I love photographing newborn babies. When they are very new there’s a lovely stage which is feed and crash drunk with milk!
That’s the look here
‘Tugging at the heart strings’ is such an evocative phrase.
This week one of my most pleasurable shoots was a 12 day old baby – he really stirred the emotions I always feel with very new babies.
Parents may have a set of huge expectations for their child, but to me, each baby is an amazing achievement which we take all too much for granted.
See this little man and wonder what his life will be like!
This family is South African so an expectation that he will know about and come into contact with elephants is not far fetched. Maybe they will even be his favourite animal! The hat he’s wearing and the creature behind him in the picture may influence that as no doubt there will be lots of bedtime stories about elephants as he grows up.
He also looks cute in his Springboks hat and nothing else!
I’m always very interested in how people describe the wedding photography style they prefer.
Despite often saying that they only want informal pictures not posed shots and no groups, Brides then often find that a picture with Mum is essential (and why not!) and their family, his family, their girl friends, his stag do group and so on.
That means they do actually want group pictures after all.
Making these entertaining is so important to me! I can’t bear the stiff collections of people one used to see in old fashioned wedding photography.
So finding a way to undestand exactly what a Bride wants and then ensuring it’s delivered is key to successful imagery in my mind.
Some of my more informal wedding pictures are shown here, including flower girl melt down! 
Now do you call this reportage or what?….
Also check out my animoto show of pictures to make you smile
Well I hope you had a wonderful holiday over Christmas and the New Year break.
I usually expect to watch a little more television than during the rest of the year but I was overjoyed this year to find my favourite Ballet dancer Darcie Bussell on TV. Not only that she was emulating my favourite tap dancer Fred Astaire.
What a fantastic programme that was. Glimpses of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers shows I used to watch when I was young and then seeing Darcie’s version of “putting on the Ritz” I leaned a lot about the different styles of dance and how she had to adjust as well as enjoying watching how well she could do the routine after only 3 weeks working on it!
Then this week we went to see “Strictly Gershwin” at the English National Ballet – a fantastic fun show with magic tap dancers as well as balletic interpretations of Gershwin’s music.
The audience was mostly elderly, and I was amused to hear one woman who must have been in her 70s say just what I was thinking “I wish I had learned to tap dance”!
We still think we are teenagers inside!
So to illustrate this I offer you a picture of a young budding ballerina that I took recently.
May 2012 be the best year yet for you and your family and friends
I am behind the times in discovering the joy of the BBC programme Spooks. I’m now viewing it on the iPad at the gym. It certainly works wonders for exercise motivation!
This morning’s episode had a meeting between spooks in the Natural History Museum, beside the dinosaur skeleton.
In this excellent recent photo shoot, the person gives scale to the grandeur of the building.
A great example of corporate imagery making a statement about the premises where they work. It looks like a cathedral don’t you think?.
It seems that interest in the Higgs boson is growing in the run up to data revelations from the LHC next week.
I recently had the opportunity to meet and photograph Professor Higgs and he had his first encounter with an iPad which he definitely enjoyed.
Can you see what he is drawing? Maybe a boson, or a sombrero potential?
I love watching David Attenborough’s programmes and last night’s episode of the Frozen Planet series, as usual, provided me with a new bit of information that seems so simple and yet is a surprise.
It never occurred to me that a dorsal fin is an impediment to winter in the arctic, but you can see looking at the dorsal fin of an orca (killer whale) how tall it is and this immediately makes sense.
By contrast the Sperm whale has a much less pronounced dorsal fin, and as I learned last night the Bowhead whale has no dorsal fin.
In New Zealand I saw both Orcas and Sperm whales and they are so impressive. Once again it is a privilege to see such massive, graceful creatures so close up.
I am not a specialist nature photographer and so the pictures are a bonus for me to look back on, even if they are not my usual subject matter.
While in the Arctic I went on a sea eagle safari.
These magnificent birds are so fast and elegant it’s a tremendous privilege to watch them.
From soaring high above to sweeping down takes seconds and the capture of a fish in their claws is the work of a moment.
Unbelievable grace, speed and accuracy, and a breathtaking performance.
Google reminds me that today is the 224th anniversary of the birth of Daguerre, inventor of the Daguerrotype a way to ‘print’ images.
He wasn’t the inventor of photography, that was Henry Fox Talbot some years earlier, but Daguerre was the first to patent his process in 1839, limiting its use. At first mercury was used to cure the plates on which the images were recorded so it was dangerously toxic. Previously exposures had to be for many hours so were totally impractical for portraits. Each image was unique.
What a long way we’ve come!
The arctic.
A wonderful sunrise, but it didn’t last long as within an hour of first seeing the light it had disappeared behind cloud. The amazing effects of the sun’s rays as it creeps over the mountain took my eye.
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