I was recently asked if I could take a look at a damage wedding picture to see if I could do anything to restore back to its former glory.

A nice little home shoot of Josh and his proud mum and dad, plus his big cousin Sophie. Here is a little video clip of some of my favourite pictures.

Tots and Toddlers 1 from Alec Kirkham on Vimeo.

With young children it is sometimes better to do a photoshoot in the comfort and familiar settings of their own homes. It can be a very daunting experience for young children when they first walk into a studio not only is this a strange place full of strange equipment but they also have a stranger in the room me trying to take pictures. At least when doing this from their home there is only one strange element and again that is me trying to take pictures:)

Tots & Toddlers 2 from Alec Kirkham on Vimeo.

Some simple portraits taken recently while on some family days outs. This is my daughter Lauren who up until now has had a complete aversion to having her picture taken however recently she has been more willing, long may it continue 🙂

Sunday 17 March 2013: Summerlee Photomedia Studio

Local photographer Alec Kirkham will host a one-day workshop aimed at people wanting to ‘skill-up’ generally as well as those important social and family occasions.  Alec will take you through from the beginning, covering aperture, speed, ISO and ambient light control, flash unit choices, light modifiers and off-camera flash use.  There will be hands on practical exercises balancing flashes with Ambient light, colour balancing, bouncing flash and finally how you can use your environment for effect.

Suitable for beginners with some experience of cameras, and those with a little more photographic knowledge.

Booking is essential.

Course Link

The good news is that the course is now full.

I was asked to run a lighting workshop by some members of my camera club. The remit was they are relatively new to the world of flash and studio photography so wanted to get some practical experience of working with various light set-ups and light modifiers. I was just there to facilitate with the set-ups and give some advice if advice was needed. So we had 4 hours in the studio and thanks to another member of the group we also had a model (Mhairi McGowan) and make-up artist (Charlie Doherty), which always helps when running a workshop 🙂

In order to help with the session I had spent some time searching the internet looking for some interesting studio photographs, each with a different lighting set-up. In total I selected about 10 images. I then showed these images to the group and asked them to select an image that we would then try to reverse engineer the lighting set-up in order to recreate a similar looking image. This approach was very successful and it meant we were not trying to invent anything for ourself on the day and it made the job for the model really easy as all she needed to do was to copy the pose from the selected image. As there was 10 members of the group and time was limited meaning each person could only take a few shots of each set-up; however everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and all contributed well to the session.

So now that everyone has have had a bit more exposure to the studio and tried different lighting set-ups I hope it has demystified some of the technical aspects and perhaps my simplistic approach will encourage the members to explorer the creative realms of flash photography.

To see more examples taken on the day please read on

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