Christmas Special Offer

We are running a special offer in the run-up to Christmas

We are offering a family lifestyle portrait photoshoot in the location of your choice* such as your local park, woodland or maybe a gritty urban location for up to 45 minutes and will give you a 6" x 8" print all for £30 with additional prints and products such as canvas wall portraits also being available

Lifestyle photography dispenses with the 4 walls of a studio and heads outdoors with all the fantastic natural backdrops that are available. It also allows younger children to be themselves with their fun-filled characters showing in every image.

This is a limit time offer and we expect the available timeslots to fill up fast

Please can Paul on 07866 719730 to book an appointment or email on caterham@gmail.com

* within 25 miles of Hitchin

Barkston Heath 'The same but different'

Back at the begining of August Antonella and I went to RAF Barkston Heath to photograph a round of the Toyota Sprint Series for Andrew Cliffe as he'd found himself double booked.

Earlier this month I blogged about the images from the day that had been published by Banzai magazine and yesterday I heard that MR2 Only Magazine (subtitled No Scoobies, Evo's GTO's or FTO's... MR2s only) had published 5 of our images

The title Same But Different comes from the fact that the track is normally used clockwise but occasionally they spice things up a little by running the otherway around

For those of you that don't know of this hidden away venue it has an interesting history as it was home to part of the Bloodhound missile defence system after it was reployed from Germany in the early 1980's. The missiles remained at Barkston Heath until 1991 leaving only some rather odd concrete structures that formed the bases for the launch platforms.

They would certainly have given these MR2's a run for their money as apparently it was a rather rapid piece of kit

"By the time the missile has just cleared the launcher it is doing 400 mph. By the time the missile is 25 feet from the launcher it has reached the speed of sound (around 720 mph). Three seconds after launch, as the four boost rockets fall away, it has reached Mach 2.5 which is roughly 1800 mph"

I heard on the radio that Gordon Brown said that there was no Plan B

Just as well that I have made my Plan B into my Plan A I thought to myself if this shower have decided to ban everyone's Plan B

Oh wait a minute, he was talking about climate change (Telegraph Website) - it's all part of trying to hold onto his place on the world stage by his finger tips

When I blogged the story of the 13'6" truck and the 13' bridge in Hitchin last week I thought that the story would have missed the copy deadline for the print edition of the paper

Happily I was wrong and a short version of the story together with one of my pictures was published last Thursday.

It's kinda nice having a picture credit

A recent portrait shoot of 3 brothers

The time is flying by and it has been over a week since I last blogged - oops

I recently did a quick portrait shoot of Tom, Guy & Harry in Letchworth (those of you who know me will no doubt recognise them)

We started off in Granny's garden and then moved to the fountain in Broadway Gardens in the centre of Letchworth. This fountain was created for the millenium and is about half a mile from the world's 1st roundabout

Calumet and why A 13'6" truck will not fit under a 13' bridge

I went down to London this morning to the 70th birthday Open Day at Calumet, lots of very tempting things to play with including a rather spendy Hasselblad and some covetable Bowens portable strobe units

I comforted myself by buying a small stash of replacement modelling light bulbs for my current studio lights - I'd not noticed before that they do some ordinary ones at less at £2 each or some special long lasting ones for over £20 - will they really last 10 times longer ? I dont expect so in real use so I went for the cheap ones.

One the train on the way home just before Hitchin station I noticed that an express train on the adjacent fast line had slowed right down and was crawling along at the same speed as my train to the extent that I could pick up their wifi (thanks National Express trains).

The reason for this slow time became apparent when I walked out of Hitchin station to see that a container truck that was too tall had tried to go under the Cambridge Road bridge which carried the East Coast Mainline and had no doubt stopped very rapidly when the container hit the huge steel girder placed a few feet in front of the bridge to protect it in this very eventuality. This sudden stop also resulted in an  innocent van driver having a rather stoved in vehicle that would need a great deal of work with T-cut to restore

I took a couple of iPhone pics but decided to rush home and back to get a proper camera

Back on the scene tt took about an hour for the breakdown truck to arrive to take the van away and then the truck was reversed away from the bridge and went on its merry way to find a bridge of its own size to pick on.

