Edge Bespoke Picture Framing

edge bespoke picture framing
www.edge-framing.co.uk
bev@edge-framing.co.uk

After my shoot with Jasmine and her two beautiful boys I wanted to welcome her as an ambassador of my photography with a couple of framed prints. I knew of a local company that I had been wanting to use and this was a perfect opportunity/project to assign to them. Bev at Edge Bespoke Picture Framing is not only a convenient contact as she is based in the same village as me but someone that I also wanted to support as a local small business.

My First Film Experience

The title is probably slightly misleading, I used to photograph with a film camera all the time when I was little, it was like an awesome pink and purple brick with a wrist strap attached to it that had a very particular smell. Still not sure how it could have such a distinct smell but it did and it travelled very many places with me capturing all the things my tiny girl brain thought were worth capturing. Apparently a Winnie-the-Pooh pillow was one of those things. Children, they work in mysterious ways.

However, as groundbreaking as disposable/point and shoots are with their picture quality, I thought it would be great to try using an SLR film camera just because I have always shot digital ever since I woke up and thought "I want to be a photographer." There is one very tiny minor issue I have with digital cameras which is that the display will not necessarily show you the true exposure of the photo you've taken for varying different reasons. The LCD brightness changes from model to model and you can manually alter it yourself as well. If you work in bright sunlight the screen can appear pitch black (which happened to me at a recent event, every photo looked under exposed until I stepped inside and they were actually fine) and finally I fell into a habit of relying on the review image to adjust my camera settings...not genius!

Hickstead 2013, The British Jumping Derby

I haven't written a blog in so very long, mostly because I rarely have much exciting news, however I have been keeping busy assisting other photographers at horse events such as The South of England show.

As the title may suggest though, this is just a quick insight into my second year working at The All England Jumping Course, Hickstead. After a brilliant experience interning last year I was thrilled to be invited back for this show season as a press office assistant!

The Spanish stallions of Stelling Minnis

Look at that, a photography post! I confess it's been a while and even still these photo's aren't new, I took them back in august. If you follow me on facebook or twitter however you will have seen glimpses of these every now and again. 

Andalusian horses are one of my favourite breeds and i'd resigned to photographing them "someday" for lack of knowing anyone who owned one. However, I am more than chuffed that my "someday" arrived a whole lot sooner and in a far grander scale than I could have hoped for. I discovered early last year a family run stud farm that are dedicated to producing purebred spanish horses and couldn't believe they had been on my doorstep this whole time and I never knew anything about them. I contacted Jayne, owner of the business, explaining who I am, what I do and how i'd always wanted to photograph this breed. As an avid Andalusian fan she was more than delighted to welcome me up to see them.

From the instant I arrived the horses were everything I could have hoped for and then some; expressive, lively and stunning! Jayne and her husband were more than willing to answer all my questions and I learned about their breeding programme, spanish riding/showing competitions in the UK and information about the breed.

The two resident stallions were the main point of interest this time around. Carceno V is a showing superstar and a total show off who exploded with energy the instant he was turned out. He seemed to be aware of the camera and took tremendous joy in performing for it, throwing his head around, rearing, bucking, leaping in the air, prancing and kicking. 

Carceno V

Ulano is the older of the two (If I remember correctly he's in his 20's) and has a unique gene that adds a silver sheen to his coat. There aren't too many spanish horses that have it but it's a characterstic which has been passed on to one of his offspring, a 2 year old colt that literally shone silver in the sunlight. He was let loose in the school and demonstrated a beautiful collected canter and extended trot with the elastic movement that is associated with the breed. 

Ulano

The full set of photos has been posted to my website so please click this link if you'd like to see them: http://lottesimons.com/andalusian.php 

For more on the work Jayne and her family do at Grays PRE Andulsian Stud head over to their website: http://www.grayspre.co.uk

F**k It

I said a little while ago I was working on putting motivational techniques into place and playing guinea pig to them to see if/which have any positive effects towards productivity. I had even written up the framework of the post that I would eventually share after a fair amount of time to give the techniques a chance to sink in.

