Moshi!!!!

My son now has an obsession with Moshi Monsters. I surprised him this morning with some new ones, but he had to hunt them down as they had escaped into the garden! Great fun!!!

Sunday was a special day....

...a wedding!! Victoria and Daryl's wedding to be specific. I knew that if I took all my camera gear, i'd get carried away and miss out on the spirit of the occasion, so borrowed my brothers Cybershot for the occasion. I'm so glad I made that decision, the reasons to which i'll explain in a minute, but first......

    

                                               

Usually when using my camera gear, I get carried away and totally immersed in what i'm doing and can easily be oblivious to things going on around me. I didn't on Sunday and I gained so much...The ceremony was a beautiful civil affair, and later on a discrete but very emotional blessing ceremony was held in the garden. 

Unfortunately, someone very special to Victoria couldn't be there. Jane, a very close friend of Victoria was cruelly taken away from us on 25th July 2010. There was a very special, and certainly emotional (but happy!) feeling to the day, something I just can't put my finger on. I had never even met Jane, but I think she was there with everyone on Sunday.

I would just like to thank Victoria and Daryl for letting us be part of their day, and would like to wish them all the best for the future!!!! Rock on!

Jane's story can be found here, please visit and show your support for John and Penny. A Facebook page can also be found here. 

Portrait session

Offered to do a portrait session for a very old friend (not insinuating she's ancient or anything!!) to try and get some practice in. Attempted to use a clamshell setup for the lights, but a 30mm is much too short for it so abandoned that pretty much straight away!

Really need to look into some ideas for backgrounds. White/black are the classic backgrounds but i'm starting to get a bit fed up with them to be honest.....patterns might be the way to go....or even outdoors if the weather ever sorts itself out!!!

Selfie!!

I really despise having my photo taken. I resemble the back end of a bus. I find it even harder trying to do a self portrait and find it more difficult than it really should be.

Anyway, seeing as I need the practise and there's no-one else to practise on, I didn't have much choice! Set-up was K7 and Sigma 30mm f1.4 on a tripod set to interval shooting (which is really handy as you can fire a sequence of shots and it will autofocus itself before each one!), Yongnuo trigger to a Nikon SB-24 flash, housed in a gridded Phottix softbox.

New Lights!!!

Not overly convinced by my set of Ez-flo continuous lights, i've progressed onto a Lencarta Smartflash. Better light output, and more flexible! The first shot is through a Phottix 70x70 softbox with white reflector and the second is via a shoot through umbrella with reflector (clamshell setup used for both).

I've got a shoot on Thursday night, so needed a bit of practice!!!

The Wedding

The whole reason behind the South Africa trip was to attend my sister-in-laws wedding. As i've been asked to shoot weddings before and flat out refused because of a total lack of experience, I saw it as a prime opportunity to get some. Couldn't get all the shots I wanted as I didn't want to upset the official tog too much (name of Christopher Munton, quite a nice guy and a damn good photographer to boot, some of the pics are on his blog here)!!! Would love to get the experience to produce shots like that.

Great experience, just a shame I only had the 30mm to work with, quite restrictive, especially in the church.....