We had a special treat yesterday courtesy of the great people at The Douglas Bader Foundation and their friends at West London Aero Club at White Waltham Airfield.

We spent 25 minutes in the air with Tom and his 35 year old Piper getting an aerial tour of the area including the Reading Festival and the edges of Bracknell (Bracknell is in restricted airspace so we could only skirt round the west edge). Thanks to Tom and all the other pilots and helpers who volunteered their time and their not-too-cheap aviation fuel to give the children (and parents) a real treat.

Last weekend my University buddy Daran was at Bracknell dry ski slope with his family. The children were competing in a freestyle skiing competition and I went along to photograph them. Unfortunately the weather was shocking and I only got 1 shot of the actual skiing. Keen to come away with some good photos we did a quick portrait session with his 2 older children.

I heard later that they both won their respective categories which is a bit of a habit for them. I’m expecting we’ll hear their names competing for Team GB at a future winter olympics. If not I’m sure Madi will have no problem finding work as model!

Michael’s Freestyle skiing blog is worth a look to check out some of his video footage.

Our youngest son is a big big fan of Doctor Who and particularly likes the Daleks.

Our good friend Cath made a present for him that serves double duty as a cafetiere warmer/cosy.

Thanks Cath, hope you enjoy the pictures.

ps I’m still thinking Clanger

Packed my eldest off to his prom tonight.

“Take your wellies son”

One of the things I find frustrating about photography is that the more I learn and the more my skills improve, the less inclined I am to simply take a quick picture of something or someone. This sometimes results in no picture at all.

Today was a case in point. My wife made a fantastic cake for our youngest son’s birthday tomorrow. I was so impressed with the cake that I thought I’d better capture it. This started the little internal battle in my head over whether I should do it properly or just simply point the camera at it on auto (or even use my iPhone) just to record it.

In the end, doing a proper job won and I thought it would be interesting to document the process. The first image shown below is the finished item. For comparison, the second image shows the cake lit by only the ambient light in the room – what I would have got if I’d just let the camera do its own thing.

Ambient Light Only

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the ambient only image but it can be made better with the controlled addition of my own lighting as seen in Image 1.

So first  things first. I want to use the ambient  light in the room as my overall fill for the image and then add my own lights where I need them to try and create some shape and form to the cake. The first stage is to set the camera to underexpose the ambient light by 1 stop. From memory the ambient was just under f/4.0 so the camera was set to f/5.6. Without adding lights the image now looks as follows:-

Next stage is to add in my key light at my working aperture of f/5.6. The key light here is a 19″ Damian McGillicuddy DMLS Beauty Dish placed off to camera right at about 45 degress and raking across the cake. This gives some shape to the image by creating highlight and shadow sides on the barnacles and the pieces of treasure. The image below is the cake with the key light and the ambient fill only:-

Its starting to look better but the addition of a separation light will really help to lift the cake out of the background and create a more 3-D feel to the image. I placed a 2nd light about 3ft behind the cake pointing back at camera and metered at a stop over my working aperture. Whilst this gave me the separation I was looking for it also introduced a new problem by lighting the table behind the cake. See image below:-

The solution was pretty simple and involved placing a cushion such that it blocked the light from hitting the table but still letting it hit the top of the cake. The final finessing involved increasing the shutter speed to knock down even more of the ambient light resulting in the final image which is repeated below. No post processing other than a slight crop and a tiny vignette.

Nom Nom!

Not only is it our 18th wedding anniversary but we have just had a wonderful few hours at the John Nike Ski slope in Bracknell with our youngest son.

We were invited to attend a taster session organised by Snow Hounds, a new group that has been formed to help promote snowsports for people with a wide range of disabilities.

Whilst physically able, our son has autism and this means he struggles with taking instructions and understanding what is required of him. So it was a huge acheivement to see him performing the lessons given to him by the very patient Paul and doing so well. We were both very proud at what he managed for his first time ever on skis.

Thanks to Paul and all the team at Snowhounds for helping us make another little step (or slide ) that we never thought we would witness.

We are big fans of bluebells in our house. One of our regular dog walks takes us through a small area covered in bluebells and we’ve been carefully monitoring the development of this area to work out when the best time to photograph it is.

It turns out today is probably going to be the peak for the bluebells, so, we went out this morning armed with camera, a light and a light modifier to make some pictures.

Results are below. Mrs R. loves bluebells so much she reckons she could fall asleep siting amongst them. Of course we were very careful to select our positions so that despite the impression you might get from the images, there were no bluebells harmed in the making of these images.

Have a great sunny weekend.

We’ve just received some lovely comments from Ryan, Kelly and some of their family members about the photographs we published on Sunday from their wedding at Warbrook House.

Its always so nice to receive feedback on our work and we were so touched by the comments that we’ve gone all soft and decided to put a few more images from the day online.

The confetti shot below was a lot of fun. We were only allowed to throw confetti outside the grounds of St Pauls Church and that left us very little room to work with, the busy main road being only a pavement width away. So, we improvised.

We used the pedestrian crossing on the main Reading road to stop the traffic. When the lights changed red and the beeper started beeping the whole congregation ran out into the road and then Kelly and Ryan dashed through the middle of the crossing with confetti being launched at them. Great sports, all of them.

On Friday we had the pleasure of photographing Kelly and Ryan’s wedding at St Paul’s Church in Wokingham followed by the wedding reception at Warbrook House Hotel in Eversley.

It was a lovely day and the bride, groom and all their guests were a pleasure to work with.

Enjoy your honeymoon guys and we will be in touch when you get back.

I’ve been a bit slow to update the blog recently so I’m going to try and catch up over the next few weeks. I recently attended a workshop, run by Damian McGillicuddy, with the aim to further hone my use of off camera flash lighting for lifestyle photography. It was a great day, a lot was learnt and a lot of great images were made. A selection of the images are posted below.

If you are interested in having some modern and funky portraits created and are bored of the white studio background stuff then get in touch with us, you’ll be in good company.