It’s been a busy couple of weeks, with wedding bookings rolling in for 2015, and already some tentatives for 2016 (including the winner of my 20% discount competition.) I have an August booking for a central London wedding that includes an open-top bus ride and formal pictures inTrafalgar Square – I’m sure that’ll produce some great images! So with my 2015 weekends filling up fast, if you’re planning on getting hitched next year, get in touch soon to guarantee my availability.
I had a spare hour (and it was only an hour!) last Saturday and I had a quick look at the arboretum in Lincoln near the hospital. I’d seen it on a couple of road signs in Lincoln and then searched it out on Google maps, thinking it may make a great photoshoot location. All I can say is what a great spot it is! With fountains, a bandstand, large stone staircases, a wide boulevard, a mini-maze, ornamental ponds and a giant statue of a lion, there are loads of possibilities for family shoots, engagement shoots and post-wedding trash / cherish the dress shoots. Here are some of my rapid iPhone pictures:
In other developments, I have started on a project to build a photo-booth for use at parties or wedding receptions. The concept is that guests can then enter the booth, and with a remote control take their own picture that will then be added to a slideshow on a projector. I’ve had a bit of play with my gear, and after lots of faffing with various bits of software, I’ve got a workable technical solution. I had hoped to use Lightroom for everything, but I ran into a couple of issues: 1 – my laptop was still running Vista (which won’t run Lightroom 5), 2 – the camera I want to use for this isn’t supported, and 3 – the slideshow module doesn’t auto-update with new images as they’re taken. So, I’ve upgraded to Windows 7 and I now have the tethered shooting handled by a free programme called digiCamControl; the images are then auto-imported into Lightroom. I then use a free plug-in called ‘Show Biz’ that handles the slideshow element (and supports the addition of images as they’re taken.) It sounds like a mess, but in practice it actually works seamlessly – the user / customer doesn’t see the workings, just the final slideshow of their self-shot photos appearing! There are a couple of things I need to now sort – a projector to display the pictures, and then I need to actually build a booth! I have some plans (see pic) and I think I’ll build it out of PVC pipe for lightness and portability. I’ll try and document how this little project goes in future posts.
Thanks for reading,
Al.
