you lock photographers and models in a big house together?
we go make pictures! That’s what!

We were there because of a very special photographer, an unassuming chap called Paul Haley who runs http://www.facebook.com/PhototrainingPRGH Paul is mad enough to organise us motley crowd into some sort of shape. Actually is is sheer brilliance on his part because it is collaborative learning, we all learn so much from each other that it almost happens organically. Still someone has to put the programme and kit together and arrange everything for us and Paul does it brilliantly. Thanks Paul x

I had an idea that I wanted to explore at Buxton. It came from a Rhianna video for “Disturbia” which was directed by David LaChapelle who is, of course, a rather good photographer. So full circle and back to a photographer again. So weeks before going off to Buxton I hit the internet. Of course I’m not going to find Rihanna’s buzzard feather and rattlesnake head Indian Headdress…..well actually I did (just call me the queen of shopping) but it was in an auction and sold for rather a lot of money. So being a poor impoverished photographer what IS a girl to do but go off internet shopping for a burlesque one instead.

I had booked some studio time with our gorgeous model and Richie Crossley was instructing on the course that week so I asked Richie to help me out with the setting up of this shoot. For more of Richies work have a look here http://www.chicproduction.com/

We “borrowed” a background from my erstwhile colleague Ben “Mac” McBride and set up one beauty dish. I joked with Richie that my camera was bound to break because it never goes past about f8 at a wedding and that is only for the groups, the rest of it’s life it spends at f2.8! So f20 was new territory for this one!

Back home and I have looked at the set of images over and over and I can see what I want it to look like, but my processing skills (finely honed for weddings) don’t yet extend to the tones we have to work with here. There is a lot of subtlety about this image, the way the dark red of the feathers work into the black of the background, it’s very easy to lose those! Getting the skin tones right, getting the definition in the headdress without overcooking the skin for sharpness….a lot to consider. I “see” it very much as gold toned image……

So I was delighted when Richie emailed me this morning with his interpretation…..

Thank you so much Richie, very generous of you to share…this is what we did.