Bodiam Castle

On a grey Saturday morning I paid a quick visit to my favourite castle. Bodiam Castle in East Sussex is everything a castle should be, with a perfect moat around the outside, turrets, and not too many people visiting it.

If Carlsburg made castles, they'd look like this.

Red Rock Canyon

It was raining as I was driving out of Las Vegas.  It's rained so rarely during my visits to Vegas that I really hoped it would follow me out to Red Rock Canyon.  Sadly, it didn't, but the dramatic skies did.  I love how the opening picture came out, taken from High Point Overlook with the southern most bit of Las Vegas in view.  The white buildings you can see in the middle are South Point Casino.

Update: All photos here are taken with the Canon S95 camera.

The Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas

The last time I visited Fremont Street in Las Vegas the lights of all the casinos there went dark every 20 minutes or so, and the street canopy light show would begin. Now its all changed. The light show runs all of the time, the casino lights don't go dark, and there is lots more to see there. Live music is on every corner, and there showgirls, Elvii (apparently that is the plural for Elvis), and much more.

Outtake from a stock photoshoot

A quick snap of what a shoot looks like behind the scenes. My reflector holder, Russ, was multitasking and trying to take a business phone call while also reflecting light onto my wonderful Japanese model Kozue.

Ever had one of those days?

An expressive stock photoshoot

I love it when a beautiful woman is confident enough to make silly faces to the camera.

I really like this photo of Aycan.

Shooting an Italian business woman in London

The other day while I was in London I asked my Italian friend Francesca if she'd be interested in shooting some "sexy business photos".  She was.  The following afternoon we found ourselves at a cold Canary Wharf.  It was just a couple of days after the attempted car bomb in New York's Time Square so they had stepped up security and we had to stop the car twice for them to look in the boot.

Canary Wharf is a perfect place for a modern business shoot - its clean and clinical, and at weekends fairly quiet.  My only concern had been that technically it's all private property so unlike shooting on a street in the City of London which is public land, I was aware of the fact that we might be asked to stop and move on.

As it happened, asides from a couple of curious Docklands Light Railway staff nobody appeared to give a damn, and we were left alone to do battle with the cold and the wind.

Francescas Italian style was great, and if that's how the average Italian business woman dresses then I think I want to do business in Italy!

I want to revisit this shoot in the near future and try it again under nicer conditions.  It was just a little too cold, a little too windy, and quite a lot too dark to get really optimal "stock library business images".

Fun stock photoshoot in London

Last weekend I did a few stock photoshoots while I was in London.  These are a few pictures of my shoot with Emma.  We started off shooting in and around an old bombed out church near Monument, and then as terrential hail and rain came down we moved the shoot to underneath a bridge somewhere near Canary Wharf.  It was hardly an ideal day for shooting outside, but with a positive attitude from Emma, and some help from my friend Jorge we got the job done and I'm really quite pleased with the results.

Stop using stock images!

So when my client that I photographed earlier today was booking the shoot they were telling me how currently they were using stock photography.

Now there is nothing wrong with stock imagery as such, I've just started to submit my work through the fotolia library.  I've only got 3 images there at the moment, and I haven't sold anything yet, but these things take time and I'll be uploading loads more images over the coming weeks.

They'd bought 10 images from I believe iStock (not that I'm singling out iStock by any means, it just happens to be where they bought their images from).  The images they were using were all excellent photos, technically perfect, with pretty models.  The trouble with stock images is that they are kind of generic, and my client was telling me that they were starting to see the same or very similar images on their competitors websites.

It's hard to stand out from the crowd when your rivals are using the same images.

Their solution to this was to call in a professional.  That's me by the way!

Interestingly, and while we're on the subject of standing out from the crowd, it was by doing just that that got me the call to do this job.  I'd met one of the company directors at Business South at the Rose Bowl a few weeks earlier, and we engaged in a conversation about road trips around the USA because of the moose photo on my business card.  Now if I'd  have had my old business card with 'boring' sensible photos on, would we have had that conversation, would I have stood out in his memory and would I have got the gig?  Chances are slim on all counts.

The client had a good idea what he wanted, and infact had printed off some images from iStock for us to use as a guide.  They photos as I said were excellent.  No point trying to re-invent the wheel.  The big difference being that the new photos were of his staff, in his office, and no other bugger would be using the same images.

The end result is that for a relatively small amount of money my client now has (or will when he gets the photos and uploads them) a more original website, original imagery and a better chance of standing out from the crowd.

So if you're guilty of the same stock imagery crime, give a photographer a bell, talk to them, you might be surprised at just how cheaply you can get your own original images done.

I've included a few photos from todays shoot, with the wonderful people from Frontline Telephone Answering Services.  I enjoy my work most days, but today was really quite fun.  There are some good people working at Frontline.  It was a pleasure to shoot them.