Well spring is well and truly sprung here in North Lincolnshire and the farmers have been doing us proud with fields bursting over with all sorts of unidentifiable green things – with the exception of oil seed rape, everyone knows how bright and yellow that is !!.

So that gave me an idea for a shoot.

I recruited Lauren and Holly, the daughters of a family friend (and conveniently, a farmer) and I arranged to photograph them on Saturday morning, starting on the farm.

We began in the hayloft before moving off to explore other bits of the farm

Then we did some individual shots

Then we had a change of clothes and went off to the churchyard, always a favourite location of mine for photography.

It’s always nice to walk up to the church because you never know what you are going to find in terms of photographic opportunities, even though I shoot there regularly every model brings something different and interacts in a different way with the surroundings. For example Lauren and Holly found the old rope swing

and then Holly had to have a go !!!

Before we headed off to explore further

Of course we had to go around to the old Iron age castle mound that we have next to the church – the girls had a great time running up and down the mound and exploring all the little wooded areas

But then we had to set off for what I had originally intended the shoot to be – working in the oil seed rape field. The girls father doesn’t grow rape seed but there are plenty of fields around the village which are full ofthe stuff so we just ‘borrowed’ one !!

But did the girls have a good time ???

Well, have a look at this one

What do you think !!

This week I was lucky enough to be back at Annabel Williams studio in Stavely shooting with my CPT30 buddies, ably instructed by Tamara Peel and Gary Walsh. It was a 2 day shoot designed to get us up to speed on handling clients and locations – so day one was an instructive day with Tamara where she demonstrated her skills with little Ayla (who I had the pleasure of photographing some time ago).

Day two saw us out on location with both Tamara and Gary and a whole bus load of models, children, Teens, couples and families – and off we went shooting !!!.

In the morning we worked as 2 small groups and just one model per group, my group started off with Tamara and we worked with Jonny and his family

on the steps

This was a whole load of fun as Tamara is completely mad – lovely, but mad – and we saw a whole new way of interacting with your clients to get  the best out of them and the family were lovely.

After coffee we swapped to Gary, again a load of fun but equally mad – and we shot with a couple who were late twenties and very stylish, I decided that stark black & white was the way to go with them.

B&W

This is my favourite image of the set I did with them, although I have loads of pictures as they were incredibly photogenic and completely at ease with the camera – not to mention all the tattoo’s – it didn’t take long for the ladies in the group to get Kirk’s shirt off !!

After lunch we were off on our own (well me and Abbie as a team) and were allocated our own models to play with – we initially got Fallon and Freya with their Mum and they were very cute, if a little shy – but we soon got through that

All 3 girls

Again we had a whole set of lovely images – especially Abbie, but I think this one best sums up how we got along. By the end of the session I think the girls had relaxed enough to get some great individual images.

Next we moved on to Ola, a teenage girl with the most amazing hair and a very enigmatic Mona Lisa semi-smile

Hair !!!

That hair came down to her knees and gave the most incredible photo opportunities – and as you can see it moved beautifully in the breeze.

But the best thing about the shoot with Ola was the fact she had such a great face, with that little subtle smile and big eyes – perfect for close head shots

Close Up

This is turning out to be my signature images – get in close and concentrate on the eyes !!!

At the end of the two days both Abbie and myself were shattered, but had learned a whole lot of stuff and shot a huge number of images. I’ll be revising my website images in light of what we shot and will be sure to include some of the new ones both on the web and in my Picasa album – so keep watching !!!

Link to Tamara Peel
Link to Gary Walsh