Yamaha XVS Custom

I was recently commissioned to photograph this Yamaha XVS Custom motorcycle with the aim of creating the poster featured below. The client wanted these photos taken as a birthday gift for his brother who owns the bike, and has been living and working in New York for some time, it’s his pride and joy but he’s not been able to transport it over with him. I actually took the photographs in a temporary makeshift studio I set up in a village hall as transporting the bike would be problematic for various reasons. I put the poster artwork together myself in photoshop, taking the specifications of the client and running with it.

Yamaha XVS 650 Dragstar Custom motorcycle, photographed in a makeshift studio!

A Documentary Wedding…..

I have to say I enjoyed this wedding shoot quite a lot. While the Bride & Groom did give me a small list to work from, they allowed me free reign to work how I wanted, and both they and their guests were comfortable with me shooting in what was mostly a documentary style mixed with the essential portraits of the happy couple.

A Wedding at Wisbech Castle

I had to shoot a wedding at Wisbech Castle this month, a two hundred year old building in the centre of the Fenland town of Wisbech. So I am told, there has been some form of fortification on the site since 600AD, although the existing building is more in keeping with a grand Regency era house with a large garden and surrounded by an outer wall. I had never shot a wedding there before, and I took my lead from the well kept garden and period surroundings to the style of images I took.

Sam & Ollie’s Wedding – 29th April 2016

I just completed my first wedding shoot of the year. So I though I would mark that event with a selection of my favourite images from Sam & Ollie’s wedding, taken on the 29th April 2016. It was a great day, the weather just about held out, and the venues were St Faith’s Church, Gaywood, and The Duke’s Head Hotel in King’s Lynn.

The King’s Lynn Mart

King’s Lynn Mart, 2016

This is of a travelling fair that has been visiting King’s Lynn every February, known locally as the Mart. The Mart has been visiting the Town in some form for 500 years, and a lot of the iconic rides such as the chargers and roundabouts, were designed and engineered by local man Frederick Savage, who pioneered power driven fair ground rides.

The Red Mount on a Frosty Morning

I had some other business to attend to very early yesterday morning, and when I was on my way home from that (still relatively early!), there was still a heavy frost. I stopped off at the Red Mount, situated in a local park and took this photograph. It was at a focal length of 24mm, and is the result of five frames shot in portrait and stitched together. I did start out intending to make it one of my usual panorama shots, but I kind of like this quite square aspect.

Old Tree Under the Stars

I thought I would have another go at a star trail picture, however, I decided to do this with a new camera that I had not yet had a chance to get familiar with. In fact, it was only the second time I had used this new camera (I took a portrait for someone a couple of days before), but I had been wanting to use it for a landscape and not had the opportunity previously.

There was a bit of a struggle with it at first, and I was able to work through it, but the biggest issue for me was managing to get to the location of the old, twisted tree – I had recently strained a muscle in my leg, and walking on the really uneven ground in the pitch black night conditions after parking the car, was not the best idea I have ever had!

Once I got home, I really wanted to have a look at the images and get them stacked and corrected, but I instead ended up in a fight with Lightroom trying to get it to even open with all the constant crashes, let alone work and get anything done! So, even though these two photos were beset with difficulties from start to finish, I think they were worth it as it was a very clear night – unusual in the UK – and an awful lot of stars were visible. I just need longer to get more than a hundred or so shots in order to get more complete star trails next time. Oh yes, there will be a next time, I am a glutton for punishment!

Heacham as the light fades.

It’s been a little while since I went out took some landscape photos, and by that I mean an actual landscape, and not star trails or galaxy shots in the name of experimentation or trying something different. So it was just good to go and and take these photos simply for the sake of it.

First attempt at star trails……

I thought I would have a go at a star trail photo, and the sky was just about clear enough last night to have an attempt. There is quite a lot of conflicting advice on how many shots are needed, anywhere from 50 to 300 to create the trails, and also with regards to the exposure times, so this ended up being an experiment to see what exactly would give me the results I was looking for. I settled on 30 second exposure as longer would start to burn out the foreground interest, and took 80 frames to stack, and I think I will stick with the 30 second exposures, certainly not use any longer than a minute in future. And I will definitely take a lot more frames depending on the effect I am after, a minimum of 200 and possibly a lot more!

The Perseid Meteor Shower – Thornham

Always looking for something different (or at least something I haven’t done before) to do with long exposure landscape photography, my brother said to me, why don’t we go and have a go at taking some photos of the Perseid meteor shower, and I thought, why not indeed. We researched the technique for astro-photography, which seemed to go against everything I would normally use for long exposure landscapes, use a very high ISO, and as wide an aperture as possible the information said, so I wondered how this was really going to work. This was taken at around 11.30pm at Thornham on the Norfolk coast, there are some dead tree stumps on the harbour and it seemed they might make for foreground interest. We got there far too early, so we ended up staying there for around four hours, but hey, sometimes it’s worth doing these things to get a photo, although we did wonder if there was too much cloud to make it work. Once it was dark enough, the high ISO and the wide aperture on a very wide angle lens started to make sense, there were still a few clouds around and it took three hours to locate a galaxy to shoot as a backdrop, in the end I downloaded an app on my phone that allowed me to locate the Sirius Galaxy which by a happy coincidence, could be seen looking to the North-East – exactly the direction of the meteors!  I thought I had a photograph with a really bright meteor trail slap bang in the middle of the frame……but once I checked it on the back of the camera, the realisation that it was actually a plane flying overhead was really very annoying. So the only thing to be done was to persevere and hang around in Thornham taking pictures until nearly 1pm in the pitch black of night! A bit of experimentation with lighting the foreground happened from time to time, sometimes there was a massive shift in the colour balance of the sky, there was also annoying wispy clouds hanging around the sky, this is the UK and we rarely get clear cloudless skies. But keep at we did, and I decided the clouds added some colour and texture, and for a first attempt the results are not too bad. The first one has the meteors in, the other images are just to show the odd colour shifts!

Perseid Meteors over THornham