The Human Element

As usual, I’ve left it really really late to do another update. In some ways I think it works though because each post has plenty of gunf in it then, rather than lots of little short ones and me spamming you all each week to let you know about it.

So, first things first, if you’re not reading this on my actual blog, go here: http://www.paul-gardner.com/blog to see it in its full glory. This blog gets automatically posted into my Facebook notes, etc so there’s a chance you’re reading it from there.

A couple of other bits I thought I’d mention before getting into the post:

• If you haven’t already done so, start following me on twitter: http://twitter.com/paul_gardner
• If you’re not already a fan on Facebook, go here and join in: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Paul-Gardner-Photography/8962401235

Ta!

What’s been going down in the world of Paul Gardner Photography? Take a look…

Run to the Sun!!

My last blog update was written the night before I shot off to Newquay to attend this year’s Run To The Sun festival. As usual I was up and about on the stage taking photos of the DJs and performers, and running about in the crowd getting shots of all the crazy RTTSers!

Hed Kandi were impressed with the shots I got on their night so they’ve bunged a whole load of them up on their website: http://www.hedkandi.com/wallgallery/galleries.aspx (gallery aptly titled Run To The Sun)

So, here’s a few of my favourite shots from the weekend, including some of the gang out on the beach during the day:

The astute of you will spot some photos of me with various well known DJs and MCs including one of my idols, Paul from Pendulum!

The full galleries can be found over on dontstayin.com somewhere.

I can’t wait for next year!

Emma

I did a shoot for Emma in the studio towards the end of May, I quite liked the shots, here’s a few of my favourites from the shoot:

 

Lost Bear

While walking between venues on a Friday night in June, I came across this wonderful assortment of abandoned junk. I didn’t move any of it, this was how I’d found it:

 

Club Photography

I don’t talk about it too much, or advertise it on the various sites like Facebook, etc. But I thought I’d quickly mention it here in case anyone’s interested.

Over the last 5 to 6 months, I’ve been working solely in 2 Southend clubs on the weakens: Talk Nightclub on Friday nights and Storm Nightclub on Saturday nights.

While some of my club photos are pretty cool as club photography goes, I often find it hard to get enthusiastic and proud of my club work, but here’s a couple of cool dancer photos I’ve taken recently in the clubs:

Too Damn Glam, one of the nights that I take photos at managed to get a double spread in the M8 magazine too, here’s a screenshot of it:

Of course, all of those shots are mine, not that I’m particularly impressed with the ones chosen, they all look a bit over exposed, but still, it’s good to see your stuff in print like this now and then!

Finally, I’ve been doing a few mini-shoots for Diason, a promoter who runs the Too Damn Glam events, and is putting on a new night out in Ibiza called Ibiza School Disco. The shoots are for flyers and the like..

Here’s a few from the shoot I did for Diason quickly for Too Damn Glam, I turned up to Storm Nightclub with a couple of my studio lights and we quickly cracked off loads of shots as the punters were coming in. Obviously these photos haven’t been edited as that’s the flyer designer’s job, so you’ll have to use your imagination:

     

Then last week I did something very similar for his new Ibiza School Disco night, but this time in the studio, but it was one of those very quick “In, Shoot, Out, Done” type shoots, so again, what you’re seeing in the selection I’ll put up here is the unedited shots, ready to be played around with by the flyer designers:

   

I’ll try and get a copy of the flyers off of Diason soon so that that I can post them up here in the next blog update. I’ve seen one of the Too Damn Glam ones, and it looked pretty damn good!

(Big thanks to Zara, Hayley, Holly, Natalie and Lewis for posing in the flyer shoots!)

 

Sam

I did a shoot a couple of weekends ago with my friend Theresa’s sister Sam. Sam’s getting into a bit of glam and is doing well apparently and getting plenty of work, I can see why, here’s a few of my favourite shots from the very successful shoot:

    

Of course there were some really nice topless ones but I like to keep things clean on here

 

Louise

And finally but by no means least, while tidying up the studio last week, I asked my girlfriend Louise if she wanted to do a few new shots for me. Louise is fun because she’s somehow body-shy and body-proud at the same time… it just takes a bit of convincing and then she gets into it. Anyway, I love these shots that we got:

 

I like one of them so much, it’s now the homepage photo for my website: http://www.paul-gardner.com something that only changes once a quarter, so I have to be really pleased with a photo for it to go up there!

