“Fashion shoot, fashion shoot! I’m in a fashion catwalk tonight” said my friend and model Azzi Kalili. This was sent at about 1pm and the preparations for the event started approximately 7pm .. this gave me just enough time to go home after work, pick up my camera and head out the door.

I’d said to Azzi to please let me know when she does a fashion show and an open call to photographers occurs. I want to experience a lot in photography, try everything so that I can figure out if I enjoy it or not. I must say that I definitely learned a lot! Here’s the story of that evening of fun, mistakes and a whole lotta learning :D

Azzi is a queen at networking and her open call for photographers, along with Miss Elle Zadina’s; was answered by quite a number .. 9 in total I believe. Which is a considerable number saying as the main call only went out a few days before the event and me and 5 others only heard of the fashion show about 6 hours before the preparations started!

As with anything to do with fashion there’s always the preparation and the getting ready.

Elle Zadina was the fashion show organiser and PR wonder woman of the evening. Orchestrating organised chaos and also preparing all the models from hair and makeup, to dressing them along with the clothing designer, making sure they knew the sequence and placement of the walk on the bar and club floor .. and so much more. I caught a surprise photo of her and I’m pretty sure she’ll kill me for this but she also works as a model and her surprised face is still pretty darn beautiful.

I nipped downstairs to the club basement where a few of the boys were already dressed in the clothes for the show during the pre-show run down of where they were walking and posing. I must say this was the easiest time to be able to capture them in their finery!

After the quick rehearsal we all scuttled back upstairs to the 3rd floor which was reserved for the fashion show preparations. (Yes that means we kept running up and down 4 floors between the fashion show location and the preparation floor .. whooo, talk about exhausting.) So .. while the rest of the models were getting ready all the photographers grabbed them as soon as they were ready of waiting to get ready to do some impromptu photo shoots.

TIP: for any fashion show co-ordinators this is an ideal time for you to have somewhere (even a stairwell) where the photographers can shoot the models in their clothes. The effort has already been made for the fashion show, scheduling in 1 hour of shoot time for a few photographers to get a fashion show photos is great publicity and a great opportunity to do a photo shoot.

In addition to shooting some models looking gorgeous, one model wanted to ‘fly’ and play with her wonderfully floating clothing. So we had some fun and then I captured people gossiping while waiting for starting time of the fashions show.

I gave my card out to the clothing designer but she hasn’t been in touch. However if by some miracle you come across this blog and you are the designer of these clothes .. I’d love to work with you and do a proper fashion shoot using your clothes and I’ll organise a makeup artist and this same model to do so. Deal?! K, thanks :D

To wrap up, the following two photos were taking from the actual fashion show itself and with the lights dimmed and absolutely no space to stand back from the floor, due to it being crammed full of fashionistas .. it was a difficult shoot to say the least. But .. I learned a lot and when the next time comes around I’ll improve yet again.

My main problem in the evening that I discovered later was that I was enjoying the behind the scenes photography with my speedlight so much that I’d drained the spare set of batteries and didn’t have a second set to be able to do a quick fire series of shots during the fashion shoot itself. So you can see the photo on the left is lit from a speed light reflecting of the mirror ceiling .. yes you read that right, that was a mirror ceiling which cast really strong reflections and was incredibly hard to bounce diffuse light off. The second photo on the right is where I shot purely on my camera with existing light in the club itself .. this is a wide open aperture and a very high 1600 iso or some such. Trying to free a reasonably fast model who poses only for a split second is hard to do a dark nightclub fashion shoot! Oi vey!

So what were my big lessons from the event:

• Bring a notepad and pencil to take a rollcall of who’s who so that I can remember later!
• Find out the fashion show pre and post schedule
• On arrival, scout out some interesting spots to do an impromptu fashionphotoshoot
• Bring a stand and two speedlights, one can be hand held and the other positioned for more exiting lighting.
• Bring TWO sets of spare batteries for my speedlights!

Other than that, I had a really great time. It was hard to shoot amongst so many people with only two locations reserved for photographers and I’m not used to having to wrestle for a position with others shooting the same subject. I’m used to being able to remove myself from the crush and getting a different angle .. but not this time in such close quarters.

