In the interim, I’ve just joined PurplePort to see what all the fuss is about!

Summer Flowers

I’ve been neglecting the garden too.

Spitfire Flypast

Well, it’s been a bit quiet, so here’s an image of a Spitfire doing an acrobatic flypast at Marvellous Festivals 2011.

Fireplace Lingerie

Another from Studland.

Model/MUA: Victoria Summers

Sixties Dress

And this is the other model from my Studland shoot.

Model/MUA: RainStorm

I may disable this if I’m suffering from too much spam however.

Cream Dress

Well, this is my first edit of the Studland images (minus the out-take images).

This is Victoria Summers wearing her cream dress on the balcony.

Model/MUA: Victoria Summers

Beach Babes

I spent yesterday at Studland Bay House amongst fellow photographers as part of a venue share organised by Gary Wallace.

RainStorm and I drove down, collecting our friend Nikita Sablier (she was working for someone else) at 6am from the station to be there for 9am. Firstly, we were early (8:15am), and secondly – the people I assumed were groundskeepers were the people who had rented the house for their holiday! I only thought of this after I’d asked to use the bathroom and interrupted the last day of their holiday.

The house is massive and lovely. The extended kitchen and utility room was set aside for make up, styling and bacon sarnies (thanks Gary!) and the rest of the house and grounds was free for use. The weather was fabulous so we even managed the kilometre walk to the beach to take some shots!

I had the joy of having RainStorm and Victoria Summers as my models for the day. Victoria drove herself up from the West Country to be with us and was an absolute blast. She is a really lovely lady in person.

It was great to catch up with friends – Sean O’Malley, GDSandy, Nikkia, Ace, KK1, Button, and meet new ones – Gary Wallace, Tony Nutley, Monseigneur, Ace, Victoria Summers, Sinopa Rin, Matts Brabus, MrInitials.

I’ll post some more photos as I edit them (or as the models choose them).

Models/MUAs: Victoria Summers / GD Sandy

Let me start by saying these are the allocated-slot versions. For the studio days, you pay a set fee for a set period (say £50 for an hour working one-on-one with a model). For the groupshoot, you pay for the entire day (say £100) and get an hour with each model and possibly in a different location/set. I am not discussing venue-share arrangements (where you pay for an entire day at a location and provide your own model whom you work with all day).

My general opinion is simple – they’re great for networking, but don’t expect fantastic photos.

How come?

Because it takes time to set up the shot and to make it unique, and the model needs time to get prepared and settle into the shoot.

If you’re allocated an hour in a dance-card system, take 15 minutes for the model changeover. This will mean a rapid clothes change and minimal make up changes. Generally this will overrun due to the previous photographer eating into this handover period. Meanwhile, you’ll be carting your kit to the next location (or being booted out of your current location). You’ll be scouting out the next location for shooting – even if it’s somewhere you’ve seen before, the timings may have changed the ambient light or you’ve discovered that other photographers are in the space you were going to use for your lighting stands.

Effectively, for photographers, it’s a whole bunch of compromises – time and space are both squeezed to give you more quantity rather than quality.

Even worse – if you’re not on a dance card system, then you’ve got to grab a model and shoot. By the time you’ve worked this out, the best models will have been grabbed already, and the best locations too. And now it’s your job to make this model look superb in a broom cupboard (not impossible, but tricky).

For the model, things are even less appealing – the internet spawned a relevant saying – “What has been seen cannot be unseen”.

What I mean is that you’re turning up to a shoot with a whole bunch of photographers of unknown quality. You may have been lucky to have examined their portfolios, but that doesn’t state how many images they took to get their portfolio images – will they get an image in the 45 mins you have allocated? Or will they just publish what they’ve got – out-of-focus and eyes mid-blink?

Remember, the Internet has a long memory. These pictures are likely to crop up when you least want them to do so.

As I said, they’re great for networking, but don’t expect fantastic photos.

Official announcement.