 

Anyway, that’s it for now!

Paul.

Ooops, It’s been ages since I did a blog update! I’ve been so busy but now, just before I head off to Newquay for the Run To The Sun festival, I’ve finally found a spare 10 minutes to write an update!

So, what have I been up to? Apart from working hard, and playing hard (the usual then), I’ve been taking lots of photos:

Colchester Zoo

Some of us had a little reunion at Colchester Zoo at the end of last month, I took some lovely photos, but here are my favourites:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dogs

Louise and I took the dogs out for a run along the River Crouch. They got quite messy, but really enjoyed themselves, here’s a couple of cool photos I snapped while we were out:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Class Full of Girls

My good friend Annabel needed some photos taken of her and her classmates at university to go with their artwork, including in some sort of catalogue. So I lugged some lighting gear all the way up about 7 or 8 flights of stairs at her university and took some lovely black and white head shots of them all. Each girl had 3 taken; a serious one, a smiling one, and a silly one. Here’s my favourites:

 

 

 

 

 

Some of you might spot the member of the girl group Honeyz in one of those photos (I didn’t recognise her though… oops!)

 

 

Laura Needham

Laura popped into the studio for a few hours a few weeks ago, and we took some great photos, here’s my favourites:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shoot London

Wo0 (A photographer and a Mother), Marc De Groot (A weirdo who used to have an afro but now has a mulletasaurus), John Brophy (works for mixmag and founded dontstayin or something), and myself all had a day out participating in a competition at the Tate Modern. We didn’t win, but I did get this cracking shot:

 

 

 

 

 

Bernie T and Damo Shoot

A couple of DJ friends of mine booked me for a shoot… Bernie had access to an old Vulcan Bomber so naturally we used it as the backdrop for some of the shots… here’s my favourites from the whole shoot:

 

 

 

 

 

You can see the full shoot over here on facebook

 

Well, that’s just about it for now… I’ll be back next week with some snaps of Newquay I’m sure.

Paul.

I’ve been very busy with work lately, but while I’m sitting here in Dusseldorf International Airport (Germany), I’ll do a quick update!

First up, after the success of my night shots in London, I decided to go out for a bit of a longer walk and get some more! Here’s a selection from the walk:

 

 

 

 

You can see the full set over at Flickr.

Some interesting work that I’ve had to do this month was for a Restaurant called Soya, opening in Leigh-on-sea in Essex this weekend. I got a call asking if I could produce 3 photos, on large canvas prints. One of a Soya Bean, one of some Soya Sauce, and one of some Tofu. Oh, and they had to be ready in 9 days!

Well, needless to say, I got the job done, and I’m really pleased with the results. The prints were blown up quite big, the biggest measuring 120cm x 80cm!

Here’s the 3 shots. The Soya Bean one is really small because Soya have paid of exclusive print rights to ensure it doesn’t show up in anyone else’s Restaurant, etc:

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s all for now.

I’ve been having some fun with ‘available light’ at night recently, using street lamps, moonlight, shop windows, etc. as light sources.

I returned home at 2:30am from a drunken night out in London last week, to find a nice fresh layer of snow in Southend, and my housemate’s friend’s Citroen 2CV car parked outside the house. Perfect for this type of photography. Here’s the result:

 

 

Also, last night I took some snaps while on my usual walk from the office in Farringdon, to Liverpool St. Station. Here’s my favourites:

 

 

 

You can see the whole set on Flickr here.

This is likely to be a bit of a big blog post, so set aside some time if you’re really going to read it!

Dell have yet again impressed me. The laptop which they said would take 3 weeks to build (due to shortages in certain components such as the fancy RGB screen) has in fact taken less than 2 weeks! It’ll be delivered on Monday! The laptop I’ve been using in the mean time is dreadful. It takes about 3 times as long to process a photo on it, and sometimes it’ll just crash photoshop without any warning or error message.. most frustrating.

That said, I’ve still managed to keep up (Just! Sorry for the delay Sara!)

Southend

On Tuesday last week, due to the laptop death, with no way to do work, I took to the cold winter beaches of Southend, to catch the sun going down. I wanted to do some cross processing, play a little with fill in flash, and play with keeping the sun in shot. all of which I achieved. You can seen the full set on Flickr here. 