Plus the DJ at Molton House club and bar in London was fantastic that night, I couldn’t resist doing some mini dancing swaying and grooving in time with the music from one food to the other and not crash into the other male photographers who I’m pretty sure I amused with my not to subtle antics! lol

A good time, a great learning and an opportunity expand my personal photography experience into new areas.

CathieGraphy – London Fashion Photographer

Being a new business photographer, especially a new professional (vs amateur) photographer starting out in London .. it can be nerve wracking! I’ve had this dream and desire for many years to own my own business and make my own living. While I’m still fully employed in a day job, I know I’m starting with a good foundation.

Part of this foundation was to gain some more confidence in my skills. My work, photographs and designs speak for themselves but I needed to be sure in myself that I knew what I was talking about and how I can improve with my lighting skills. The thing I wasn’t so confident about was how to get a great shot within 5 minutes of getting an idea, setting up for the shot and grabbing it in my magic camera lens! Because, of course .. my camera is magic within my hands and no one has a bad picture in the end. It’s all about confidence, in myself and in the beauty and charisma of others being themselves in the moment.

Meet Studio Time’s – Speed light photography course teacher Brian Hillsden, who taught our class near London Fields train station and their gorgeous model of the day: Sofia Skvortsova. For the first part we learned about our cameras, our flashes and what gaps we have our knowledge. I started off with a bit of a hiccup scenario .. I’d forgotten the fact that while I’d been playing around with my camera the night before and had manually turned the on camera flash compensation to -3, its lowest power.. I had not turned it back. It took Brian reminding me to set all compensations back to zero to get my flash balancing correctly like everyone else. Woops!

After that though things went a lot better and I soon felt my confidence return. I learned about how an 18% grey card also works for exposure settings as well as for white balance .. who knew! I learned that the less distance a properly exposed speed light is to the subject the softer the wrap around lighting .. I always thought the opposite, but I now know that a bare exposure flash from a speed light can yield amazingly soft shadows. I would never have believed .. my proof was in the pudding before me in previous experience. It took doing a class to teach me otherwise and I was READY to learn.

I’ve specialised more in the dramatic lighting, normally found in theatre work as I like to play act being characters other than myself. Yes I’m interesting but I live with myself 365days a year and I need something to play at to learn something more about myself and to push further in my skills. So I thought I knew how to soften a speed lights harsh edges. Uhuh .. riiiiight. I admit it, I was wrong in what I thought I knew and now I know different .. I’m free to improve in another grand leap. Just wait and see.

So for fledgling efforts in redoing what I know about speed light, Sofia stepped up to the hot seat and let us all practise our new lighting skills on her. Miss @SofiaSkvortsova deserves a medal, despite a cold and feeling under the weather she was a star. Smiling out our geeky humour in the class, our sudden bouts of nerves when things did NOT work as we expected and got flustered. She was perfectly graceful and understanding.

So the challenge for me was to find a more subtle and gentle light from speed lights that have not been diffused by gauze, soft boxes or filters. We, of course, did use a soft box but the great surprise for me was bouncing light from a faux wall (made from polystyrene) and also from a home made beauty dish. Which gives me hope of being able to build a replica myself! Here are the results from that play time in the day.

One of the really suave comments that I said, just because I thought it so I said it kinda thing, is that Sofia has the clearest whitest eyes I’ve ever seen. Really, truly .. I’ve never seen eyes like hers that are so white. Especially not a person with a cold to boot. I admit to cringing internally the minute I said it but there we go. I’m a goof ball, very cool and collected with the compliments. Yeah. So no I have not dodged, lightened or done anything to her eyes apart from a  slight sharpen action to bring out more details.

Anyway. The biggest thing that I learned to do that day was to use my light meter in conjunction with my speed lights. I knew it would revolutionise things for me and I’ve had my big Oprah style ‘Aha’ moment .. yes, Oprah dear I know you trademarked that but we all still say we have aha moments. I now know exactly how to set for the ambient light I want in the background and how to tweak the speed lights to perfectly expose my subject with the f.stop giving my much loved narrow depth of field. This is a very big *happy sigh* moment right there and I think this next photo says it perfectly. Its everything I wanted to achieve from the day: soft, v. narrow depth of field focus and a feeling of natural light from a flash!

