With the intention of taking my photography to the next level, I’ve been busy planning lots of new photoshoots to get as much practice in as possible & build up my portfolio. I’ve also been trying out lots of different areas of photography, to work out where I want to focus on, and what I enjoy the most. I had forgotten how much pleasure you can get out of photographing people. That feeling when you show someone their photo and they squeal in excitement, amazed at how beautiful they look & how cool the shot is, its a feeling of ecstatic buzz. If I could bottle it I would be a millionaire.

With that said, there was a lot of buzz from our latest shoot, in which I collaborated with an up & coming makeup artist in the area, Abbie Pochin. I knew her from years ago (at school!!) and reached out to her on facebook after seeing she had done some cool makeup for someone. It turned out that she has been wanting to make a business from her makeup, but struggled with the photography side of things so was more than happy to collaborate in order to build up both our portfolios.

We also had a mutual friend Lily who I have known for as long as I can remember & has always been my number one go to model whenever I wanted to try something new. In fact she was the one who helped me realise my love for portrait photography in the first place. She was more than up for doing the shoot but I also wanted to try and get some new faces in my portfolio (otherwise it would be 90% of lily!) and thankfully abbie was up for doing some modelling too. So through a group chat on facebook we discussed ideas and found inspiration for what we wanted to do.

Abbie found these cool face jewels first, which had been all the rage at every festival this year, and we all decided a festival themed photoshoot would be pretty cool, incorporating lots of glitter/sequins & colour. I really wanted to try creating some brandon woefel inspired photographs; He uses objects that provide light refractions to create a multicoloured bokeh effect. I decided to order some cheap kaleidoscope glasses to give this a go.

We then had a fair bit of trouble trying to decide what clothes would look best, especially being on a tight budget. But we found these cool sparkly/glitter skirts, that many people had worn at festivals & would look great in a photoshoot, so I ordered them from ebay praying they came in time for the date of the shoot we had organised. But they didn’t. I realised that the skirt hadn’t even been dispatched and we had two days left. I asked my work friends if they had any festival style clothes I could borrow for the shoot & out of pure luck, one friend said she had a few bits. It was my only hope and I had no idea what the clothes were like so it really was a big risk but it was all we had so we hoped for the best.

It turned out that the bag of bits I borrowed was pretty much a goldmine of pure festival. From tassled clothes to sequin dresses it was a dream come true, and after madly worrying about letting the team down it was a massive relief.

Day of photoshoot

I was pretty shattered from work the past couple of days, to the point where I could feel myself getting ill-er by the minute, but nothing was going to stop the shoot going ahead. Abbie worked her magic on herself and lily, the makeup looked insane, and I was starting to worry the photos weren’t going to do it justice.

When we were all ready we walked from lilys to the local field area (location top secret😉) which had a perfect range of backdrops. I really wanted to do the shoot with long dead grass, which it had exactly that, but also had a small woods area too for a completely different look. I had a big challenge on my hands as the sun was shining and it was mid day.. a big no no for any photographer!

Occasionally clouds passed which momentarily caused less intense light on the models helping to create perfectly focused photographs. The only post-production that was needed on these was to warm the colours/skin up as the mid day light was so intense it made their skin whiter.

We tried our best to get the photographs in the field & long grass first whilst there were a few clouds about, and then moved on to the forest area which created beautiful light when it shone through the leaves. The photograph to the right is featuring the kaleidoscope glasses which looked pretty cool, but when I tried them just in front of the lens it was unfortunately too bold/obvious so the bokeh effect didn’t work.

We shot for around 2.5 hours and got a fair few good photos in that time, despite the set back of the lighting. I was so dead to the world the next day that I just sat and edited all day for a solid 10 hours to get through all 800+ photos that were taken.

What style/theme do you love? what should I do next? Let me know in the comments below!

Check out my portfolio page for the final photographs from this shoot.

Thanks for reading 👌