Theatrical Head shots : North Herts Photographer.

My latest shoot was held on a cold, snowy Sunday.  They were all taken using just natural light, with various backdrops on a stand in front of my huge bank of windows in one of my sitting rooms.
Phoebe needed some head shots so that her theatrical agent can have her photo included in the upcoming Spotlight database.  Hopefully then she can start being put up for auditions. She is a very talented singer and no doubt actress like her mother, Judith.

Phoebe arrived with slightly, heavy eye make up. So I toned her make up down a bit. Also she had bought with her, very patterned clothing for the shoot. I dug out some simple, plain coloured and shaped tops of mine and away we went.

It was interesting to see the images Phoebe chose, as opposed to what the more "mature" people chose. Phoebe does not like to smile..... at all...... There was a lot of teenage pounting going on, the sort you see all over Facebook.

This was my favourite image .

along with this one.

Phoebe would kill me I'm sure, but when I was going through them I couldn't get over how much she reminded me of Kourtney Kardashian.

Oh and her mum, Judith.

This is a head shot from Judiths old theatrical days. My husband was winding Phoebe up how much she looked like her mum. Something a teenager does not want to hear, EVER.

Super easy, nutty granola : North Herts Portrait photographer

As anyone who knows me, I don't eat healthily. About as healthy as I get is eating an oat granola for breakfast. Mind you, as I understand it, Granola often has more sugar than a can of Coke.
But it's either that , Cocoa Pops or Frosties !! In my reckoning, a wee bit of roughage in the form of oats, can't be too bad. I mean it would be the only roughage my body would ever get in a day.

I buy this granola. Low in fat, but super high in sugar. The problem is I HATE the rat droppings they put in it. Rat droppings to you, would be known as raisins. I have to pick every one of them out, before I can even settle down to eat it. Plus I LOVE nuts, so I started cutting up various nuts and adding it to the granola. One day I thought why don't I just make my own. So that is what I did.

Granola is super easy to make, and the joy is you can change the recipe to your likes and dislikes.
I use this recipe, that I keep on my recipe Pinterest board, here, I laughed when I went back and read her posting of the recipe, she hates raisins too and refers to them as dead flies. LOL.

I don't add any rat droppings or anything fruity at all to my version. I mean just think of the hidden sugar !!
I add various nuts and seeds. I also leave out the nutmeg and cinnamon from my Pinterest recipe. Now I am a big fan of cinnamon, but my first ever attempt tasted a bit too cinnamony ( is that a even a word ? ) for me. So I prefer to make my granola plain now.
I searched all the supermarkets here in the UK for some coconut shavings, as I really like coconut flakes in my granola. But all I could find were the really small desiccated varieties. I finally found some in the American Whole foods store in London.

You just bung everything in a bowl together and stir. See easy peasy ! Sometimes I rebel a little bit more and add a few more oats to the mix. I think it's because I panic when I see the amount of honey going into the mixture. And I don't actually eat honey !! It's another item on my infinitely long list of foods I don't eat.

I think making things from scratch is a great way of really appreciating what goes in to your food. If anyone has ever made shortbread, they will know exactly what I mean..

You then just spread the mixture over a baking tray and pop it in a low oven for about an hour. I pop mine in my simmer oven in our Aga. It's where I cook my meringues and there is little chance of anything burning. Just maybe drying out a bit, if left in there by mistake for days on end. Believe me I've done it ! Several times.

 and then " voila ", an hour later a whole batch of super, easy peasy Granola..

Everything is now nice and toasty and crunchy. I couldn't resist having a little nibble whilst I was waiting for it too cool down. Mmmmmmm

What I then do with the batch is, add it to a plastic cereal container with about half a box of the Quaker Oats granola. I then vigorously shake the two together. The Quaker Oats granola often comes in large chunks stuck together. The vigorous shaking not only distributes the two together but breaks the lumps down to more manageable pieces. I find my version tastes less sweet, so that is why I always add some of the shop bought one. That shop bought one tastes mighty fine, but I just hate those darn rat droppings.