To wrap up the day I tried two experimental lenses, one was mine and one was Brians. Mine is a lensbaby 2.0, it allows me to bend the sweet focal spot in the photo to exactly where I want it .. well, it takes a bit of guess work and effort when shooting at f.1.0 but still .. practise makes perfect and this was my best experimental shot.

The lens that I truly want to steal from Brian is the Defocusing Lens that he has. It is such a soft dreamy focus on the lens but also manages to have absolute pin clarity in details. How it manages to do that I do not know but .. it does! You can see that with the photo of my classmate Anna on the right. Forgive me Anna!

There we have it .. new confidences, new friends, new models, networking and skills to round out the day. Plus I found a new sometin’ sometin’ to coveat .. a defocusing lens which costs the earth!

Thanks to all who took part in that day and to helping me get closer to one of my photography goals: being able to set up within 5 minutes and get a perfect exposure. All I need now is practise, practise and practise. So who wants to model for me?

- CathieGraphy – London Photographer

Today I took a personal holiday day, in London of course, from my day job and I LOVED it! I decided to boost my confidence and signed up to the Studio Time – Speedlight photography course. Yes I could already use my speedlights in a studio type setting but not so much for fast shoots in weddings and 5 minute portrait jaunts. All my studios based in various locations I’ve lived have a ‘few’ things in common. My photography has always been shot in my lounge, kitchen, dining room and even a few times my bed room when I had a large room with great big white walls.

But I digress. I’m tired, I’m happy, slightly hungry and very ready for bed. I woke up at 5 am and was so excited to see this day that I daren’t go back to sleep just in case I slept in! So I preped my bag and whittled down my photography gear to the essentials I knew I wanted. I was ready .. but this is a story for another day. I’m almost out like a light and while I may be typing this I’m doing so with my eyes closed .. ready to close the laptop lid, switch of my flower vine lights and curl in bed to sleep.

Before I do though, I wanted to shout to the blogoverse out there that I had a great day, everyone should know this fact (sarcasm alert for the previous statement!) aaaaand .. above is my favourite photo from today with the lovely Sofia Skvortsova from Model Mayhem! The gorgeous one, with the honey dew eyes you see above ;)

G’night internet.

- CathieGraphy

Good morning, enjoy your week ahead. If any of you are going through tough times .. just remember, don’t stop because you’ll still be stuck in tough times, just keep going. “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, what can we do but swim, swim, swim.” .. Let me know if you recognise this movie snippet.

It’s been a while since I’ve really done some proper design work in Illustrator. Since I’ve played around doing realism in vector form. Well .. this isn’t it! I’ve just been wanting to dabble in illustrator and pick up, then dust off, my old vectoring skills. I’ve mainly used vector work for corporate identity and branding design. A prime example being my cathiegraphy heart ID. The aperteur heart was made in illustrator and I’ve only just found an easier way to make it!! Such is life.

So I thought I’d make an inspiration quote mock up poster. Its nothing really fancy, as I’m after simplicity when making a 15 minute effort design. Nothing too hard but trying some new techniques.

- CathieGraphy

So this past three days of this Bank Holiday weekend I’ve: moved out from my London flat to my own property outside of London, been to see a movie, sunbathed, edited an entire wedding, and I’m spending this next week preparing for moving back into London. Back to being a London Portrait Photographer and Designer par excellence!

I’m a bit of a geek so a light fake tan is my main source of colour on occassion but I managed to see some sun and make my body into a Vitamin D factory for a bit.

I also went to see the movie “Prince of Persia – The Sands of Time” and it was a classic action movie, with a candy floss story to loose yourself in but doesn’t unravel on you to make you bored. Loved it and the comical whit included was enough to make my friend and I snigger and laugh in places.

The rest of the weekend was spent playing and editing my cousins wedding photos on my laptop in my shorts and T, with a lovely cross breeze from my windows *happy sigh*.

Last weekend I shared a sneak peek blog post with one of the images from my lovely cousins wedding and this weekend I got to properly take time (not just two hours for the next morning family breakfast showing) to peruse what to keep from the selection. Just before I started editing I shared on facebook the fact that I ‘almost’ didn’t want to start editing because if something is started it means that it also has to end .. at some point!

