Nude Photo Pro

For many years I have avoided forums like the plague, because frankly I don’t learn that much after 20 years in the business as a professional and it takes up my valuable time when I could be working. When a friend called Simon Plant started a forum recently I decided to get involved and though I am not one of the most frequent visitors there, I do post occasionally and try to help when I can. It seems like a friendly enough place and there are a couple of others that I quite like as well. 

Read More >>

Beauty editorial fitness shoot

Among the many topics discussed in my book, I touch on the subjects of finding the right models and locations for your intended projects. Take the image above done with my Hasselblad as a prime example.

Read More >>

Topless advertising image for sun tanning product

Earlier today I was sifting through a storage area underneath the stairs where I found a large box that contained roughly a dozen folders with a large chunk of my old film archives and it was a real trip down memory lane. In the first folder I found, the transparency for this image which is actually from the very last job I did on film before my first experiments with digital.  

Read More >>

An old example of fashion work by Ashley Karyl

I write about this subject in greater depth in my photography ebook however here are a few points to bear in mind when approaching a model agency to organise a casting.

Read More >>

Canon 1DsII with 24-105L

Very often I find photographers hankering after the latest and greatest camera equipment. This is most common among amateurs but a good number of professionals also suffer from this curious affliction.

A quick look at many web forums will quickly reveal that most of their members are far more interested in equipment than in taking pictures. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call them “camera owners” rather than photographers. Next year they will probably own a new camera but their photography is unlikely to have improved much.

Read More >>

Nude by a waterfall

The above image was part of a beauty assignment I did in South Africa for an Italian cosmetics client. The team which flew out there must have been about ten people but not everybody was there to work directly on the photography.

This particular day had been extremely hectic, since we were unable to start as early as I would have liked and there had already been a shoot on the beach that morning with the same model followed by another shoot at a rented house nearby. It then took an hour or so in the mini van to reach the final location before we started the hard walk up to the waterfall.

Read More >>

Anybody who has read this blog previously will know that I recently upgraded to snow leopard here on my main computer and everything seemed to be going pretty well for a few days but then I had a couple of crashes and freezing episodes immediately after updating to 10.6.1.

Read More >>

It’s inevitable that you have times which are full of inspiration and progress, while at other moments it all just feels wrong. Austin Powers would say, you’ve lost your mojo baby. Personally I hate the days when I only seem to be dealing with problems or one of those really tedious tasks that are nothing more than a means to an end, but bring you no satisfaction at all.

Read More >>

I think there was a time when the biggest question of the day was whether or not I should change the lab where my film was processed. There was no question of shooting with anything but the Hasselblad or changing film, so anything else was pretty much a side issue. Those halcyon days were either spent flirting with models or simply trying to be a better photographer in its most straight forward sense, i.e. somebody who takes pictures.

Read More >>

After a couple days use I have to say this has been an extremely uneventful upgrade, but in a good way. A few 3rd party plugins were disabled, but I have been able to reinstate them easily enough. The printer works, which had been a major concern given the past track record of Epson drivers with OS X.

Read More >>