Piggin Hell!!…its been over about 4 months since my last blog and that was about a shoot in February with the ever wonderful Chrissie Red. Time to get my arse in gear and  describe my next shoot which was much later on in…erm, well March really. This is my second shoot with Rachelle Summers, I decided to book the Studio RoRo again as the weather was very unpredictable and a location shoot would have been a very cold if the weather was bad. I picked Rachelle up at the station and headed over, chatting about holidays and visits to Paris along the way.
The studio was nice n warm and once hair and make up ( not me) was done we got down to getting images done and trying out some of the new lights.

I had some ideas for this shoot and one of them was to use some old style jewellry and an old fashioned shirt, I had the shirt which was actually my grandfathers but I paraded around the second hand store to find some unusual pieces….I originally wanted some stylish rosary beads but absolutely no-one had any, however it all came good in the end.

Back in February a fellow camera club member came across an old abandoned hospital in deepest darkest Fife, in fact the hospital had a bit of a reputation for ghosts and spooky goings on, it was in fact featured in one of those supernatural programmes on TV. Well anyway off Chrissie and I went to explore, meeting Nicola Shepherd on site, the hospital was just off the road but actually quite difficult to spot. It used to be a respite hospital in war time and after that a fever ward for children.

It has to be said it was a piggin cold day, not frosty but that damp cold bone biting way, the lighting was also very dark though the images don’t look it, Nicola manned the reflector but we are still talking very high ISO. We did a quick search through the rooms and decided what to do so that we could shoot quickly to prevent getting Chrissie too cold. In one room we found a huge tractor tyre.

These 3 images below have been accepted in International Salons.

It seems such a long time ago now but its been just over a year since my first acceptance into a FIAP salon, I was mainly intrigued by Ciaran Whyte’s blog on What the F@ck is FIAP. So I thought what have I got to lose except for a bit of cash, I entered 6 images into Photoclub Danube and was surprised to get 4 accepted on my first try. I was a tad flabbergasted especially as two of them were nudes, in the past my art nude images have received luke warm attention yet here they were now in an international salon. After a bit more investigation into the is FIAP stuff I found the criteria for the distinctions had changed, the first level called AFIAP required at least 40 acceptances using 15 different images in 15 different salons and from at least 8 different countries, with 10% being prints (4). Hmmm that seemed do-able as I had 18 months to do it in as the FIAP submissions are in Dec every year and you must have over 12 months since your first acceptance.      
It all sounded a bit tricky at first glance but the more I looked at it the more I thought I could do it, I just needed 15 killer images. And in there lies the perplexing part of the issue, I have hundreds of images but which ones are killer images? in honesty I didn’t have a clue, I only had my experience at camera club competitions to guide me. I started off using images that I thought had impact and that were technically good and to some extent that worked and those guides are still valid, however I was soon to find out that certain images do not work in certain countries and that some salons prefer digital art or composites to straight photographs. And so into the FIAP maze I went, feeling my way along as best as I could.
The most troublesome part was gaining print acceptances, most of the English and Scottish salons did print based salons, however I got very few acceptances and this still stands today. It would seem that most of the print salons I had entered do not like nudes, even though these same images did very well elsewhere as digital. I found that gaining acceptances wasn’t much of a problem, within six months I had over 100 acceptances but I still only had 2 prints accepted, in fact I had well exceed the criteria for AFIAP except for prints. This was mainly due to inexperience at targeting the right image to the right salon, I had been sending prints to salons that just didn’t value my style of photography. By the time I did get 4 prints I was more than halfway to fulfilling the EFIAP requirements and had picked up some awards too. Awarded images :-

It was a great adventure that day, even though my car got stuck in 2 inches of snow, useless pile of crap in the snow and ice. Rory and I got some great images and Chrissie did fantastic stuff in the snow, Rory and I were cold with all our winter gear on, god knows how cold Chrissie felt….lol.
Roll on the Summer!!! 🙂