There is one fundamentally huge obstacle in the way though. You need to be motivated to make motivational changes. They didn't think that one through properly eh? It's true that to make a change you have to really want to do it like with all the classics such as getting fit or giving up smoking. It is easy if you have the will power and enough Winston Churchill determination bubbling inside of yourself. However, as much as I want and need to make these fairly small alterations in life my enthusiasm peaked within a few hours of thinking the idea and it's slipped ever since.

So how do you motivate yourself to be motivated? Or encourage yourself to do something despite the anxiety, depression, fear, whatever it is that's mentally standing in your way?
One book that I read about a year ago by John C Parkin is  "Fuck It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way" Now don't be thrown off by the word spiritual if like me you don't have religious or spiritual beliefs because the book is actually pretty logical the whole way through. It's more life coaching than enlightenment. The underlying message is incredibly simple, just say fuck it.

2012 in summary

I said some time ago that I would write a post on depression and I have drafted one but I think it's easier to write about in context of the entire year. So I thought i'd do something cliche and take a look back at the past 12 months, which with new year coming up i'm sure a lot of people have started doing.

2012 was a slow start and that's because for the last six to nine months I had unknowingly been suffering with depression and it was a gradual decline downwards each month. I didn't have the motivation to do anything, no inspiration or desire to photograph and for the most part I didn't want to exist at all. Not die, I wasn't suicidal, I just didn't want to exist, perhaps a little hard to differentiate but ultimately two very different things. For two months I just read books. All the time. As soon as I woke up I would start reading and pretty much until I went to sleep, i'd just want to stay in that fantasy world because ultimately it was a lot more tolerable than reality. It got even worse when my guinea pig passed away. Now I know that they're just small fluffy rodents but she was MY small fluffy rodent and the last of four that i'd had over the past ten years so I felt extremely lost when she died and that pointless feeling to life just got worse and I no longer cared about anything.

That's a very short summed up paragraph of what is realistically very complicated. I've made it brief, skipping out most of the details of what actually happened but for the sake of an overview, you get the point. In terms of my career, i'd been promising to do shoots left right and center and just never managed to uphold to them due to the previously mentioned mental illness, but in March things finally came together for a shoot in Brighton and it helped re-inspire me. I always forget how much passion I have for photography when I haven't done it for a long time and then everything clicks back into place in my mind when I get behind the camera again.

All legs and personality.

This summer I returned to Stud UK Euro, they breed competition horses and I visited last year to get some shots for them and blogged a series of photos of their rising 2 and 3 year olds as well as the new foals.

I had seen them tweeting throughout spring this years new arrivals and was itching to go and play with some foals so asked if it would be ok to come and take some more photos, to which it was happily agreed that it was fine for me to come up any time.

He stalked me all around the field.
We became very good friends!

When I got to the offices to let them know I was there no one seemed to be expecting me so I mentioned that i'd arranged it with a lady over twitter that I was coming over to take some photos of the foals. Little did I know, twitter duties had been handed over from Katie, whom I had arranged things with the previous year, to Rupert (Husband & Business partner of the company). They called across to him to confirm that I was supposed to be there and directed me over to his office where upon arrival he introduced himself with "Hi, i'm the twitter lady." Bit humiliating!

Anyway, onto the foals! They're brilliant. In short, hilarious, sweet and cheeky. I had one little chap follow me around for a long time and kept getting in the way of my shots because he wanted ALL of my attention, I found myself sneaking round the field trying to outsmart him so that he would leave me in peace to work. For the most part they are all very inquisitive and as soon as I stepped through the gate I was full on ambushed by the lot of them, all curious to see who I was, what I was doing and what was in my hands. As well as the foals there is also the mares to contend with, those which are very sweet and enjoyed a scratch whilst others, understandably, were keeping an eye on the "kids." One in particular was happy to mind her own business and stay out the way but she had a particularly friendly foal who walked over to me a lot so she stood a little distance away but never took her eyes off me.

