Band Photography or Music Photography is an area of portrait photography that I’ve always thought would be good fun – working alongside another creative where the prime objective is to come up with something cool sounds like a lot of fun.

I had a taste of this genre of portrait photography a few months ago when musician Robbie Leeson contacted me to do one of our Street Fashion Photoshoots in Stirling.  As is obvious from the photographs Robbie is a Saxophonist and he wanted some cool images that would resemble the typical kind of images that you would find on a rock band’s album cover.   I’ve featured some of the photographs from this shoot before on my blog, but I thought it deserved a blog post of its own.

So with the brief in hand I headed off to meet Robbie to do some portrait photography in Stirling. We met at Forthside in Stirling which is one of my favourite shooting locations in Central Scotland for this type of work. Forthside is the new part of Stirling that the local council are developing (very slowly I might add) to extend the City Centre across the rail tracks and closer to the River Forth.

Most of these photographs were taken using off-camera flash triggered by the fabulous RadioPopper system, and we were very lucky to have some fabulous sunlight creating a great “ray” effect under the new Stirling bridge.

As a Scottish Wedding Photographer I’m known for my style of contemporary and “cool” wedding photographs, so it was nice to extend that style out of the wedding photography arena.

Thanks Robbie and the best of success in your music career.

If you are interested in an on-location photoshoot or contemporary fashion portrait shoot, or even a modelling portfolio – give me a call on 01259 210299 or contact me here. We also have a very special offer on at the moment for a Fashion Photoshoot that also makes a fantastic Christmas Gift idea.

Shooting Wedding Photography in Scotland is always done with one eye on the weather, but on a fashion shoot like this it’s even more critical as you don’t have the luxury of a wedding venue on hand to provide any shelter in the event of a quick shower. Fortunately the weather behaved itself and we had a great day.

We spent some time in one of may favourite “urban” locations in Stirling, before heading out to a more rural location which was an old favourite of mine when I shot a lot of landscape photography, a location that features lots of abandoned buildings and beautiful old textures. Fantastic!

I also had an opportunity to compare my Pocket Wizard radio flash triggers directly with the competing Radio Poppers brand that John uses, and I think it’s fair to say that the Radio Poppers won hands down giving consistent results shot after shot, whereas the Pocket Wizards still seem to have some teething issues to be flushed out.

It was a great day’s shooting and I think I came away with some images to be proud of and hopefully worthy of enhancing Rebecca’s model portfolio.  What do you think?

At the event we were given a challenge by Roger Griffiths to come up with an image that would emulate the look and feel of the great Hollywood photographer George Hurrell - Hurrell photographed many of the iconic images that came out of 30′s and 40′s Hollywood and his work was stunning – he used a particular lighting technique mostly using “hot” studio lights and spotlights.

I’d first been introduced to Hurrell’s work when I attended a lighting seminar run by the great Trevor and Faye Yerbury. Trevor demonstrated how he could emulate the Hurrell look by using a Fresnel adapter in front of a Bowens studio light – he then simply used the modelling light in the Bowens (and a bit of that “Yerbury magic sprinkle dust”) to come up with a stunning image. I was knocked out by what Trevor and Faye achieved that day and promised myself that I would try out some Hurrell lighting at some point.

So, when Roger came up with the challenge – and it was backed up by a prize of a Joe McNally book and a framed print of the winning image from Colorworld – I was definitely going to give this a go.

So below you can see my favourite image from that day’s shooting session.

This image was shot on a Nikon D700 using 2 Lowell iD Video lights. The key thing for me in George Hurrell’s images was the heavy contrast in lighting, so we worked in a darkened room and had the key light on full power and zoomed right in (the Lowell has a small fresnel type lens) – the second Lowell was used to light the background and provide a little separation between the model and the background. Exposure was manual and spot metered on the model’s nose.

The file was processed using my normal Black and White processing method which emulates film as much as possible and I then added a little softening to the image to give that Hollywood “glow”.

I think it worked really well.

What do you think? – Greta Garbo eat your heart out?

Fortunately our judges also liked it and this image was picked out as the winner from the day.

Hopefully you agree this is a fabulous look to try to achieve and something I will be adding to our fashion inspired portrait sessions. If this is something that might interest you we currently have a special offer on our Fashion Portrait sessions - give us a call on 01259 210299 for details or use our contact form to get in touch.

These were all taken in Old Town, Kissimmee and in the the town centre of Celebration – a great couple of locations for shots like these as you are totally spoiled for interesting backgrounds.

Surprisingly for Florida it was very cold that day (well relatively speaking) but Kathryn was a trouper and you can’t really tell that her nose was as cold as a Spaniel’s.  I’ve already posted three from the set, so here are a few more.

Kathryn would love to break into modelling and her mum treated her to this photosession as a Christmas gift to kick start her portfolio. I’m sure you’ll agree she has managed to get off to quite a good start.

Like what you see? Then please leave your comments below as we’d really appreciate hearing your feedback on our photography.

Want to see more? Then please take a few minutes to view our portfolio.

Want to get in touch? – please click on the Contact menu at the top of the page.

Thanks for visiting!

It wasn’t all relaxation however, as we had been asked to do a photoshoot for a young aspiring model when we were out in the Orlando area.  (Any excuse to escape from the Scottish winter for a couple of weeks LOL).

Kathryn Miller is the daughter of the couple who look after our villa for us and she is very keen to try to break into modelling.  Her mum asked if we could help with some initial images for her portfolio.

We took Kathryn and her Mum, Jan down to the Old Town area in Kissimmee, which if you visit the area on holiday, you will no doubt be familiar with.  It’s a small shopping and leisure area designed to resemble an old tradition American town – it makes a great location for a portrait shoot like this as they are lots of different backgrounds that can be utilised.

From there we drove a mile along the road to the beautiful community of Celebration.  The township of Celebration was designed from the ground up by Walt Disney Corporation and it’s almost the “perfect” town centre in the way that it has been laid out.

Shown here are three quick edits from the day – once we have a chance to get over the jet lag I’ll post some more images from the shoot.

I’m sure you’ll agree that Kathryn is a complete natural in front of the camera and hopefully some of these images will grace her initial portfolio.

P.S. As an aside – if you are planning a trip to Florida, our villa is available for Vacation rental and any of our portrait or wedding clients get up to 15% off our normal rates if they decide to book it for their honeymoon or any future holiday occasion.

However it is an area of photography that I do enjoy, and is very similar in approach to a pre-wedding photoshoot in terms of camera technique and general style of shooting. So when approached by Kevin and Leanne (who were married last year) to do a maternity shot for them I was more than happy to oblige.

We shot the maternity session in and around Stirling in Scotland – firstly in the Clackmannanshire countryside at the foot of the Ochil Hills and then into Stirling itself just beside the Old Stirling Bridge.

Fast forward a few weeks and say hello to Baby Grace, Kevin and Leanne’s delightful daughter. Grace is a natural poser and her first formal baby pictures turned out rather well.

A quick sneak peak from last night’s photoshoot of Kevin and Leanne’s recent family addition – Baby Grace.  All went well and clumsy old me didn’t even need a safety net.  This one of Kevin and Grace jumped right off the page when I viewed all the proofs.  Grace’s little expression summed up how she was feeling at the end of the shoot.