Malvern in the spotlight

We do a spot of photography for the wonderful magazine Worcestershire Life, who are running a spread about Malvern in the January issue. Cue Phil and Rachel trying to take old subjects in new ways.





The lad with the knife is Shaun Harris at Cridlan and Walker, organic butchers to the stars.

Panoramas

I don't know about you, but we often find that stitched panoramas make me feel a bit seasick. Both these two stitches are intended to give a wider angle with less distortion, but without the usual nausea.

These are images of The Downs School, Malvern College Preparatory School for their upcoming prospectus. We've left some of the image edge effects in so you can see how it was done.

If you like this kind of thing, why not look at our friend Bob Bilsland's site www.panoview.co.uk
Bob is the king of enormous panoramas!

Glamourpuss

These shots were for Apparicio's hair salon in Worcester. We took these in a busy hairdressers, though you'd never know!!!

It's nice to be appreciated, once again

OK, so we get a lot of nice emails from wedding couples. Here's the latest email from the latest wedding!

Rachel and Phil: We both just wanted to say a massive thankyou for photographing our wedding. Weve just had the best weekend of our lives. We want to do it again.Ha ha. We just loved it so much. I couldnt get over how gorgeous my Rachel looked. Since we've been home ive asked her to put back on her wedding dress about 100 times.ha ha. Once again though, thankyou. Your both such lovely people. We cant wait to see the photos. We'll be in touch when we return from Thailand in 2 weeks. Mr & Mrs Smith.

Worcestershire Life Spread

We have three pages of pics in Worcestershire Life this month - various shots of the Autumn Show at the Three Counties Showground. The layout does us proud!

We have some more commissions for November which will be in the December issue - watch this space!

All Yours picture in today's Sunday Telegraph

we don't normally buy this paper, but we had to today to see Rachel's picture of Susan Kelsey. This was taken as a publicity picture for Susan-Russell publishing, who produce a range of diaries so that women can chart their various cycles. Available at a Waterstones near you!!

http://www.susan-russell.com/

Making it look interesting

Sometimes it's hard to introduce some movement and drama into an office-based commercial shoot. This is early days, but we're trying to get something interesting in the new website for Russell and Co., local solicitors and all-round good eggs:

www.russellandcosolicitors.co.uk

The problem with teaching

Is that some pupils are better than the teachers!

Witness these efforts from this term's Even Less Basic class in Worcester - my night time shot in Malvern totally eclipsed by student Roger King's picture of Worcester Bridge. Drat and double drat!!

Roger uses a Nikon D70, which makes it even worse since I'm on a D2X. Must try harder!

Shoe fetish

October has been a busy month at All Yours Towers, with lots of weddings, magazine shoots, schools work, teaching and product shoots. Our office is currently overflowing with shoes and handbags as we are photographing the new collection from Zinnia. Very nice products, nice people to deal with and fair trade as well:

www.zinnia-gifts.co.uk

It's nice to be appreciated, again

We happened to be up in Bromsgrove yesterday so we dropped in Sandy and Aimi's wedding photos personally. We'd also put together a little album for them as a present, which is something we often try to do for our customers if we can.

When we got home, they had sent us an email:

Hi Phil and Rachel,

Was great to see you both. A massive thank you for dropping the photos and cd’s off. Also for the present you gave us, its fantastic!, I like how you have got my dress detail in the background, gotta show off me dress J

It was a fab day, and you have captured it all on your amazing pictures.

Really enjoyed having you with us on our special day, and will recommend you to EVERYONE!

Well, hope to see you,

Cant say ‘thank you’ enough

Aimi & Sandy

(there were also some smiley faces which the blog software can't do)!

Here are a few pics from their day.

Massive cabbages and medieval divorces

First of all, apologies for the lack of blog postings over the past few weeks - we've been snowed under with weddings of all shapes and sizes, and we are working on a new wedding-related project that I can't mention at the moment but is close to fruition. We've also been doing some schools photography which is great fun but can't be shown here.

Meanwhile, we've started photographing for Worcestershire Life magazine. We covered the Three Counties show this weekend. We are deighted to be working with such a prestigious publication. Here are a few of the pictures, but there are many more in the magazine and you really should buy your own copy!

Sir David and Lady de Jarpanville (Philip and Louise Monteith), of the Freemen of Gwent discuss their medieval divorce.

Bob Edwards with Sky.

Winning gundog from the Mid-Western Gundog Society.

Ian Scott with his unfeasibly large first prize cabbage - 23kg!!!

Detail from Rosemary Stammer and Sheila Madigan's Gold Prize winning flower arrangement.


We love this kind of shoot, but there is lots to do - is it portraiture? is it journalism? who cares??