For me the general editing is over and I’ve put into my client proofing gallery all their photos from the selection of over 1000 photos on the day to just over 300 for proofing. I’ve not yet included the photos I’m also acquiring from the other amateur photographer friends of Tim and Lucy’s to the collection, but when I do the selection will grow massively!

So while one part of this wedding editing is over I’m very happy that my ‘consolation’ prize is to start making my true wedding present to them .. my secret project! Woohooo! Does a quick Glee show tune moment in my head and has just realised that .. yup .. I’m letting the fact I’m doing a secret project outta that bag .. so we’ll see if the cookson family read this blog or not. They may know I love photography but until the wedding I don’t think they really knew just HOW much I LOVE PHOTOGRAPHY!

Oh and to show my eeevil weevil streak I’m not saying what my project is .. I’m going to leave that up to you to guess and wonder.But. To be kind  I’m going to slip you another sneak peek photo. It is one that I fall in love with every time I see it. If ever I’ve seen a smile of joy and happiness, this .. this is what we all yearn for.

I hope you enjoyed your mini holiday / three day weekend everyone in the UK and to my other worldwide readers .. yah boo and sucks to you! *ahem* I mean to say, I hope you enjoyed your twooooo day weekend as per usual :D

Ps. I booked tickets for the Wireless Festival in London Hyde Park in July this year as @pink is headlining it. I’m super duper excited about it, I gotta get my P!nk fix somehow, ttfn.

I had the absolute pleasure of shooting my cousins wedding this past weekend. Tim and Lucy have been together for 13 years and love each other absolutely. They met at university and have loved each other ever since through thick and thin with the grooms speach making a joke about him being thick and she’s thin!

They are a joy and I love them both dearly. I’m so glad they gave me the opportunity to shoot their wedding .. it would have been pure agony for me to attend and not be able to shoot the photos I see happening every minute of the day. I would have been happy for them but I confess to loving them even more for allowing my creative heart to capture their day for them.

Here is a sneak peak until I manage to process the entire collection.

My portfolio of portraits needed some new works put into it to share with you all and I called upon my local London model muse: Azzi Kalili. There is a stretch of road not far from where I live that has a wonderful black iron gated strip gardens with daffodils in them. Its one of those narrow stretch of public gardens that people never sit in but I always admire when i walk past when the flowers are blooming.

Spring is a gorgeous time of year, I love the overall feeling of waking up from a long sleep and the world being refreshed again. This is what I wanted to capture with the daffies that were in bloom. I showed a sneak peek from that shoot a few blog posts ago but here is the selection of works that I think really captured the beauty and presence of Azzi as well the feelings of spring. A calm fresh portrait of a beautiful woman with loads of creativity.

I also like the fact that the daffies are white instead of the traditional yellow. So much green and bright colours .. love it!

I hope everyone is enjoying the warmer weather .. I’m really excited and can’t wait there is a family wedding I’m attending in 48 hours time .. oh la la!

- CathieGraphy – London Portrait Photographer

Regarding blog design: I need to make a declaration .. I’m a geek. Bona fide, certified with two computing degrees geek! I love my geek status but sometimes I do worry wether I’ll loose it from not using my developer skills. This blog design is kicking my ass all around hte coding court but in the last three months of very sparodic internet I’ve grabbed effectively 6 days of intense coding within the behind the scenes of this site.

It’s been helped and hindered by using The Thesis Theme for WordPress. WordPress in turn is an open source blogging platform that I use on a host on my own servers. It means that when I want something a certain way .. then I’ll sweat at it until I get it that way, or something has truly broken and I can’t figure out how to fix it, or inspired me and I do i’ll code it that way now! A few months ago, ie. a few internet hiccups ago I was totally new to Thesis but now .. I think I’m slowly beginning to get a handle on things.

As such this site has gone through 3 design iterations .. first was a basic white boxy layout, second was a dark mahogony wood style and now this third style is a mix of graphic design, wood flooring, magazines and photography. All elements which reflect me to a T. This is the design you see now on this site.

I’ve been umming and ahh’ring about my various skills. Do I create a portfolio for each style or merge them together? I’ve been inspired by so many creative artists who have done either / or. So I decided that for me, right now, I’m going to keep them all together. I love design, presenting information, images, lines and curves to present ideas .. lovely jubbly. I also love photography with its’ lights, shadows, emotions and history in the making.

