My feet haven’t touched the ground this August. I’ve been wonderfully busy with work, two hen dos and a wet weekend in Southport. There were some lovely jobs, photographing Fiz from Corrie, eight-month-old triplets, a donkey and a child genius [not at the same time (now that would be interesting!)]
Back in February, Tally and I met the talented Thelma Madine for Woman magazine. Thelma was in the middle of filming her new series ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Challenge.’ As soon as we arrived we were surrounded by girls wanting makeup tips and a film crew running around filming arguments. We had a great time.
It was a pleasure to photograph Alexandra Singer for Glamour magazine, who has overcome adversity, to write the very well-received novel ‘Tea at the Grand Tazi.’
Alexandra spent three months in a coma, suffered memory loss and has had to spend months fighting total paralysis after an attack of the auto-immune disease, cerebral lupus.

Another very inspiring story for Woman magazine. Sue donated one of her kidneys to a stranger. I don’t think you can get much more altruistic than that. What an amazing thing to do.

On a much more lighthearted note, I photographed Hazel Davis’ bottom for her feature on curvaceous derrieres for Femail. My mission was to make Hazels’ bottom look as big as possible. Here is one of the outtakes! This has to be one of the more bizarre shoots I’ve done.

Ahh, far more sophisticated now. Tea, biscuits and a shoot in the grounds of a very grand old house.
Growing magazine commissioned me to photograph John Ravenscroft who established one of the largest garden centres in the world – Bridgemere.

I photographed Louise for Fabulous magazine who, after losing her job, suffered from depression and OCD. Louise is back on track now, but it’s not hard to understand how losing your job can impact on all areas of your life.

Robbie Savage was reluctantly persuaded to pull his ‘blue steel’ face for me (even though he claimed not to have a clue what I was talking about and made me show him how to do it!). Good job I’d done my research – learn more here about the Blue Steel pose, if you fancy a go.
I think he pulls it off well though? Photographed for ‘Fabulous does a blow dry with Robbie Savage.’

That’s it for now in my August ’12 news. By the skin of my teeth, I’ve just managed to get this out on the last day of August. I’ll be more organised next month – honest.
Enjoy September. Cx
I spent half a day with Joe and his team at Soteria Fire Protection in Huddersfield to create branding photography for their website and general promotion and marketing. Soteria provides expert fire safety solutions across the north. We started with headshots against a mid grey background, wearing branded t-shirts of all the staff. Then moved onto more editorial style portraits of Joe
I visited a lovely school in my home town of Huddersfield - Moor End Academy. The pupils were really easy to work with and glad to be involved. I worked with Susan, who organised the schedule and helped me on the day. We were looking to get lots of photography of the students working hard, interacting with each other and enjoying the school environment...
Harper Green School is part of Leverhulme Academy Trust and we worked together to create positive, happy and natural shots of the pupils engaged in lessons and interacting with each other. Occasionally adding in a posed portrait that will work really well alongside a quote or a case study in the prospectus.
I was invited to spend the day with Mosaic to create some quirky fun headshots that really show the personality of the people and the company. We used 3 different background colours and played around with different expressions and poses and although the office dog took it rather seriously, he does look very handsome :-).
Box Power asked me to photograph their event to celebrate 10 years in business. Box Power is a UK not-for-profit energy consultancy, where all profits, go back into the community and support good causes. It was a lovely evening, with an amazing fire artist, plus the mayor attended – always the sign of a good ‘do’ in my book!