 I always weigh out my portion of granola in the mornings. Granola is laden with calories, so the recommended portion size is  a tiny 45g. So with those big Quaker Oat lumps it can mean I only get a couple in a portion. Thats why I always give it a vigorous shake in a cereal container. As I don't eat yogurt or fruit, I always eat my granola with milk
 I get great pleasure picking out any of the random "rats droppings " (raisins ) that remain in the mix from the shop bought one. By removing these it usually gives me a few more grams of granola.

My version of this Recipe:

Ingredients

• 1 cup of rolled oats
• ⅓ cup of shredded coconut
• 8 tbs of pecans/ walnuts/ pistachios/ brazils/ almonds and hazelnuts, roughly chopped ( I actually buy Tescos finest mixed nuts and use those, with some other variations added )

• a handful of sunflower seeds
• ¼ tsp of sea salt flakes
• ⅓ cup of honey
• 1½ tbs of olive oil
• 1 tsp of boiling water

Combine all the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix well together. Add the boiling water to some honey and add along with the olive oil. Stir well until everything is well coated.

Spread on a baking tray and bake for 1 hour, in a low oven (120 celsius ) or the simmer oven of an Aga. Stir the mixture every 20 minutes. When it's baked to just how you like it, leave it to cool and store in an airtight container.  

Enjoy.

Animated Gifs : North Herts Portrait Photographer

I just had a play with making animated Gifs in Photoshop.
I had to look through my photos for some that would work as a sequence.
Here are a few I played with.

I couldn't resist using these shots from Christmas Day. Hubby was a wee bit merry from the unlimited alcohol.

I had been wondering how easy it was to do an animated Gif. After reading one of my favourite bloggers recent post I had a play.

Amanda's original blog is here.

It took me a while, to work out I had to resize all my images for viewing on the web. The Gif reduces the quality of the original images, but I still like the affect. 

The one below is of my niece Taya, from a shoot in the summer. The images are all the originals straight out of camera shots, except one. An edited one snuck in there. See if you can spot it.

I can't wait to shoot a collection of Teddy. He is so hard to shoot without movement, but this will be a great way of showing how truly mad he is.
It's a shame you can't post them on Facebook. It would be a great way of sharing a quick little slide show for clients to share their shoots.

Engagement shoot : North Herts Portrait Photographer

I bought my daughter a lovely engraved silver frame as a Christmas present. It was engraved with her and her fiancés names and the date they got engaged. But I realised we hadn't taken any photos to celebrate the occasion. Her fiancé is at University in Newcastle and rarely goes home.
He was home for a few days, and the snow was just thawing, so I dragged them across the road to the nature reserve. Everyone was moaning, especially my husband who I said had to hold the reflectors and throw some confetti. He moaned so much that we sent him home.

So I only had a few minutes to grab some images.

I played around with some textures in Photoshop.

It was only later I realised, that I had made the mistake of shooting in Landscape mode and the picture frame is for a Portrait shot. So I had to crop one of Tasmins favourite photos to fit the frame. She choose the one below.

This one below, was the only one I could use of my husband throwing confetti at them. Craig would always screw up his face, or a huge batch of confetti would cover their faces. Hubby just could't get the grasp of what I needed, so we sent him home.

Today, I had a play in Photoshop. The result was a bit naff, but cute in it's own way.

India 2012

It has taken me forever to get around to writing about our recent travels in India. I think because I knew it could be an epic post. I had been putting it off.
It was so long ago that I shared this post of the Smash book I put together to take on the trip


From the off our trip was amazing. Our seats on the plane weren't the best, so a tour rep waiting for us at Heathrow, said leave it to me and we did. When we got to our seats, we were ecstatic to see we had the extra leg room,emergency exit seats. I popped some sleeping tablets and slept the whole journey, only to be woken by the sounds of breakfast. I was lucky I slept, as the tour turned out to be full on.

