BIPP and beyond!

OK, as you may or may not know I am a Licenciate of the British Institute of Professional Photography - this is THE qualification to have if one is serious about their work - when I worked for Max I realised how professional it looked to have the letters LBIPP (ABIPP or FBIPP) after ones name - maybe not to Joe Public who might not of heard of the BIPP, but certainly to other photographers. It's not just about fancy letters after your name, its a sign that you have reached a certain standard in your photography - they dont let any old Tom, Dick or Harry in y`know!

However, I am now looking at progressing onto my Associateship, the second level of qualification. With some of the work I have produced this year, I am quietly confident that I can at least make a good impression with the judges.

The BIPP have already run an interview/case study with me earlier this year - which brings a surprising amount of traffic to my website.

I think towards the end of the year I will post a `best of` gallery to get everyone else's opinion. With the grading interviews in April of next year, I have to start thinking which ones to use.

Wish me luck!

Time is on my side... sometimes.

After another fantastic day this time shooting a Wedding in Thurlston, Devon, I have a few comments regarding time given to the photographer to create the formals - now as you know when I talk about formals I am referring to the intimate shots with just the bride & groom - the money shots, the showstoppers, the ones that your friends & family will see and just say. "Wow!". Now these will not be the `reportage` (urgh, I hate that word) style shots, these will be the ones where I am allowed to flex my artistic muscles and create images that really will be the envy of all your work colleagues when you show them your album/gallery etc. These are the ones I will need some time to work on to get just right... I have so many ideas when it comes to the formals, but they do require a little time to pose, compose and shoot - it may mean I have to set up a couple of flashes on stands so that I can tease light onto the subjects face - it usually requires me to lay down on the floor to work depth and texture into a shot using foreground subjects - but I will guarantee you that if I am given time I will create work that really will stun you, remind you why you hired me and make you feel & look like a million dollars (about £631226 taking the current exchange rate into consideration - but I digress). My style is not and never will be 100% reportage - I hope my clients never hire me thinking that is the case.

The one most important thing I try to achieve every time I shoot a wedding is to capture the emotion between the B&G, but in a way that looks stylish - not tacky. Maybe selfishly I try to create amazing images for my own reasons - anyone who knows me knows how goddamn passionate I am about this job - to not be able to capture YOU in amazing and stylish ways frustrates me so much - I want to progress in my chosen career - I want to deliver images my clients deserve - I don't want to be some hack churning out the same old formulaic rubbish time after time - I know my clients know this and hopefully its some of that passion that endears me to them.

All I ask is for a little bit of time to capture all that magic and bottle it up for you.

Thanks so much for reading again

Cheers, Mark

PS - we was given time for the image below - I love it to pieces. Its the first one I grabbed from loads we took - I cant wait to get started on the others, but they need to wait until next week - I have a LOT of catching up to do!

PPS - the next post will be far more upbeat and less whiny - I promise!!!

New projects.

OK, as some of you may know, I am currently setting up a number of training courses and photographic workshops along with one of my freelance photographers Kevin, the first one of which was a wedding workshop last month that went really well. Due to demand we have now scheduled another one for November.

As a result, Kevin & I have decided to work on this together which includes setting the whole project up as a separate enterprise to Eyecandy. We are still working on names etc. but today we registered a whole bunch of domain names so we can setup a website in the very near future.

Eventually we hope to be able to cover a wide range of photographic disciplines from Basic D-SLR training courses, wedding seminars and even studio lighting & nature photography workshops. Further down the line we are looking at holding seminars and talks and may look into inviting prestigious photographers along for Q&A sessions. Its early days yet but we are both very excited with some of the other ideas we are coming up with. It will certainly help those quieter winter months fly by (and help keep the bank account healthy).

Once I have some more news and can share some of our even better ideas I will post here. Keep checking back often, I know from my webstats I have around 15-20 regular visitors (and I also know who two of them are now - right girls? ;-) - and feel free to leave comments.

One last thing - a few weeks back I mentioned that I was designing my new brochure and couldn't decide between two covers. Well in the end I opted for a completely different cover - but I am very happy with the choice - it is a far more classic shot and should look amazing on the super-high glossy paper we have opted for. Hopefully I will find out in the next few days when 2500 of them are delivered to Eyecandy Towers.

You can view it by clicking HERE - however be warned it is a large PDF file weighing in at around 50mb - so will take a few minutes to download even on a relatively fast connection.

Hablamos mas tarde!

Not much really happening...

Just a quick update to please those search engines, not much happeneing, still shooting a wedding every week at the moment, although I did have this Saturday off ,well, I did have a venue visit in beautiful autumnal Richmond Park and another on Sunday at Mannings Heath Golf Club again - but my first Saturday evening at home in about the last thirteen weeks - I did shoot a wedding at Forbes House in swanky Kensington/Belgravia on Friday though, so still keeping busy on the wedding front. Attached a few pictures from that day here - shot most of the formals inside as we had the most amazing light filtering in through the windows we just HAD to use it. I guess as we move more towards the darker afternoons/evenings we will be shooting more and more formals inside - but lets enjoy that amazing autumn late afternoon light whilst we have it.

