Aviva portraits

Aviva continue their longstanding You Are The Big Picture global marketing campaign with a blitz of activity at London's South Bank Centre this week.  They invited me to their City HQ, to take portraits of their staff.  These pictures will be digitally projected onto the side of the National Theatre this weekend.  For every picture taken, Aviva promised to donate £4 to Street to School.  I was given a total of 5 hours over two days, and managed to shoot 172 individual portraits. It was pretty frantic, but everyone was in good humour and enjoyed raising money for a good cause. Office lighting is usually pretty unattractive, but I was required to move too quickly for studio lighting to be practical.  So I opted for a mixture of natural light (north-facing floor to ceiling windows were a big help) and a dab of on-camera flash to fill shadows and add sparkle to the eyes.

Here is a selection:

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Featured on Festival Brides website

Martin and Jaime's wedding was a highlight of last summer.  A gorgeous couple, married in the stunning village of Hambledon, followed by a super-relaxed reception in an Arabian tent on the village green.  Just perfect.

http://festivalbrides.co.uk/martin-and-jaimes-classic-with-a-twist-wedding

Family photography in Chiswick - simple studio fun with Jaya

Lots of fun and laughter with two-year-old Jaya and her parents in the studio yesterday. I set up a simple three-light system and, with a little prompting, let her do her thing.

A little shy at first, she soon realised she was the star of the show and could do pretty much whatever she liked.

Cue the cuteness.

A bowler hat made of a fun little series

Then we found some more hats

Very proud of her counting

Family sessions at my studio in Chiswick start at £250 with high resolution images given to you on CD, and helpful advice re professional printing and framing comes free.

Children's and family photography in Cobham

A glorious June day, with cloudless skies and not a breath of wind...too hot, in fact, at lunchtime, so we began indoors, with a black backdrop series of family shots. The sunlight was flooding through the windows so I shot it all with natural light.

Thereafter we headed into the garden for some fresh air, the children delighting in the unaccustomed sunhine.

A short walk and we were out in the real countryside.  The children played hide and seek, and raced each through the long grass.

This was my third photo shoot with this beautiful family.  It's always a treat to be invited back, and to see the children growing up.  It gets better every time, as our rapport is now well-established.

Happy clients

It's always lovely to hear positive feedback from clients, and happy brides can be particularly effusive.  There is an area of my website, under 'Weddings', entitled 'Happy couples', dedicated to these delightful messages. I was thrilled, then, to receive a 12-page newspaper in the post this week, from a happy couple, featuring not one or two, but HUNDREDS of their wedding pictures, along with a charming covering note.

They designed it themselves, had it printed and circulated it amongst all their family and friends as a memorable thank you for their support on the day.

The newsprint medium means the colour reproduction isn't 100% accurate, but it looks fantastic nontheless, and the layout and picture selection really capture the mood of the day.

It's rare to see so many pictures laid out next to one another in one place, but the collage effect works brilliantly.

Their civil ceremony and reception were held under one roof at the gorgeous Cripps Stone Barn, which is in a magically isolated spot, set amid rolling Cotswold countryside.  The total seclusion and privacy, not to mention top-notch service and fabulous catering, meant that all 120 guests really got into the spirit of the day.

It was, more than most, a day filled with laughter, and tears, enormous emotional highs, and a number of more reflective, sentimental moments.

Seeing the pictures again - hundreds of moments, funny, euphoric and sad, captured forever - reminds me how lucky I am to have such amazing clients, and how privileged I am to bear witness to days like this.