Arriana & Kiri

Winter time tends to see less portrait shoots due to the cold weather but I recently met up with Funbir and Resh to photograph them with their 2 girls, Arriana & Kiri. The girls were fantastic and instantly relaxed in front of the camera. I think I may be Arriana’s new best friend!

We took some more posed shots but my favourites, as usual, were the ones where the kids forgot they were being photographed and just enjoyed being kids.

After a break for pizza we headed outside into the autumn afternoon and added some variety to the shoot.

We’re hoping to do a lot more family portrait shoots in 2009 as part of a major new project (more details here soon).

For the photographers reading this, I normally shoot most of my outdoor kids portraits with my 70-200 IS lens but the focusing broke on the day of the shoot! It’s fine now thanks to ACS who fixed and returned it in 24 hours, but most of the images above were taken with a simple little 50mm 2.5 lens.

Many thanks to Funbir, Resh and the girls for making me so welcome. I’m off to New York tomorrow for my first US wedding shoot. It’s gonna be cold but I can’t wait!

Happy Halloween

The variety of photography that my job brings me is something that I keep coming back to and last week was a great example. I began the week photographing thrash metal legends Slayer in Manchester and Wolverhampton. I ended the week photographing Barney the dinosaur!

As a parent and a photographer I feel it’s my duty to make sure I get at least one photo which we can bring out in 30 years when our kids get married. Of course, dressing kids up for Halloween is great fun (although in England the dressing up part is still somewhat half-hearted compared to the other side of the Atlantic) and Evelyne went to great lengths in her search for an original but cute Halloween outfit for Elliott.

On the night we headed out to Walsall Illuminations which is an event I’ve never been to before and it made for a fun way to spend Halloween as Elliott (or as we called him for the evening, Ellion) ran around in his outfit, giggling, checking out the lights and getting plenty of “Ahhh, how cute!” comments from people. He got bored with Barney quite quickly (the boy has taste) but enjoyed being out past his bed-time and running around amongst all the people…

After all that Elliott was asleep within minutes of getting back in the car!

Happy Halloween :)