After an afternoon at HyperJapan and not taking many photos, I was itching to use all this camera equipment I’d unpacked.  Fortunately, Danni was all done up in a cute outfit and willing to be my lovely model.

It was the nicest day so far this year so we opened up the patio to take advantage of the cherry blossoms erupting from the trees in the park.  Our patio worked out to be the perfect height to give us some lovely (if not a little busy) backdrops.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been hoping to do more of this year, but haven’t really gotten around to doing.  We’ve been busy with house hunting and that, coupled with a pair of photo shoots I’ve had fall through I haven’t done nearly as much portrait photography as I’d like.

Thanks to my lovely wife for being such a good sport, and to Pepsi for always getting involved whenever the lights and cameras come out!  There’s a couple more images in the gallery.

I’m still really enjoying my project, but it’s getting tricky to find the time every day for photos and I feel that March shows this more than the previous months.  There are several dull photos that were done just to fill the days requirements, but I’m blaming my move and engagement for taking up a lot of my free time.

I’m actually afraid to miss a day at this point because I’m worried that I’ll think ‘well, I’ve missed one day so one more won’t make a difference’.  I do the same thing when it comes to eating unhealthy food (well, I’ve had one cookie so I may as well finish off the bag), so it’s something I’m doing my best to avoid.

My goals for April are to shoot a few more portraits of my close friends here in London.  It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and this project gives me an easily explainable excuse so my friends don’t just think I’m being (even more) odd.

The overview page for the project is here, in case you’ve missed the progress so far.

2 down, 10 more to go!  I wish I could say it’s been easy just firing off a few shots each day and then picking the best of the bunch, but I tend to spend most of my day trying to think of just what to shoot.

I haven’t missed a day yet though and I’m really hoping to keep that up throughout the year.  There have already been one or two days when I’ve realized at 11:00PM I haven’t taken my shot for the day and had to rush to meet my deadline.  Close yes, but still on track!

February was a good month for practicing my off camera flash techniques, something I’m really happy with and will continue to do going forward.  March will be a busy month for a number of reasons; I’m due to move in the next week or so which will consume a lot of my free time (and all of my patience).  There may be more snap-shot style images for that reason so don’t be surprised to see more of the Casio in the EXIF details.

You can view my most recently posted image here, or if you’d like to view the year thus far you can see the calendar here.

As part of the website creation process for my fencing clubs new site I’ve taken several head shots of the coaches.  It’s the first time I’ve used a 3 light setup (having just picked up another 580 EX II while back home), and it wasn’t as difficult as I was expecting.  I think the trick is just to add one light at a time until everything looks the way you’d imagined.  The setup shot is here, where the tripod in the middle is where I had the subject stand.

In this case I wanted to use the colour of the walls in our gym to add a warm, orange-ish background and use a fairly fast shutter speed to kill any ambiant light and make the rest of the image darker.  In this way I could get an orange/black look that would match the colour scheme of the website and I’m quite happy with the results.

A couple of examples are here, and the rest are in the gallery.