Erica was to be our amazing tour guide for the entire trip, there aren't enough superlatives I could use to express how great she was. We had enough time to have a quick shower and then we were straight out to experience the delights a smoggy, polluted Delhi had to offer a coach of 20 tourists.

During our tour the Hindu festival of Diwali was taking place. So there were a lot of Indians taking time out to visit their national treasures. This was always my favourite part of each monument we went to. Watching the faces of Indians taking in the beauty around them.

Everyone was eager to have their photos taken with us or by us. We were as exciting to them, as we thought they looked to us.

 Everyone wanted to see what they looked like in the back of the camera...............

Months later and I still hadn't finished this post, so I have now decided I'm just going to show you some of my favourite images from the holiday and then share videos of the photo-book, and SMASH scrapbook of our tour. Otherwise this post will never get done.

Here's the Smash book scrapbook I finally finished today of our tour. To begin with, the focus isn't great. I forgot to reset the focus from a previous video. Sorry.

And here is the My Publisher photo-book I put together.

There is a fantastic giveaway going on over on Photobook Girls website here, for a chance to win $100 of a My Publisher product. It's a great site for finding out all you need to know about making Photobooks.

Dubai Christmas 2012 : North Herts Photographer

I recently spent three days watching a live workshop on the next step coming in photography, video. Sue and Hayley were showing us how to make short, snappy videos.. Our homework is to put together a two minute video, after a month of shooting. I chose my model to be Teddy. Now it is way above my head, and I think it will be a miracle that I ever get to cut a months worth of video into two minutes. So just watch this space.

But whilst I had my DSLR camera out, I popped it on a tripod and videoed some recent scrapbook projects. I have finally finished a scrapbook of my recent trip to Dubai to see my son. At a recent crop in Enfield, we had a bring and buy stash sale. I picked up some freebies and quickly put together a layout for a photograph I took when my daughter got engaged. Everything but the white 12 x 12 card stock was free.

 I also spotted a Christmas inspired album that was for sale by Denise. I hope she likes what I did with her cast off.

PS.. I noticed when I watched the video back, that some of my small word stickers had come loose. So I went back and used some Glossy accents on them. They're not going anywhere now !

A snow day : North Herts Portrait Photographer

We have had some beautiful fluffy, dry snow fall over the last week. In the UK that means the Country can come to a standstill. But this time the local councils seemed to listen to the forecast, and gritted the roads. But the majority of schools decided to have a snow day, as with " Health & Safety " rules now, they were frightened of children slipping over !!!!
That was a bonus to me, as I knew some children who wanted to go out in the beautiful snowy backdrop and I could photograph them.
We went to an area directly behind there home. I can't describe how beautiful the woods looked. There was a fantastic slope with kids sledging down on anything they could get their hands on.

I took some props along with me, to incorporate in the shoot. I knew a fur collar I have, would work as a beautiful frame to Lucy's face.

and old picture frame, worked just perfect as a simple natural frame.

Noodles came along to. But just one major drawback. For some reason he is petrified of cameras. So I had to employ some stealth to get a snap of him.

We had a walk through the woods and up on to a hill bordering Weston. It's the hill of choice for all the locals. It was mobbed as is usual when the snow hits. There were even teenagers attempting to sledge down in a massive paddling pool !! I have one confession, I have never owned a sledge. It's one of my things I have high on my "grandchildren gifts " list, if and when I ever get any. I have only been on a sledge once, briefly, as a young child. I vividly remember falling head first into the snow. Now I won't even attempt a quick toboggan because of my spine.

It is thrilling to get to work with such fantastic light at this time of year. Very little editing was needed as I could get exposure in camera just right. The snow acts as a natural reflector and as long as you get your white balance set correctly,.......BINGO- magic happens.

Here are a few more shots of Alfie from the shoot,