Professional Photographer Magazine kindly asked to interview me for the July Issue of their magazine.
They were interested in showing some of my stills based motion work, you can download the article PDF Here
Lifestyle Portrait Melanie Deegan Sculptor
After quite a large gap last week I continued with my project Life In A Somerset Landscape.
using the power of social media I posted out a request for people who might fit the project and wished to have a lifestyle portrait in the project.
I must admit I underestimated the response I would receive and now have some amazing people lined up for the project including a Gamekeepers, Storytellers and even an Astrophotographer with his own garden observatory!
Have to say I feel pretty excited and blessed to have such a diverse group and interesting people wanting to spare their time.
The first person I captured was an amazing sculptor called Melanie Deegan based at an old chicken farm near Langport.
Melanie’s work was simply amazing her website can be found here
Her studio is a very simple and cool old commercial vehicle (well the rear end of it) situated outside the old chicken barn.
After and chat about her work we set up the shoot and captured some images and were all done in less than 30 minutes.
The biggest enjoyment in shoots like this for me apart from the enjoyment of capturing and creating the images is definitely meeting some wonderful generous interesting people.
View Life In A Somerset Landscape Gallery
I took a few days holiday with my family last week to visit my sister in Yorkshire.
As always I packed a camera to take with me to capture a few images if and when the opportunity arose which of course it always does.
It’s surprising the things that catch your eye even to me sometimes just like this pond in my sisters garden.
From many viewpoints, it’s just a small pond albeit quite pretty but as I approached closer from above everything seemed to change and caught my eye.
Maybe it was the rush of colourful fish advancing towards me wanting to be fed or the specular hilites on the water or a combination of all these elements.
I lost myself for several minutes slightly obsessed for the perfect composition of fish and pond.
Pond-life
I was recently interviewed by the lovely people at Wonderful Machine based out of Narberth Pennsylvania in the U.S.A
Wonderful Machine Blog.
Stilted Low Lighthouse, A Photography Location Close To Home
Sedgemoor Somerset is the area I grew up in and explored while learning Photography and somewhere that provides some amazing Photography locations.
During my late teens through to my early 30’s, I lived along the seafront in Burnham On Sea with some fabulous views across the beach and the Bristol Channel.
This provided me with opportunities to watch the light and grab my cameras when it looked promising and go out to capture whatever revealed itself.
Probably the most famous landmark in the area is the Grade II listed stilted wooden lighthouse which sits gracefully 36ft elevated on the beach.
Evening Light Over Afon Teifi
This week my diary looked a little quieter than the hectic previous 6 weeks or so but that soon changed within one brief phone call.
I was asked by a client if I could travel to West Wales for a couple of days to shoot two urgent jobs that needed completing ASAP.
This work was shooting two amazing holiday properties one on each day hence my overnight stay.
Pembrokeshire in West Wales is approximately 160 miles from my base in South Somerset and not an area I have visited since I was a teenager riding my Vespa Scooter.
I knew or remembered little about the area except it was a beautiful part of the world and a great photography location that I would have plenty of time between shoots to explore and capture some images.
After my first shoot was completed, I decided to explore the coast and take a few snaps of my discoveries and generally just chill and even have a paddle in the surprisingly warm Irish sea!
It’s always frustrating to discover an amazing scene in the middle of the day and know that 6 hours earlier or later the light would potentially be so much nicer.
So it was nice to explore a location knowing I was stopping locally and could return in a better light if something caught my eye.
It was a location in Cardigan where my hotel was located that I decided to shoot later that evening.
Cardigan a historic and picturesque town has a wonderful Grade II listed bridge over the river Afon Teifi that is difficult to ignore.
After a brief recee and chat with the locals I found what I thought would be a good viewpoint to capture the evening light that was to backlight and give great shape to the bridge.
I’ve mentioned before that I prefer the more compressed perspective of slightly longer lenses rather than using wide angled lenses.
In this image to get the width needed to show the scene with the perspective, I wanted from my 70mm lens I captured 9 final frames to build up both image width and height.
Actually it was 27 frames as I captured 3 bridged exposures to create an HDR that I blended to capture the wide dynamic range in the scene.
This has the added benefit of creating a super-resolution image not that I particularly needed that.
You can see a video sample of this on my retouching page.
Jul
19
Soaring
Football is one of my passions alongside Photography of course.
This image was from a personal shoot captured several years ago with two male models.
The majority of my work is about quiet tranquil moments not fast action but this frame just felt very graceful despite the energy that was about to be released.
Some bespoke Kitchen Photography captured and retouched for my client Papilio.
Jul
05
There are certain days while out driving the car that I know I’m going to get sidetracked by a view or a subject I just simply can’t pass up.
It was while on location last week that the weather turned rather stormy just as I was travelling through a rather impressive landscape in Devon.
I had completed one assignment and travelling to another when I noticed heavy rain approaching this valley. Fortunately, I had time to spare (not that that would have probably stopped me) so I quickly found a spot to pull in and grab my camera from the boot of the car.
I can work very quickly when needed and I quickly composed and captured several variations before losing the drama.
Storm-over-sourton
I have fond memories of holidays as a child in Cornwall here in England.
As I grew those holidays continued with friends and I eventually found myself living in the area for a brief time.
It was around this time (the early 1990s) that I started a project to capture portraits and images of Cornish fishermen.
It mystified me why I got so deeply drawn to this subject to the point that I wondered if I had spent a previous life chasing Pilchards!
Nearly all of the images were captured on film including this 5×4 portrait below.
Having lived in St Ives for that short period I got to know the town fairly well and knew of these buildings on the harbour called lodges.
From what I learnt the lodges were used as meeting places for local fishermen.
One day while I decided to venture inside the Lodge and found several charismatic old gentlemen chatting.
I’m unsure how things progressed from there but I do remember grabbing my 5×4 plate camera and shooting a couple of portraits.
Unfortunately, this retired fisherman’s name escapes me without digging out my old film notes but by pure chance, his hat perfectly matched the interior of the lodge.
One day I may continue this project and also wade through the many rolls of film to digitise the project into some kind of coherent collection of work.