When I got home again I quickly selected a handful of images, converted them to jpgs and then into newspaper sized images and fired them off to my local Archant paper The Comet

A few hours later and 3 (inc the story link on the front page) had been publisged on the Comet Newspaper online edition. I think this has missed the deadline for the print edition and by next week this will have been old news but it is nice to get a picture credit

A few images below

To do lists and teaser image of Drop Dead Dorothy

I started the day with a very long to-do list and I have ended the working day with the an even longer list that contained everything that it did at 08:00


A quick trip down to the supermarket has ticked off one item in that I now have some folders so I can do some more filing (questionable how quickly I will actually do the filing) and so I must tick off something else before I am overcome with the guilt of being busy all day but not being any further forward, hence this posting


So here is a first teaser image from the gig shoot that Antonella and I were the photographers at last week

Here is Ashley Barber of Drop Dead Dorothy performing at the B2 Venue  in Norwich - see I told you before the light was "challenging" - I hope you had a good birthday Ashley

I will post some further images of Drop Dead Dorothy and the other 2 bands Thick Trick Chloe and Dying Breed very soon

All around the twisty bits

A very brief posting,  Antonella and I were very pleased to recently hear that some of our images from the Barkston Heath Toyota Sprint Series meeting had been published (albeit without photo credits) in Banzai magazine. Our images are the 5 at the bottom of this double page spread. This is the first time that we've had images published in a fully commercial magazine

It also reminds me that I have got to find a better blog edit system as the photo handling in blogger stinks

Still busy busy

I'm having such a busy time, I dont know how I found the time to go to work ;-)

Last Thursday I attended a workshop on running a photographic business - The worshop was useful as it did serve to reinforce the fact that I am way ahead of others starting out as a photographer so the last 12 months of research & preparation may be paying off

Then it was off to Norfolk, first photographic stop was the hotel & golf course where we are shooting a wedding in October (more of this later), it is a lovely venue with plenty of locations for ad-hoc formals.

Then I was able to assist Antonella with another photoshoot for a model portfolio, again we were shooting the lovely Justine and despite the gale force winds Antonella captured some absolutely fantastic images.

Then we were back in Norwich on Tuesday to meet the bride & groom for the October wedding, from their description it is certainly going to be a theatrical wedding (they are both in the music industry) with some very novel forms of entertainment but ..................

.....they then dropped something of a bombshell on the table. At this stage we cant give any more details for reasons that will become apparent but the streets of Norwich were resounding with a few "whoo hoooos" as we walked back to the carpark

Not too much to think about it as we had another engagement shooting a gig at a local music venue. I really should have used some ear plugs but we both managed to get some great images despite the "interesting" light (or lack of it)

I have quite back log of images to blog too including the ones I took when I was a second shooter for tpphotography down in the New Forest so there should be another blog posting shortly

So much to do, do I have the time to find some paying clients ?

I'm now a member of several photo industry trade bodies so I can now start to climb the slippery pole to becoming something like a Licentiate for a starter following that up with a Associateship as a main course leaving just a Fellowship for pudding. Not sure what I will do with the port

For the time being I will have to be content with my Fellowship of the Zoological Society of London ;-)

We have also booked ourselves into the big wedding photography conference in the new year and I'm off on a day long seminar on Thursday. The inbetween time is full of lots of little things which I sincerely hope are adding up to something but at the moment it all still looks like an odd jigsaw

Time for a walk and an excuse to open the curtains - oh dear it's 1pm and the curtains are still closed

More soon

Well here I am, out of the corporate world, just a one man band (and half of a 2 person band)

I should have written my daily to do list on a larger piece of paper or maybe not as A3 would be a little unwieldy about the house. The list contains a real mixture of things from joining a number of additional tradebodies to blogging some more about the Street performance & Circus event on Saturday and the model portfolio shoot I assisted at on Saturday evening.

I'd better get on, I cant spend all day blogging to all you lot and this tea wont drink itself now will it ?

