I have been all around the UK this year with my Children’s Photography Training and my last course of the year was held in Glasgow. As a treat to myself I took an extra day to do some shopping and indulge in a little bit of street photography.
The day of my photography workshop it was glorious sunshine but the following day it started raining when I got up and didn’t stop all day!
That said wet weather can make for more really fun images and I enjoyed sitting on a kerb right next to a huge puddle just watching people try to avoid getting soaked.
I also visited Glasgows Museum of modern art which was really inspiring. I didn’t quite know where it was so I asked a local (who was incredibly friendly – the city is full of amazing helpful people) who said to follow my way along the main street to the statue with a cone on his head… (see below the entrance to GOMA)
Here are a few of my favourite images taken in the rain – all shot on my Canon 5diii with a 50 1.4mm lens. I actually switched my camera into black and white as I find it great training when looking for contrast. I also deliberately shot some images with a slower shutter speed (around 1/25th of a second) to help my subjects remain anonymous but also to retain that feeling of movement.
For those of you that follow my website, facebook page or blog, you will know I have been talking for months about going on a trip to Paris. It was organised by Andrew Appleton (see Andrews training website here) through the Guild of Photographers. I am predominantly a natural light photographer, but have always been very interested in learning more about lighting & fashion photography, so when this training course became available I jumped at the chance. I was then on a mission to convince my other photographer friends to join me and Andrea, Stephanie, Rebecca and Louise also booked. We decided to rent an apartment in Paris and go out a couple of days earlier so we could spend some time exploring and doing some street photography. These are the lovely ladies below….
On the Saturday, after getting into Paris on the Eurostar, we headed to our apartment and unpacked. We then jumped straight onto the Metro and headed for the Eiffel Tower. It was a grey day but its been a very long time since I visited Paris and I forgot just how much I love the tower. Its especially magical when it lights up at night.
As it started to get dark we met up with Elodie, a French photographer, and she took us for a walk round by the tower, down to the Seine and then we headed out for a really lovely meal. These are some of the images I took on Day 1 I especially enjoyed taking photos on the metro.
On Day 2 we headed to the shopping district and to the museum which has a lot of street artists. There was a fantastic clown, and bubble artist, and I could have stood for hours watching the children running through the giant bubbles and having balloon hats made for them. I challenged myself on day 2 to shoot a little differently, so all day I used a fixed prime lens, the 50mm 1.4, and tried to only photograph in black and white.
On Sunday night we met with Andrew and his team including Jen & Angela the models and Donna the make up artist. I’d been looking forward to meeting Jen as I’ve been following her blog for a while now as she is incredibly creative and has started her own very inspiring Dream Catcher photography project. You can read Jen’s blog here http://jenbrookmodel.tumblr.com/ and see her interview with F Stoppers magazine here http://fstoppers.com/when-a-model-dictates-creative-direction-jen-brooks-dreamcatcher-project.
Part 2 of my Paris trip to follow soon….