Sara

I did a shoot 2 weeks ago with a friend, Sara, as an xmas gift from her boyfriend James. There was no general theme, they just wanted a nice portrait shoot with her looking all nice and pretty. But I’m not very good at sticking to the rules, so I threw in a few more details shots for good measure. The following photo is my favourite:

 

My good friend Mandi was assistant for the day, and was kind enough to climb a ladder and throw feathers about! I love the combination of colours, facial expression, and clothing in that photo. Thanks to Melissa too, the Makeup Artist for the day.

Storm

I don’t often showcase my club photography these days, and when I do, it’s usually just 1 specific outstanding shot that I got in whole night of taking hundreds. However, this weekend just gone, I produced what I think is the best set of clubbing photos I’ve taken to this date. So, have a nose through the 4 galleries taken by me over here on dontstayin.

No doubt my next blog post will be me ranting or raving about the new laptop!

Today, my laptop decided to drop its guts. For the last 4 months the hard drive has been making a strange clicking noise, which normally means it’s on its way out. Me being me, I decided to ignore it, and deal with the problem if and when it dies. Well today is that day.

As a result, I’m without the tools I need to work for at least a week now, while I wait for my new beast of a laptop to arrive. I’ve ordered a new Dell XPS Studio 16 thinggy… should do the job.

The last thing I managed to get done before its untimely demise was to edit the only photo I got of the snow that attacked us this week:

So for the next week or so, don’t expect a lot of Internet noise from me, but please say a prayer, or spare some thoughts for me, as I sit indoors getting Photoshop withdrawal symptoms!

The New York Collection is up and available on my Online Store section of the website.

The collection is comprised of my 4 favourite shots from my visit to the city in November. I’ve just ordered the canvas print of the Flatiron Building myself!

The canvas prints are produced on real woven heavy 500gsm fabric using fibre deep printing with dye sublimation. This means the ink fuses deep into the fibres and does not sit on the surface of substrate so it doesn’t crack like the inkjet produced canvas prints you get in the high street.

The gloss prints are produced on Fuji Crystal Archive Professional Photographic Paper

Enjoy!

I’ve just been pointed in the direction of these pictures. Truly amazing stuff.

Some of it is a little too staged (I like staged shots of course, just not when you’re trying to sell them as impromptu)

Very inspiring work.

I’ve been meaning to write a photography blog for a long time now. I’ve had general blogs before, but I’ve become bored of them quickly as they’ve lacked direction and subject, however I have high hopes this one will develop well.

I think it’s good timing that I’m starting this at the beginning of a new year, as I’ve set myself some interesting photographical targets to achieve this year (this being one)

So to start, I’ll have a quick chat about some shoots I’ve done already this year:

Megan

Megan was lucky enough to be the first shoot of the year. It should have been a young lady called Carli on the 4th of January, however she was unable to attend in the end.

Megan wanted to start a portfolio, with some photos she could send to agents with the hopes of getting some interest from magazines such as loaded. I’ve done this sort of thing a lot recently, but what was interesting about it was the time I had to prepare. She rang me on the Wednesday, and had to have the shoot before the Sunday, so I squeezed her into the Saturday.

The results were great, and she’s a very photogenic young lady. Take a look at the homepage of Paul Gardner Photography, she’s the new face for this month!

One thing I finally got to do, was play with the loft space above the shooting area in the studio. In the past I’ve only shot in the other direction up in the loft, using the yellow brick wall and round window as a backdrop, but shooting in the other direction gave me the opportunity to try out some funky lighting effects, using shadows created by the beams and scaffolding.

Finding Mamma

A quick MSN to my friend wo0 resulted in a last minute dash to the studio on a cold weekday night. Wo0 is a photographer herself, and we decided to have a mess about. We brought along some other friends too, and wo0’s daughter; Emily (mini-wo0).

The main shot I wanted to get was a very controversial shot called Finding Mamma. The shot was wo0, after she’s hanged herself, with Emily finding her. I had a clear idea of how it would be lit in my head, and I was able to quickly convert that to reality with a single, open flash head with a set of barn doors.

The result is perfect, exactly how I wanted it, and is getting much praise. Of course it’s also upsetting a few people too due to its nature, but hey, that’s art!