Smoke and Mirrors

I've been playing lately with a very analogue technique for overlaying images in-camera. I've no idea where it's going but it's always useful to have another trick in your box when inspiration is needed on a shoot, though I can't see this one having many commercial uses until I find a few more clients who are brave enough to let me play around on their time! Here are some examples...

A bit of tonal adjustment in photoshop, but apart from that they came out of the camera like this.

More Car Photography - Drive It Day

The FBHVC - Federation of British Historic Vehicle Clubs - were having their annual run last weekend, centred on the Royal Oak Pub in Bishopstone. I was there, for the third year running, to photograph the cars and their equally interesting owners.

Prints available at www.photoboxgallery.com/martinphelps

Drive It Day - Images by Martin Phelps

Car Photography

A couple of weeks ago I hooked up with an old acquaintance who now runs a business buying, restoring and selling classic european cars - www.europeanclassiccars.co.uk - and took some photos of a rather nice old Citroen DS Super 5 which he's selling. It's the first time I've dealt with trying to light something so unforgiving - curved, shiny, metallic, reflective - there's no place to hide the lights, so you have to make the highlights part of the composition. Which is (comparatively) easy in a professional studio, but a bear of a task in a dark barn with lots of other cars and assorted junk in the background, limited space, and a doorway that's leaking too much light to work with long exposures. The results were a bit underwhelming, but at least next time I can go with a much better idea of how to solve the problems. 

Down in the Hood - Melksham Town Criers Competition

Saturday afternoon in the Market Place in Melksham, and there are lots of people in very loud clothing taking turns to shout at the top of their lungs about how wonderful it is to live where they do. Places like Ilfracombe, Warminster, Bromyard and Wootton Bassett. Are these the Gangsta Rappers of rural England?

Later they were due to shout about the benefits of healthy eating, in an initiative sponsored by the NHS and something called "change4life" If you call it a name that looks like a text message, the kids will surely come, right?
The irony of having 16 walking Toby jugs shout about the benefits of regular mealtimes, low sugar cereals and "2 snax max" seems to be lost on the geniuses who thought of that one.

Wedding Site UP!

Well I finally got it done. 

It's not exactly the most full-featured wedding photography website I've ever seen, but it is at least up and running, and gives a little more information than the previous version which said pretty much "give me a call". 

It's at www.martinphelps.com/weddings - competitive prices, slick Jorgensen albums, pre-wedding shoots, trash-the-dress-shoots, documentary/reportage style, a gallery of recent images, ...it's all there. Oh, and in addition to the 2-300 edited photos as standard with each package, I make available all the out-takes as lo-res .jpgs, so if I missed anything in the edit that's really important, you can dig it out and get me to run an edit on the original raw file. Can anyone give me a reason all wedding photographers don't do that?

Bashstreet Skinhead

Here's a selection of shots from last weekend - a low-budget film shoot in Chippenham, for a company called "Kandu Arts for Sustainable Development", run by Ed Deedigan and Gracie Redfern. Actor Con O'Neill was lending his experience and support to an amateur cast. 

Bashstreet - Images by Martin Phelps

I can't relate what the story was about as I haven't read a script. The scene I was there for involved bands, a nightclub, a number of rather scary looking skinheads and some Elvis lookalikes. Or rather, some Elvis lookalike lookalikes. 

Cute or just weird

I love finding places like this. I'm the Loyd Grossman of abandoned buildings. Sort of. 

On a trip to the south of Spain last week, ostensibly to help my mate Mark out with a bit of concreting on his finca, I wandered off up the rambla in search of things to photograph and came across what appeared to be a disused quarry hut. Two rooms, a shower that still worked, a few pieces of furniture slowly taking on a covering of pigeon shit, rotting clothing on hooks on the walls, a bag with a flask, a half-empty bottle... in fact everything seemed pretty much as it had been left by the last quarrymen, and it seemed they left in a bit of a hurry.  The calendar on the wall doesn't have a year, but February begins on a Thursday and the paper is still pretty clean, so in all likelihood it's from 2007. But more interesting than the calendar is the soft porn on the walls. There's always something interesting about rotting, faded, blueing porn, but these were all the more fascinating for the odd rubbing marks around the rude bits. Did the quarrymen touch them every morning for good luck on the way out to work? Or when they had showered off the dust, changed and were on the way home? Did the marks show while the building was still in use, or have they only appeared with the passage of time, the sweat of fingers rotting the paper gradually in betrayal of some secret fetish?