Some from last week.

Just a couple of my favourites from last weeks shoot. I love the 1950s hollywood feel to both of these. The couple are Pip & Ash married at Rivervale Barn near Sandhurst. Its a great example of what is possible given enough time to shoot some formals. These are going to look so good in their album. Click on the images to view larger versions.

Wedding at Rivervale Barn

Reportage vs Formals vs Art

One thing this year that has been playing on my mind a bit is regarding Reportage v Formals - now I am not a big fan of the word `reportage`, its been thrown around amongst wedding photographers both good and bad and during the past few years & the whole concept has become somewhat diluted - clients or potential clients will approach me, whether it be after meeting me at an exhibition, finding my website or being referred to me from another couple whose wedding I have shot and they say they want the reportage style of wedding shoot - but when I say "fine, that means you dont want any group shots or posed formals" they generally say "oh yes, we want those as well" - which isn`t really a reportage wedding.

If you'll allow me to expand on that a bit -

The problem stems from photographers and their web galleries - when a bride (or groom, but usually the bride) is reading up on wedding photography they visit all these websites and see these wonderful `reportage` slideshows showing about 15 or so images from a single wedding, backed with a nice snip of emotive piano music and the initial impact is usually "WOW!" - and they do look great, simple & effective, showing tiny snapshots of the day and making the whole slideshow `pop` with some nifty photoshopping and cool black and white effects. The only problem with that is the prospective client wouldn't only want to be presented with 30 or so `reportage` images for their many hundreds or even thousands of pounds spent. It’s a problem I have been wrestling with all year - do I present less images? do I cut out my DVD package and not allow the client to see,literally, hundreds of shots of the day and just send the couple a proof of the album and my interpretation of the day? Or do I post 600 shots on my website so they can see every tiny thing we captured? I like to think of my style as 65% "reportage", 35% formals - and by formals I don't mean lots of group shots, I am talking about the artistic couple shots which are posed but not in a contrived 1980s style - I like to bring the essence of the couple into my formals, integrating the venue, the weather, the lighting and some love and personality - but when that’s tied in with some nice reportage it can make for an amazing album, something you can pull out on a cold winters night whilst sitting in your lounge and relive the day through 20 pages of well picked, tastefully laid out photographs, in fact, something you can pull out in ten years time with your kids on your lap and they will say "wow Mummy you look so pretty".

I think within the next few years I will drop the number of images shown in my online galleries from 500 or so now, down to 250 - I certainly don`t want to end up turning into some `hack` photographer treating every wedding like a souless product on a production line just so I get my paydirt - thankfully I know I will never get to that stage , but looking at a lot of photographers out there it seems, sadly, that the way it is going for some of them. Anyone who knows me, friend, family or client will know I have an absolute passion for photography, whilst this is a job for me, I still have that fire in my belly to become great within my field and respected by my peers. I just want to produce work that will tingle emotions in ten, twenty or even thirty years from now when my clients look at their wedding album.

Thanks for reading.

A dilemma!

I have hit a bit of a problem regarding the design of my new brochure. It's regarding the frontcover - I am torn between two images both of which are rather similar but equally pretty.

Bearing in mind this year we are going for very glossy A4 brochures to really make an impact at the exhibitions and so it stands out in amongst all the other pamphlets that will no doubt being filling the vistors bags to bursting. So, here are my two choices - I know I have a number of regular visitors to the blog (I can tell from my web-logs, although I have no idea who you are!) so it would be great if you could just leave a comment telling me what you think- you dont even need a blogspot account to leave comments, just leave them anonymously.

Thanks!!

School days.

Well yesterday was the day that we held our first "Introduction to Wedding Photography" training course. We hired out the facilities at Crondon Park Golf Course in Essex and we had four students in our initial `intake` and we had a great day! In the morning we talked about the wedding day as it happens, the do and don'ts, how to prepare and be ready, essential equipment and we also took some questions relating to the business aspects of wedding photography (although the business side is another course we are planning). After a lovely hot buffet lunch we introduced a couple of models for the practical aspects of the course - covering areas such as posing, direction, communication and looking for and utilising intersting areas for the bride & groom portraits.

We also used the Function Suite area to discuss flash lighting - both on-camera and off-camera - natural lighting and how to add movement to otherwise dull and flat images. I believe everyone went away with lots of information to mull over - I certainly had to learn how to teach as I had never done anything like that before, but its certainly something we will be expanding upon in the near future - in fact the next course may well be "An introduction to DSLR photography" and even a couple of nature workshops!

I have attached a few shots that I fired off inbetween advising the students - thanks to our models Emily and Lee for working so hard and being incredibly patient.