So I’ve learned how to use WordPress over the last year, Thesis in the last 6 months but really got into doing relocating parts of the design due to using WordPress + Thesis hooks. Hooks are a really nifty design idea for coders and then I’ve been brushing up my old css + html skills and the only thing that has me really stumped now are image sprites for CSS and why oh why do some of my linked images show up but others don’t?!

Bizarre .. but I’m very happy with the progress so far as I think its my best design .. well, until I find the next big upgrade I can do! While I think about it, a tip for any thesis designers + coders out there. Tip: Code specifically for the full fluid width frame Thesis design and don’t bother with the fixed width one .. the layout of the div boxes is fast to understand and design for with the full width frame .. even if you have a fixed column width in the middle of it like mine!!

Tip: Code specifically for the full fluid width frame Thesis design

Anyway .. I’m now 14 hours later into coding and a brand new design is done (saying as I first tried to code for fixed width and that just doesn’t work but working for full fluid width design was easier) and now I’m ready for bed. My face seems to have settled into stasis, it refuses to work properly it’s so tired.

G’night US peeps who are still up and hope the insomniacs in the UK finally get some shut eye.

- CathieGraphy, a london designer.

Before I even picked up my first camera, my first love in computer arts was graphic design. One of my favourites aspects of design that I’ve learned is: negative space. It’s an absense of anything surrounding a point of focus that you want to highlight. You can see that in my new header design on show at the top of this blog. My second favourite is the rule of thirds; beauty and balance is usually found in a fibonacci spiral which roughly divides in thirds. You can also see this clearly in my work with the off centre composition.

beauty and balance is usually found in a fibonacci spiral

Nearly everything to do with my creative art skills in graphic design and photography I’ve taught myself; except for a small course I did with an online design school based in new york called Sessions.Edu. They helped me understand ‘New Media and Marketing’ way back when in  2001.

Some of my more recent facinations in the last couple of years especially has been surrounding fonts. I love love love the indie band pamphlets that get strewn around the streets and universities. Grants its now been a few years since I left university for my undergraduate and I was working while I did my postgraduate studies .. well I still see the designs but I no longer go to the gigs they are advertising.

So that has been something I’ve been wanting to work on. Using fonts to illustrate a quote, to make a design out of words, phrases, slips of the tongue that sound great.

I have so many quotes that inspire me in life but the main one for me is by Confucius – Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it. The first time I read this I took it to heart. Its explained so many life lessons I’ve learned and sums up my view point in life quite well in a lot of ways.

How about you? What quotes do you love in life?

.. to remind us to live, smile and continue on even when its mad, crazy and feels like black and white. I’m undergoing quite a lot of change at the minute so this blog is something I will try to keep up but forgive me if I slip up here or there. I’m without internet (apart from what I can stream through my phone and rapidly reaching my 2 gig a month data limit) and I’m in between homes as I’m about to move out and move into a new place. I can’t handle not having reliable internet as I’m trying to run a business here and I need connection!!

*takes deep breathes to not hyperventilate*

Doing research into ShowIt portfolio and the +sites option as I’ve been inspired by Jasmine Star.  Just need to get more regular london portrait photographer commissions in order to justify the expense .. although I know the social media boom effect pay off from this would be huge!

But what’s all this chatter about. You are here for photographs, as well as my slightly insane personality that is part of parcel with me at the minute! This is another sneak peek shot from the same shoot with Azzi last week but we shot two different topics .. personal headshots and the last post featured a bridal shot as if from a wedding.  I wanted to remember fun times so I’ve spent today editing the shoot and we’ve captured some fantastic photos .. a few of which I’ll show here and more on Flickr as well.

Too many thoughts, so much going on, can I just shrivel off the need to sleep so that I can get through all this!!

Hopes to make it to the countryside in a few hours to meet with friends and shoot their family portrait .. so excited :)

Eeep .. nearly burned out my phone it’s so hot from doing constant 3G roaming to stream my internet!! Better post this now before it explodes. You can tell I’m tired because I’m thinking, writing and talking in exclamation points. Yikes.