                  
Another excellent shoot with an excellent model, who I have to say works very hard indeed and at the end of the shoot still seemed to have bundles of energy and ideas. I love those dreads she has, they look fantastic and are a real bonus in images…it certainly makes her different from other models and I suppose it gives her an edge if a shoot calls for something a little different. However there’s more to Elle than just great hair, she’s good fun to work with and really delivers. So Elle Black, highly recommended?…hell yes! 🙂

 All in all a grand day out and somewhere that deserves more than one visit, there is an old tumble down church there that just cries out for a shoot however there were people there out on a ramble….some other day perhaps…after all Chrissie must visit the horses she made friends with, mostly by feeding them mints. Chrissie did very well with the cold that day, there were quite a few nudes and a few hiding behind rocks when cars came by etc etc…..a star as always, she never fails to impress at a shoot.

By the time we got to doing this image in the tower the weather had gotten very wet and windy, and we had to abandon the shoot, I was planning to take Bink to Morton Lochs as a last location but the fire brigade blocked us in the carpark at Lady’s Tower for 40 mins. We had just enough time for a coffee before getting Bink on the train, however Bink was a pleasure as always.

I had heard that Artemis was doing a tour of Scotland and I really did want to work with her however the time of her tour was extremely awkward for me, not her fault obviously, it just happened to clash with a particularly busy period at work, a time when I couldn’t really take time off work and if I did do the shoot I could be called away at any minute. Anyways I booked Artemis and was looking forward to it but really in the back of my mind I was expecting to have to abandon the shoot and pay her for her time (only fair). Fortunately things went smoothly and I picked Artemis up from Chrissie’s flat where she was staying for a few days, it sounds like she and Chrissie got on well together, always a bonus.
Anyways, on the way there, just 5 mins from Chrissie’s flat I came across a very strange site…..orange sheep!, yup…..orange sheep! I was telling the girls this when I got there but I’m not sure they really believed me, so on the way to the location we stopped off to have a look!.

Erm..yes a bit bizarre and the question is why?..but anyway I justified my sanity a bit..lol.

The location I went for was Lairds Loch, mainly because it was close and if I got called to work then I could pack up quickly. Artemis and I managed to drag along Chrissie as a lookout and general crazy person. It was a lovely September day and fairly sunny and it was my first shoot with the new Nikon D800, however it had been seriously raining for a few days before hand and the ground was distinctly soggy underfoot. However we soon got started and grabbed a few images.

The sun was very strong and low enough to use for some flare effect….

And with a few nudes along the way….

Now around the corner of the loch is a panaramic view of the hills of Perthshire, and the foreground is a grassy lane where the logging lorries used to convey tree trunks along…

This one is a snapseed version……check out this editor at Niksoftware..Bargain!

Then with Chrissie being lookout and people watcher…Artemis and I headed deeper into the woods just to the side of the path.

On the way to this wooded area we past a tree that grow out over the loch so we headed back there, however that area is more popular and Chrissie had to be extra vigilant…

By this time I was ready to call the shoot short because of work, we could have gone to another location but I would definitely be ‘chancing it’.
So all in all a great day out, Artemis?….lovely girl, absolutely top notch person and model, definitely on my ‘work with again’ list, highly recommended!
This image here is my favourite from the day and I’ve quoted what I have written on flickr :-

“Although on this shoot we got a lot of art nude and other interesting shots, this is my favourite from this shoot. As photographers we employ models to create images and we display these lovely images of models doing what they do best, sometimes just simple shots, sometimes photoshoped or whatever. If you look around at model shots you see fantastic poses, emotional scenes and whole variety of different ways that photographers and models work together. However seldom do we see simple shots that show the model in her natural relaxed and non posing state. There’s a difference between candid shots and unposed shots, a lot of the time models do not like ‘unscheduled shots’ as it often does not show them as they would want to be shown, therefore it is generally not polite  to take candid shots during a shoot. This image here is a shot of Artemis inbetween poses, and I love it because it shows some of her personalilty, capturing that lovely smile and her quick to laugh personality…it shows she’s relaxed and having fun (probably laughing at me in the middle of the loch wiv me wellies on). Artemis is a very professional and highly experienced model with an excellent portfolio, this standard has come thru hard work and sometimes harsh conditions, and sometimes even harsher unwarrented critisism, this shot shows a fun side.”