I happen to LOVE the camera but only one side!

Posted in - Blog on October 2nd 2015 1 Comments

I happen to LOVE the camera (but only one side!) that is until I met Lesley BT aka SUPERTOGWOMAN!

One of the only downsides of being a ‘people’ photographer is that most of my customers tell me they ‘hate’ the camera & can think of nothing worse than having their picture taken.. ~ Great start (I think to myself!) but to be perfectly honest, I hear this SO OFTEN that it no longer fazes me in the slightest & I have started to enjoy the process of shooting someone whilst they squirm (joke!)- no really I thoroughly enjoy being in control of the device I use to create images with, that I know my subjects will mostly LOVE, but the art of shooting people who are not models (& that’s most of us right?) comes down to ‘what I say’ and ‘what I do’ to relax my clients (closely followed by what I get my subjects to do!) ~ Trust me I have many tricks up my sleeve!

People are hard nuts to crack let alone shoot, especially the grown-up variety and who can blame them? We are bombarded by so many perfectly unrealistic images of models and celebrities, rubbing their high glossed/airbrushed beauty in our faces portraying to us just how we should aspire to look ~ vs~ the vilified images of models & celebrities (when they fall off the wagon), rubbing it in our faces telling us just how we don’t want to look….. Jeez did it ever occur to you that someone or something is running rings round us! – Lets leave the conspiracy theories there shall we?…

So I finally get to meet Lesley Burdett Taylor from Infinity Photographic, a fellow photographer friend of mine who I met on facebook and I can safely say is THE most buzzing Brighton Photographer Entrepeneur you could ever wish to meet!

Lesley literally does tonnes of stuff besides running her own Photographic company.. she puts on AMAZING Alternative Wedding Fairs up & down the country, has an App called Jaunty Twig (err why not?) and has her own Mobile Photobooth (housed in a 60’s style caravan) named Lucy! Oh & plus she is a single Mum with two youngs boys to boot (which makes me like her even more..) & plus she can party …BOY CAN SHE PARTY (but that’s another story for another day…don’t panic Lesley your secrets are safe with me .. for now!)

So in a nutshell Lesley does more with her life in ONE DAY than I do with mine in A MONTH & I would like to take this opportunity to say ‘Lesley you are THE Supertogwoman & I salute you – for REAL!’

So off Lesley & I trotted on this bright sunny day in Brighton (we get a lot of those) as she was kind enough to find a spare couple of hours in her busy schedule, to treat me to my own Portrait shoot in return for a big fat pot of Japanese noodles, which she loves more than anything else in the world – well almost. The benefit of being THE subject rather than THE Photographer I was about to discover, was like discovering gold – a rare but magical occurance that took some work, but delivered glowing results! Now this is where I can now TOTALLY relate to my clients in how awkward you feel at the start, but with Lesley’s help I was able to relax and just err BE…? & out of the 5000 images I was presented with (trust me Lesley has her finger on the trigger that is rapid fire continuously!) there were a handful I liked ~ no really there were A LOT I liked (& to be fair A LOT I didn’t like), but at the end of the day Lesley did her job in capturing some REAL GEMS of someone who hates having her photograph taken, which I would like to share with you now… you know the ones you really love from a shoot & think oooh is that me??!

So in summary I can fully recommend to anyone who has trouble with the painful prospect of being photographed to get in front of the camera REGULARLY! Because it helps – to accept yourself if nothing else & based on the process of ‘shoot enough darts’ (thank you Lesley) it won’t be long until you find that little rough diamond that you LOVE (& hey that little rough diamond is YOU!) So Lesley BT… you have taught me many things through this exercise & some of those things I will transfer to my own photography & clients & some I clearly won’t…(like the sheer amount of images you shoot… cos I’m sorry to say, but I just don’t have the time in the day & the bionic speed you do!) ~ Yep watch out Brighton cos’ SUPERTOGWOMAN strikes again… to teach you the moral of: LOVE YOUR SELFIE!