Rachel in leather at Hanbury Hall

Rachel and Phil are photographing a wedding this weekend so we did a quick recce on the motorbike. Tricky lighting, but very nice cakes.

Up in the air

We have worked for a while as specialist property photographers, but the state of the market has reduced the demand for this. We have a 15m telescopic mast and a Canon G9 (a great little camera even if it is a Canon) which can be controlled from the ground. 15m does not sound like much, but can provide a much better view of properties - showing the layout of the site, the gardens behind the building etc.

This picture is of a barn conversion near Redditch - we think the angle makes the scale, layout and gardens more visible.

Kaylee strikes again

Rachel's picture of Kaylee was taken in at Apparicio's hair salon in Worcester for their window display. It has been printed very large - about 46" square and looks great. It just goes to show that you don't need a studio to do glamour.

Wet motorbikes

We have a motorbike (nothing flash - a 1990 BMW K75S), and one of the joys of the Summer is to go out on a Wednesday night to the Bikers Nites, which are at various pubs in the Cotswolds. (Check out the schedule - www.//bikersnite.mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk) If the weather is good there can be several hundred motorbikes at a tiny Cotswold hostelry. Our good friends at Cotswold Style magazine asked us to take some pictures of the bikes.

Cue black skies, pouring rain and low attendance by fair weather bikers. Having stuck the cameras in the panniers, we took a few pictures, but we still never have done the Cotswold Style shoot because it's rained every Wednesday ever since!

All Yours seeking to expand

Following our very successful Summer, and with plenty of weddings booked for the rest of the year and a growing crop booked for 2009, we have been looking for photographers to join the team. So we placed a small ad on a photography website, with the result that we have been bombarded with portfolios and cv's from all over the UK. Our website viewing figures have gone through the roof!

The problem is, a lot of the photographs that have been sent are just not very good. In fact, some people's best work is so poor that it might have been on the cutting room floor around here. Among all this there are a few real gems, though, and we'll be talking to people in due course to see what we can do.

We've been speaking to couples about their weddings this week, and they have all been to weddings that have been ruined by the photographers. So it's not just about taking the right shots properly, it's also about giving the whole wedding family a decent experience at the same time.

Our experience of photographing small children has come in really useful here - we know how to get the job done quickly. Even a couple with a list of 40 shots don't want to spend 2 minutes per shot i.e. 80 minutes grinning at the camera when there is champagne ready to be drunk! Having the experience to get on with the photography quickly, and the tact and diplomacy to get on with the family nicely is what we strive to do and what we're looking for.

It's nice to be appreciated

Just got off the phone from Pam Flint (see below). Being a celeb family, Pam's been photographed by Hello magazine, and reckons Rachel did a better job without the crew of people. Putting her money where her mouth is, Pam ordered some enlargements for her lovely house. It's great for a little family firm like ours to know that people in the know appreciate our work.

Wedding frenzy

We are just recovering from shooting three weddings in a weekend, including our biggest ever - a big event in Cheltenham Town Hall. This required the biggest group shot we've ever done with 300 people. Fortunately the weather was good. On Saturday we shot weddings in Malvern and Droitwich, in dreadful weather. As always, it is a privilege to be there, and we come away happy and full of energy even after a long day.

Live 24/7 new edition on the streets

The new edition of the glossy Birmingham lifestyle magazine is out and full of our pictures. From pictures of Dennis Waterman's beautiful partner Pam Flint, to tourist scenes of Worcester to advertising shots of food and interiors, there is a lot of our work in there. It's always satisfying to see your pics in print.

International Property photography, don't you know

We were asked to photograph this ski lodge development near Val d'Isere, and who were we to say no? Since we don't ski, going in the Summer was no problem for us. Much of our restaurant and pub photography is along similar lines, but with less snow and more crisps.

The mountain is the fourth highest in Europe, and gives you something to look at as you're doing the washing up.

The pictures will be used in the next revision of the website, but the old one is http://www.balcons-ste-foy.com/ It really is a fabulous part of the world, a couple of hours drive from Geneva

Photobooks arrive!!

Our new photobooks arrived today (well, strictly we collected them by motorbike yesterday because we needed to show them to a couple last night), but this has been the first chance we've had to sit down and look at them properly. They're absolutely beautiful, and we can't wait for customers to see them. We've had a range of sizes produced, from wedding albums to pocket books and we're really proud of them. They are also much less expensive than most albums that couples have to choose from.

We're getting ready for the three weddings we're covering this weekend, and still working on teaching materials for the courses we'll be running in September. It's a long job, but as ex-teachers we know that more preparation leads to better classes.