Ladies Pamper Evening at Christchurch Infant School

Last night I went along to support Christchurch Infant School with a fundraising event aimed at raising funds for new play equipment for Year 1. We were privileged to be invited to sponsor the pamper evening and were then invited along to promote our photography services alongside many well-known and reputable local companies.

I took along a selection of albums, photographs and props, set up alongside a slideshow of pictures. I was really excited to chat to local mums and was overwhelmed by the positive feedback and interest. I really enjoyed chatting to people about what they looked for in a photographer and was keen to make them aware of our local position; emphasis on personal service and the fact that we never set time limits on shoots and always provide clients with a disc of all their pictures copyright free.

I look forward to hearing from some of the interested Mums who took our details.
Karen.

                                            A display of our photos and accessories at the Ladies Pamper evening.

What goes into a picture?

  

When you look at an image all you see is the finished result. You don't get to see the full process that went into making the picture. So here is a quick insight into some of the work......

Convert the studio into a home! As you can see in the image below we created a fake room inside our studio - complete with a fake floor, fake skirting board, and a fake backdrop against which we could take the image.

Ensure the lighting is right to produce a warm soft finish. We used 2 lights for this setup - a key light camera left with large softbox to diffuse the light and make it soft, and a fill light fired against the white ceiling to provide soft light on the baby's tummy. We kept the blind open to provide a small amount of front natural fill light. We then position the baby as per image below left (this was taken to show the wider view of the setup) and take the image as per below right to only include the parts of the 'fake' room you want the viewer to see. The image below right is the final picture after post processing - babies are notorious for needing skin flakes, milk spots, scratches etc removed to give you that perfect baby.

And finally to give you an idea of how much post-processing we are sometimes required to do take a look at the images below. The first  is a baby's tummy before processing, and then after flake removal. Under that is the finished image. The removal of the skin was done flake by flake before tidying the whole picture up to ensure the skin was smooth. Each image can take around 30-45 minutes - so a shoot can take some time to process!

Hope you've found this useful and appreciate how much work we put into each shoot :-)     Rik.