Monday Mornings, don't you just love 'em

Well here it is my last Monday morning in the corporate world

No more will the alarm go off at exactly the same time every Monday for a day at the coalface of adding value for shareholders & generating hot air

What will the shareholders do with a teeny tiny little bit less value ?

and will the property department have to turn up the termostats to compensate for my waffle contribution ?

These questions will have to go unanswered I'm afraid

Well I've only got just over a week sitting here and then the cold light of day will suddenly be shining on my life but hey ambient light is always good right ? Maybe I will need to supplement it with some flash

At the moment I feel like there are a whole lot of strands to Plan B that need to come together but currently are still floating around as ideas in my head, maybe it will all feel a bit more real on Monday 21st or alternatively it will feel like I have just jumped firmly out of the sausage cooking utensil into the flames

Time will tell, until then I will continue to write lists, lots of lists

I've gone and done it (but in the wrong order)

Things had been getting worse in the corporate world, time and time again I found I was responsible for something (especially when something had gone wrong) but without the authority or power to control it or to fix it. At other times I was asked "why didnt you fill in form xyz, the sky is going to fall in" when the answer was that no one had told me about the form and the need to complete it in order to maintain the normal position of the fermanent. Things were becoming unworkable.

Three weeks ago I was on holiday for the week and I decided that I'd had enough and that seeking another similar (or possibly just as bad) role was not going to solve things in the long term so I decided almost of the spur of the moment to give my agency the required one months notice that I was going to terminate the contract.

Ah that felt so good

And so here I am with my last day in the corporate world being Friday 18th and from then on I will be able to devote all of my time to plan B and turning that from a dream into a reality and from there into a success.

Eeeekkkk what have I done ?

Gary & Laura

On Saturday 15th of August Gary & Laura got married in Stopsley just outside Luton and I was lucky enough to be invited along to act as Second shooter for Steve Gardner

I'm getting so far behind with my blogging, I shall say "without further ado" here are a selection of images I captured on the day

Going to stop at this point as this image uploading system is dreadful

More tomorrow when I have found a better way to show images in blogspot

Progress

Oops, as has been pointed out I introduced a sort of Spoonerism in my last post - it should have read Jeff Ascough and George Weir - oops

Well the day up in Manchester was very good with an audience of around 35. Quite a mixture of folk from those who have been earning their livings from wedding photography for years through to the likes of me standing on the outside looking in. There was even a chap who had flown in from Germany for the workshop.

So I learnt a lot of very useful stuff about the process and art of wedding photography but I'm still in the wrong place in terms of taking some sort of leap - and as the saying goes you cant cross a 20 foot chasm in a series of little steps.

We've also been on the lookout for 2nd shooting opportunities and I have one lined up in Luton on the 22nd (thanks to Steve Gardner) - anyone else out there looking for a free 2nd shooter ?

Education Education Education

One of the first tangible things I am doing to make Plan B spring into life is to get some education under my belt

So on Sunday I'm off to the frozen wastes of the North to attend a wedding photography workshop hosted by George Ascough and Jeff Weir who are both at the top of the pyramid that I am hoping to climb. In the meantime I will just wander around on the desert sands and look at the Sphinx

Well quite a few people have asked me what our Plan B is so here goes

It started out with the simple idea that I didnt know what I wanted to do but I did know that after cough cough years in the corporate world driving spreadsheets, siting through rather too much powerpoint and being subject to the best efforts of idiots to grind every last little bit of morale out of me that I wanted to do something else

Over the last few months this has evolved into wanting to do something more creative before it is too late and most recently this has been distilled into wanting to make a living out of photography.

Now the hard part, how do I get from here ----> to over there ---------------->

Well we are still working on that but slowly we are getting there

The start of plan B

Well here it is, my 1st proper blog posting

Here I plan to post about the development of our plans to leave the rat race and move towards our plan B. We've been working on the new plan for quite a few months but never seem to be getting any nearer to it as the list of things we need to tick off seems to get longer rather than shorter

Well it seems the answer will either be ticking things off more quickly or turning a bit more of a blind eye to some of the obstacles and just leaping in the deep end

This is where I shut my eyes and then look for a deep end - hey wait a minute how will I find a pool (let alone a deep end) with my eyes shut. Ok I will find the pool 1st and then jump in