It’s time for our annual batch of Christmas photos, this time in our new home!  We managed to find an excellent tree this year, and Netflix had an excellent ‘Fireplace movie’ that I played the hell out of.  Sad, I know.  But I put our space heater under the TV and it was almost like the real thing!

Mom had brought us some photo ball ornaments last year, so we used our family portrait from last year as a pretty good option.  The reverse was a photo of Pepsi of course.

Christmas morning and Pepsi was right in there looking for his gifts. We’re pretty lucky he’s still with us after his big surgery back in October and his on-going chemotherapy. He’s pretty tough for a cat well into his 17th year.

And here is this year’s family portrait. For the first time since our wedding it was just the two of us together for Christmas, so it was a nice, quiet evening and we dragged Pepsi into the photos this year.

Hope you all had a brilliant holidays! There are some more images in the gallery here.

Danni and I have been wanting to do a bit of a photo shoot in a nearby park with Danni in her ballet shoes.  We took a short bus ride (actually 2 bus rides as I realized after the first trip that my camera battery was dead) to Beddington Park to take advantage of some of the lovely scenery.

One of my favourite shots of the day.  It wasn’t a particularly complex setup, just a single flash with a shoot-through umbrella to Danni’s left.  It doesn’t take much to make her look good!

We did a couple of natural light images that turned out quite nicely as well.

It always amazes me that someone can look so graceful while balancing themselves on their tip-toes, but I think she certainly managed it here.  There are some more photos in the gallery as usual.

I was apparently a well behaved little boy this year.  Well enough to warrant and excellent gift of Lego from my visiting mom which just so happened to provide me with the rest of the cast to complete the fellowship.

I’ve been putting together a few bits and bobs that I’d need to try to recreate this movie poster with Lego minifigs and finally had everything I needed.  So, this is how it turned out:

I’m quite pleased with the final result.  I think the mountains in the background are the real weak point overall and I know what I’d do differently if I were to shoot as similar image again.  Just about everything on the minifigs is Lego with a few exceptions.  Gimli’s axe is blu-tac’d to his helmet, Bormir’s shield is actually a Euro 5¢ coin and Aragorn has a bit of floral foam as a blowing cloak plus a blu-tac backpack and a needle for whatever that skinny thing is supposed to be sticking out there.  An arrow maybe?  Who carries one arrow?  Especially with Legolas right there.  You’re hardly going to add much to his ranged offensive power with a single arrow.  Now that I mention it, he’s not actually carrying a bow.  Maybe he’s at the back of the line because he’s just another pack mule?  It’s possible I may have been staring at this setup for too long…

Here’s a quick shot of the setup.  I had my lovely assistant/wife Danni hold some lumps of stuffing (aka: clouds) just above the mountains for the upper cloud effect in the image.  Apart from that, it was pretty much as you see it here in the setup.  Well, and some minor colour tweaks in Photoshop.

After a lot of planning and a few models falling through, Rob and I finally managed to arrange a springtime photo shoot.  We had a loose idea of a few images we wanted to do and after a quick scout of the area (near Ashdown Forest) we met up with our model for the day, Jo.

Our first stop was Chidingstone Castle, which had some lovely grounds and lots of early blooming flowers. It was rather open to the elements and the day was cold and windy, so we fired off a few ‘standard’ shots here and moved on to the next location in fairly short order.

I’d had a couple of ideas for images I wanted to do on this shoot which is a bit unusual for me.  Generally speaking, when we go out shooting photos with models I just kind of wing it as each location is different as are the models.  Since we’ve been talking about this outing for a while, I had some time to envision a few images that were slightly more staged.  I even drew up some prototype sketches (which are embarrassing and won’t be shown here) of what I wanted to try.

This first is this image.  It’s fairly close to what I’d had in mind, with a couple of exceptions.  I’d hoped to have the ‘axe man’ smaller in the image so he appeared to be further away.  Unfortunately, even really stopped down he was blown away by normally welcome bokeh to the point where he just appeared to be a dark blob.  Also, my radio triggers were having issues with the distance for some reason even though we were well within their stated ranges.  The other issue I had was I was hoping for a brighter backlight, but this was down to just having a single flashgun firing off in the middle of the day.  I just didn’t think that one through enough.

This second planned image turned out ok, but looked quite different in my head. The clouds are a bit too dense to look realistic and I’m not 100% happy with how the light turned out.  It’s alright though as the whole thing was sort of a learning experience and anything that pushes my photoshop mojo (or lack thereof) is a good thing.

These four shots are all of the images from the day, so no need for the usual gallery link.  We’re hoping to get out again before the end of the month to get some images in the bluebell fields.  I’ve been saying every year for the past five years that I’ll get out and shoot some bluebells, so fingers crossed for this year!

Danni and I made the lengthy bus ride from West Brompton to what was worryingly describable as a ‘ghetto’ on Sunday.  Fortunately, the ghetto was just where the bus terminated and London’s lovely Richmond Park was just down the street and around the corner.

We don’t make it out this far that often, so we had a purpose in mind.  A lot of my fellow photographer friends come to the park in order to photograph the wildlife like the many, many deer that can be found here, but we were after a doe of a different kind.

Danni was kind enough to get dolled up and pose for a few photos in the chilly winter air.  She was a real trooper as it was only about 3°C and she hadn’t actually picked an overly warm outfit for the day.

All three images were shot roughly the same way.  One great, big softbox sporting 2 of Canon’s 580 flashes as a main light, and a single, unmodified flash (another 580) as a rim light.

Normally this is where I’d link to the remaining images in the gallery, but as it was so cold we only took about 15 shots in total and quite a few of those showed my poor wife visibly shaking from the cold.  You’ll have to make due with 3 images I’m afraid!