Hello, and thanks for stopping by to look at my blog.
This is where I get chance to show you my favourite pictures from the shoots I do for my clients and occasionally some of my personal projects.
From time to time I’ll post about other stuff too. I hope you enjoy having a look at my work and please feel free to leave us comments and feedback.
Natalie & Paul’s wedding was in July last year on a perfect summer’s day at the fabulous Nunsmere Hall in Cheshire. Here’s a small selection from the day. Check out the fireworks at the end.
We met Julie Evans a few of years ago. She’s a friend of Josie’s sister and is a trustee of The Chiawa Trust, which raises money to raise education standards and promote sustainable economic growth in the Chiawa region of Zambia. We’ve donated a few portrait sessions to help with fund raising and Julie’s husband bought one of the sessions so he could have some really nice pictures of Julie. We did the session and The Great John Street Hotel in Manchester, using the roof terrace and one of the suites. Here’s a selection from the day.
I met Pam Case at BNI a few years ago and anyone who knows Pam knows she’s a amazing networker. Pam & Phil’s company is PC Support Group and they’d agreed to look after my PC and they’re service was really fantastic. When I was building up my family portfolio back in 2009 I asked Pam if we could do a shoot with her family. We did this in September 2009 and it was a really terrific session. Hope you like the pictures.
I’m still not sure how we came to do this shoot. I met Beth and Beth through my friend Angie. Angie has the amazing Puure Bridal and Lingerie boutique on Eagle Brow in Lymm, Cheshire. I’d photographed Angie & Danny’s wedding the previous November and one of the Beths had modelled for Angie at a couple of bridal fayres locally. Anyway Angie and I had been chatting about prom dresses and she told me about Beth’s amazing prom dress and then we did a shoot for Beth and her friend Beth last summer.
We did the shoot one sunny afternoon and Jake, who did work experience with me, came to help me. We started in Angie’s back yard and the middle of Lymm village, which was really funny as we stopped the traffic quite few times, partly because some of the best shots were in the middle of the road under one of the canal bridges and partly because the drivers were interested to see what we were doing.
The last part of the shoot was done in a corn field on Cherry Lane. It was a great afternoon and here’s a small selection from the day.
Catherine and Bryan live in Boston, USA but Catherine is from Glazebury on the North Cheshire border and they wanted to get married in England. With lots of guests making the long journey from the USA, they wanted to make sure nobody got lost between the Lymm Hotel in Lymm where everyone was staying and the Church in St Helen’s, so a red double decker bus was hired to get everyone there and back safely.
The wedding took place on a warm and sunny afternoon in August 2011. With perfect weather and friends joining them from far and wide, Catherine and Bryan had a wonderful day. When we were doing a few formal shots by Lymm Cross, the owner of a local restaurant called Elmer’s popped out with drinks for everyone. Here’s a small selection of pics from the day.
They say that 80% of our decisions about who we do business with are emotional. The old saying that we only have chance to make the right first impression has never been more true. The recession and advances in technology have seen many thousands of people decide to have a go in business for themselves.
The explosion in the popularity of networking, both in the flesh and online social networking, means that many people are going out and making new connections, creating those first impressions as they go, hoping to find opportunities for their fledging businesses. Many established businesses, especially SME’s and those in services and the professions are realising the value of networking and about their brand identities.
Many people are now ‘on Linked In’ but only a small proportion really use it properly. I’m still learning about it but I’ve realised it’s a really powerful business networking tool and it makes a powerful first impression.
Having looked at so many profiles on Linked In, Twitter and even Facebook’s business pages recently, it amazes me how many people have inappropriate avatar pictures. Pictures taken at parties, on holiday, at the beach, wearing sunglasses. The list goes on. My favourite was of two women at a party for the profile of the sales director of a baby goods company, and another was the holiday picture of the mortgage broker sat in a bar holding a pint. Great photos in their own right but totally inappropriate for business purposes. Even some professionally taken pictures don’t convey the right message. A really serious, almost moody picture can look fantastic and makes a real statement about a person, but does it send out the right messages about that person as someone we’d all like to do business with.
Many people don’t initially realise the importance and power of their profile pictures. Once people realise how important the right profile picture is, they then need to find a photographer who can give them a portrait that shows what sort of person they are to do business with. And it needs to be affordable. That’s why I decided to do portrait sessions where anyone can book a half hour slot, have a phone consultation about the type of pictures they need, get advice about what to wear, have professional business makeup and professionally retouched images. All for an affordable price. What we do is exactly the same as our business portraits for bigger clients with a larger number of people to photograph.
Click here to find out more about my business portrait sessions.
Click here to see examples of business portraits on my blog.
Denis McAllister is an IT specialist and his company, Coras IT specialises in small businesses with up to around ten pcs. He looks after my network, which is mixed PC and Mac environment. As well as being a genius with computers, Denis is also a keen photographer. So when he asked me to do some new business portraits for him I invited him along to our business portraits day in October.
As a small business Denis liked the idea of having professionally taken portraits, with a little business make up and a little retouching to keep things looking natural, but at an affordable price. For bigger companies with several people to photograph, there’s an economy of scale, but for an individual or a business with a couple of people our portrait days provide the best of both worlds; high quality, original images at an affordable price.
Click here to find out about business portraits for individuals.
Clive Booth from Ebbe and I are both members of BNI Focus, a business networking group that meets in Lymm every week. I’d been talking about the importance of the right type of business portrait for social networking, corporate websites and personal branding (more of that later) and Clive recognised how important it was to have the right business portrait on his profile. He’d been using a holiday snap from the beach, in t-shirt and shades. He knew it wasn’t quite right but wasn’t sure where to get the right type of business portrait at a reasonable price.
He came along to our business portraits session in October for a new set of business portraits. Here are a few of the results. You can check out Clive’s Linkedin Profile here
I was introduced to Leslie Cozens at Handelsbanken’s Warrington office by her colleague Karen McComb. I’d got to know Karen through BNI and networking over the last couple of years. When they needed new business portraits for the team at the Warrington office, I was delighted to be asked to do their business portraits and a team pictures. Whilst we had to maintain a professional image, Handelsbanken’s approach is somewhat different to the high street banks and I wanted my photographs to show that difference. Here’s a selection from the session.
Click here for more information about our business portrait sessions for businesses with four or more people needing pictures.
Colin Lindsay is the MD at Gallery Recruitment and he wanted some new business portraits for his website and for social networking. Here’s a small selection from Colin’s portrait session which we did on location in Cheshire.
Click here for more information about our business portrait sessions for businesses with one to three people needing pictures.
