When I first started shooting people I purchased a Chinese 3 light setup off eBay, it's still going strong.

Unfortunately it ruined me for a long time. Having 3 high powered strobes at my fingertips allowed me to blow out all the gaps in my own knowledge with more light, this led to a lot of flat, boring images. Great if you wanted a family photo but not if you wanted your light to tell a story.

This was my first attempt to rid my bad habit, limiting myself to a single speedlight for the entire shoot forced me to get creative and I learned more in those 2 hours than I had done in months.

Gwyn is a very old friend of mine.

We first worked together back when I was using my 60D and a great sigma 17-70 f4, a little step up from a kit lens. My photography has come a long way since then and be thankful you wont find any of those images on this site. 

I'm moving away soon so we wont be seeing each other for at least a year, we decided to get together and shoot again for the sake of old times. She brought this gorgeous headpiece which features prominently in this shoot. You'll find 3 images from that shoot in this gallery with 3 very different editing styles.

This is my favourite. A little story behind this image in particular: I decided to get this printed to hang on the wall at our new house, I had no time to do serious hair removal needed for a large print so I sent it off to a retoucher, great work! Unfortunately the image lost about 2/3rd of a stop of exposure and it's split toning in the process, this is a mix of the two images.

Once again Alexa brought me out of my comfort zone.

After having to relearn everything I knew about light with our single speedlight studio shoot we had some time left. Behind where I used to live was the Itchen Navigation and a riverside path, along that path was an old rusted lock which I've always thought would make a great place to shoot, unfortunately it's incredibly popular with dog walkers and hobby fishermen.

I've never liked having my camera interfere with other people, I'm sure we all know at least one obnoxious photographer who will inconvenience anyone for the sake of a shot, that's not me to a fault. For a couple of years I had missed out on this great spot for that reason, well we took a spotter with us and shot anyway! 

Gwyn is a very old friend of mine.

We first worked together back when I was using my 60D and a great sigma 17-70 f4, a little step up from a kit lens. My photography has come a long way since then and be thankful you wont find any of those images on this site. 

I'm moving away soon so we wont be seeing each other for at least a year, we decided to get together and shoot again for the sake of old times. She brought this gorgeous headpiece which features prominently in this shoot. You'll find 3 images from that shoot in this gallery with 3 very different editing styles.

These two pictures mark the first time I attempted to make money with a camera (Let's not count stock photography, to say that's a drip feed is an understatement.)

By this time I had built a good reputation on a model/photographer social site and was getting a pretty good response to my work. I had just about nearly bankrupted myself upgrading gear and thought I was ready to start a second source of income. 

I learned of a site called Zivity through someone I had worked with before, modelled on the same idea as SG but they actually paid the photographers! I decided to run headfirst into this, I booked and shot with two models who were also curious about Zivity, rushed through the editing and sent off my email and portfolio to their admin team....

Then the site went out of business.