Hickstead Part I: The British Jumping Derby Meeting

If you were following the social networking feeds during the British Jumping Derby Meet you'll know that I was interning in The All England Jumping Course press office. Or if you follow any of my social newsfeeds then you'll also know because I didn't stop blabbing about it. Was far too cool and big a deal for me to ever shut up about! My main job was to be more behind the scenes and shoot specifically for the facebook page to give an idea of what life is like at Hickstead, though I did get a lot of opportunities to shoot some competition.

Customer Questionnaire

SMT Interview

I was interviewed by my friend for her Uni newspaper, St Mary's Telegraph, and she kindly gave me a copy of it. Thought I would share it for anyone who wanted to have a read!

Sorry for the quality, my scanner is a bit pants.

Thanks Hannah!

A rubbish guide to good photography: Horses

"Potentially good advice written poorly in the hopes it's useful to someone." 

I don't think I have once ever posted genuine photography advice and I think it's because I don't feel i'm in a position to do so. That only comes from a comparative point of view though. Comparatively I have far less experience than a lot of other photographers but then if I take that same opinion and flip it slightly, I have a lot more than others. So I thought "why not?" and here I am biting the bullet and sharing what knowledge I have.
Had you not already guessed from the title, this post is all focused on horses so if you're here for portraits or fashion then i'm sorry to disappoint. Perhaps i'll write about something more specific to those two areas another time.
So if you're ready to join Lotte's class of 2012 then you'll want to keep reading because all the useful parts of this blog will start at the end of this sentence. Or this sentence. Maybe it will never start because i'll just keep writing in more sentences. If I were you i'd just stop reading the rest of this paragraph and start reading the good stuff. Seriously if you've not skipped this bit I question your value of time.

Retouching examples

(click to enlarge photos)

This is not my photo. All photo credit to the photographer

Ell & Cee Lingerie

W.I.P screen shot

Blue Daisies Florist shoot

Portraits

Now I make your photos pretty too, huzzah!

If you are interested/looking for someone to touch up a few of your photos then please send a low res copy of the photo and a specification of the adjustments you want made. Whether you need photos fine tuning for your portfolio or just want a family photo sprucing up, i'll be happy to help! Further examples are available upon request :)

e: info@lottesimons.com

web: www.lottesimons.com
follow: www.twitter.com/lottesimons
like: fb.lottesimons.com

Blue Daisies

So here's a little selection of images I shot for Blue Daisies, a new florist company. I'd not shot anything remotely bridal before now so it was a lot of fun doing something new and the kids certainly helped to keep things fun throughout the day!

Claire was kind enough to give each team member one of the bouquet's to take home which was a beautiful gift :)

If you need a florist I highly recommend them: Blue Daisies Website

Geneva Lane: Photos

So these photos have been a long time coming and even though I gave you some behind the scenes pics in a previous blogpost, thought i'd give you all a little video as well as!

They were shot back in April and I have only just caught word today that it's all good for me to release them. Just a little photo session I had with Geneva in the first half of this year, we played around with concepts a lot to begin with as it was important that we got the right image for her seen as this would be her first solo shoot but as this would just be promos and we were working without a stylist we kept it simple and treated it more as a good experience on Geneva's behalf to be infront of the lens on her own.

It hadn't been too long that she'd been out of the limelight after her appearance on the 2010 Xfactor as part of Belle Amie. Which meant 4 or 5 months after last appearing in my front room on the tv screen, she was back there in person. As the first recognisable face i've shot, it felt quite surreal.

I worked with make up artist Lucy on this shoot to create two different looks, one i'd wanted to do for a while with feathers in the hair and the second simply red lips & eyeliner. Realising I had some nerdy frames in my bag I handed her those too and think it really suited her character a lot more so the second look had a lot more personality to it.

