulaanbaatar, we pulled over and Holly actually went for a ride on the Camel. I was planning on stopping her since our medial insurance covered everything except camel rides, but hey how can you stop a girl with an idea in her head? After the ride I asked the nomads who owned them if they’d mind me taking a photo for prosperity. Needless to say this being the land of friendly people it was no problem and they were over-the-moon with the mini Polaroid print I gave them. Wish people around the rest of the world would be seduced by an English accent and a print of them with a camel!

Strobist info: Lit with an Elinchrom Ranger Quadra into an extra small Chimera softbox.

Right well that’s my break taken, back to the world of weddings!

More adventures soon,
Alex

Forty Models, Photographers and makeup artists, one amazing site, one amazing day.

Packing for Mongolia now. More adventures soon!

Alex

Well folks it took a lot of organising but we made it. On sunday the big photo shootout finally happened at a derelict RAF base just north of Cambridge.

Really great day, we had some amazing models, photographers and makeup artists on hand. Really can’t wait to see what everybody made of it. Unfortunately I spent most of my day sorting things out and not shooting (damn I missed out on some AMAZING models ) but here’s a couple of mine from the lighting seminar I gave.

Hope you all enjoyed it and add us to your RSS reader if you want to know when and where the next shoot will be!

More adventures soon,
Alex

Never work with children or animals. At what point did I forget that golden rule?? Well anyway I know I promised to do a little techie post on some of my more recent photos so here goes nothing.

So let’s start with the horse shot. The back story to this is that it was inspired by a mixture of Lord of the Rings and Drew Gardner. What I wanted to do was put Carys in the middle of a sunny forest with beams of light shining through the trees and her riding through them. Here’s the shot again, do you think I made it?

Hit the link for all the techie details behind the shot and some of the issues I had to overcome to make it happen. (Click here to see more…)

Wow what a day. Today I got set an assignment by Joe McNally to photograph the lovely Alessia – an up and coming musician. The goal was to get two photographs suitable for a magazine (one landscape and one portrait as a cover) in order to show Alessia as a very quirky but likeable person (think Biorke). How on earth do you do that? And more to the point, how on earth do you shoot and edit those in under 3 hours? Keep on reading to find out how and how this turned out to be one of my most expensive photos to date…

Story and more photos after the jump…
(Click here to see more…)

So for those of you who regularly read the blog you might have been wondering where on earth I’ve dissapeared to in the last few weeks. Well I’ve been working on a Philip Pullman play, “Clockwork” which has just finished it’s run at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge.

Due to my normal crazy lighting for photographs, the director, Holly, asked if I would be the lighting designer on the show. Well I couldn’t say no and as such embarked on my first foray into the world of theatre. I have to confess I found it really quite interesting and it’s really made me appreciative of my photography lighting. Enter the theatre and suddenly I was banned from all softboxes, photoshop and flashes and instead had to contend with hot yellow continuous light which couldn’t interfere with audience vision and had to work across an entire stage. Quite a mission.

I think we succeeded though: had lots of good feedback and reviews. I did take one very quick photograph while on set, of all the major cast members. It actually made it into the Cambridge News along with the review and a photo by Hugo Vincent, a good photographer friend of mine. Hugo stepped up to take the photos of the performance since I was otherwise indisposed operating the lights. If people want, I might put a blog post up going into the photo in a bit more detail later.
Anyway my photo is the one at the top, Hugo’s is the one further down.

More adventures (and blog posts) to come!

Alex

So yes I promised I’d do a post going into a bit more detail about how to light the 200 odd people of the London Lindy Exchange. Dancing fast. In a large (70x40ft) hall. With only three speedlights…

If you’re not a camera nerd I suggest you leave this post alone. Otherwise find out after the jump…

(Click here to see more…)