The Photo Blog

Following on from my previous blog entries, a recent trip to London resulted in another celebrity in the can for the ongoing charity campaign,‘Checkum’. This time we photographed former Hollyoaks star Marcus Patrick (aka Ben Davies), who has also appeared in BBC TV’s Strictly Ice Dancing and Weakest Link, amongst others. Although we used a central London studio, my assistant Andrea and I carried our own Elinchrom studio flash and modifiers, along with the usual Nikon D2x and 70-200 2.8 vr and 50mm 1.8 lenses. In terms of lighting, we predominantly used a medium soft box on the key light and a second flash was modified with a large honeycomb and became the backlight. A third flash head was used to light the background and was tightly channeled to get a soft spot effect using a snoot.

The campaign, in aid of testicular cancer awareness is now underway and the posters are due to be on display at various public venues, including shopping malls, major rail stations and universities and colleges. Keep following my blog, Twitter and Facebook feeds for updates on the Checkum campaign - and learn who will be the next celebrity to bare all for charity? Click any image for large view.

Monday the 1st of November took me to a central Manchester studio to photograph star of X Factor, Laura White. The photos were taken mostly for merchandising purposes for Laura’s current tour with Peter Andre, the cover of her new tour CD, plus her website and Twitter site - more info on Laura’s blog here. Working closely with GSD design, we managed to pull off a very successful shoot, despite an extremely tight deadline. I managed to organise a fantastic team at very short notice - Annie Roberts of Artisan on hair, Sadaf Saeed on makeup and shoot art director, Andrea Hughes.

After a day spent sat at my Mac clicking away the chosen images, I can truly say the results look stunning. Laura was an absolute pleasure to photograph, with a character that kept all involved in high spirits throughout the entire day.

You can see some of the completed artwork featuring my images at GSD’s website here (click on ‘music’ in the menu to see the artwork). All photos shot with a Nikon D2x and 70-200 vr 2.8 nikon lens and Bowens flash.  All images are copyright protected.  Click on any image for a larger view.

Next stop London to photograph a former star from Hollyoaks - all will be revealed at a later date.