Myself and Lucy both wore a feather in our hair too as we'd joked that we didn't want it to look like Gen had been the victim of a violent duck attack to passers by. Whilst at the second location we also sat and watched the ferry's coming into Dover port, observing one that appeared to be doing the slowest handbrake turn ever known to man (tryin' to impress the ladies! ;) )
Finally, aside from the photos, if there was one productive outcome from that day back in April it was that we forged an unbreakable bond from our shared admiration of one Spongebob Squarepants. To which I leave a tribute at the end of this post.

Jade & Zatessa

Click to enlarge

A couple of weeks ago I had the absolute pleasure of meeting and photographing Jade and her lovely mare Zatessa (Tess).
It was a lovely warm day and courtesy of Tess's charming but adventerous personality compelling her to go forth and explore new patches of road, grass, tree, sky, fence, leaves, gate and all other inanimate objects worthy of her attention, I was boiling hot and probably managed to burn 2 days worth of food keeping up with her. I have to say thank you to Jade for her infinite patience riding back and forth up the road for the perpetual lens changes.

I adore shoots where I have the chance to photograph both portrait and ridden images as you spend most of the day getting to know the owner and the horse as individuals within a co-existence. A relationship that you then have the responsibility of doing justice in the photos, setting up moments that represent that as well as sneaking shots of the spontaneous incidents where that just naturally happens.

Ridden and working shots, on the other hand, tend to leave me on the sidelines. Aside from giving tips as to where exactly to ride or circle around me to catch the best light, this is a chance for me to take a step back and watch the pair transform into one perfectly attuned team.
This is why I love shooting for horse owners and taking on private clients, it gives me that opportunity to witness and document the I, You and We of equestrianism and the challenge of making sure each shoot depicts the unique form of each one of those.

Jade Power:
www.drewdana.com
info@drewdana.com

Happy Halloween!

Seen as last year I did a halloween self portrait as I wasn't out celebrating on the actual day, I thought i'd make it an annual sort of shindig. Here is 2011's little set. They're just simple little things as i've been really busy with retouching work and clearing a backlog of horse photos from the past four months or so.

I vamped it up this year, not wearing fangs in this set but I did have them for the night. They're AMAZING and looked like this:

(sorry for bad quality, it's a phone snap of my laptop as I was editing the actual photo)

Beautiful all year round

If you're the sort of horse owner who deems spring/summer the only seasons you can get good photos of your horse then you're certainly missing out. No, you wont get the shiny, sleek looking coat during autumn and winter but you do get a wonderful snap of their character shining through and the potential for photos that create a lot of drama.

Whilst I can appreciate the seasonal quality to equine photography, throughout the winter months I have clients book shoots for spring/summer when "the weather's a little better" or their "horse doesn't look so scruffy" Embrace the scruffy, fuzzy look! That's their appearance for half the year and they look just as beautiful as they do in summer, it's a variation to the normal horse images. The windswept look and grey stormy clouds can be incredibly dynamic and show your horse in a different light.

Also, don't worry about aspects of shooting in various weather conditions that are of the photographers concern. It's our job to do all the clever logistical thinking and planning and if we're not worried about it, you shouldn't be either. We have experience and equipment that can cope with all sorts of issues raised when shooting on location, infact, there's one photographer who posted a set of photos of a man herding his horses up when they escaped after the volcanic eruption in Iceland. His photos are striking and he was in a situation where there can't have possibly been much light due to ash cloud coverage and the weather conditions were volatile.

Furthermore, the concern of any stuck in dirt is nothing a good groom wont take off OR you can get some great action shots of them stampeding round in the mud, if you have access to a stable that has atleast one natural light source there's always the opportunity for simple yet effective portraits and finally there's the ability to use lighting equipment. Admittedly that last point is horse dependent, if they're easily spooked it's not necessarily going to be the best option for them.

I really hope i've managed to sway atleast one or two peoples opinions that horse photos don't have to be seasonal and the change in weather and your horses appearance can be used to your advantage.