A Great Event Shoot for Christmas.

In my previous post, I promised that I’d not leave it so long before my next update – and here it is!  The headline piece of activity is that we were really honoured to do the portrait photography for the RAF Cosford Officers’ Mess Christmas Draw.  We had a fantastic evening, with all the guests having a great time and loving having their photographs taken, the fun props ensured people kept coming back for more!  If you were at the event, and you ordered prints on the night, they are right now being produced by my favourite pro print lab (the excellent Loxley Colour)  and will be with me later this week ready for mounting and sending back to the Mess for you to collect.  If you didn’t order on the night, you can still get prints and downloads direct from my sales website – just follow the link under ‘Client Galleries’.

You may have seen on my FaceBook page that I’d ordered a ‘roller banner’ for advertising at events, wedding fayres and the like.  It was a really good ‘Black Friday’ deal from Colour 24; I was especially pleased that it arrived in time for the Christmas Draw and that it has come out looking fantastic (if I do say so myself!)

A relatively short update this time around, but I should have a couple more posts before Christmas, as there are a couple of interesting assignments coming up.  This is the first blog post that I’ve integrated with an e-mail distribution service – so if you’re getting this in your in-box it’s because you’ve booked us previously or bought images from us. I don’t want to fill inboxes unnecessarily, so if you’d rather not receive future blog posts, then there should be an ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the e-mail (I won’t be offended!)

Thanks as ever for the support and messages.

Al.

Shooting the Ball

I recently had the privilege of being booked to take the (semi)formal event photographs at the RAF Cosford Officer’s Mess Summer Ball.  This was a great evening taking photographs of the guests in front of a classic car.

At most of these events, the photos are taken indoors, with very stable and constant lighting – effectively, get set up and then you don’t have to alter your settings all night.  However – this wasn’t such an easy setup!  The location was outdoors, starting at 7pm through to 10pm.  So I started in quite bright sunshine (setting behind the guests) and ended up in pretty much pitch black night!  So, pretty challenging…  I also had to contend with the wind blowing my lights over, or making them swing around so they weren’t pointing in the right direction -  luckily a swift application of tie-wraps sorted most of the issues!

Choosing their picture.

In order to make it really easy for the guests to choose their pictures, I was shooting tethered into my laptop, with this connected to a flat screen TV.  My original plan for tethering to the laptop was to use an Eye-Fi memory card, that sends the pictures over a Wi-Fi link.  Whilst this worked flawlessly in every test running up the event, it stubbornly refused to send any more than 2 pictures when I’d got set up.  So, I swung plan B into action – which took the form of a 5 metre USB cable!  Whilst this limited my movement slightly, it did give me a robust way of getting the pictures to where I needed them.  More testing is required with the Eye-Fi card before the next event, as when it works, it's a fantastic way to work giving much more freedom of movement.

Despite my difficulties, I adapted and overcame and most importantly I got some great pictures, and some very happy customers!  A good tally of sales on the night, and download and print sales from the website in the week that followed made it a really worthwhile event.