I am really pleased to be taking part in the Highcliffe Castle Wedding Fair on 18th March this year! If you’ve got a wedding booked at Highcliffe Castle for this year or next, come along and say hello! I’ll have lots of lovely albums for you to see ….. Check the details here. And if you’ve got a wedding booked elsewhere, come along anyway; there’ll be lots of lovely wedding suppliers to talk to! And as well as being at the Highcliffe Castle Wedding Fair, I was delighted to be chosen as one of just three photographers for their beautiful new brochure, due out very soon. This will actually be my very first wedding fair – in all my eleven years as a wedding photographer, I’ve never done one, and thought it was about time!

Highcliffe Castle is one of my most favourite wedding venues in Dorset and The New Forest, handy for people travelling from Bournemouth and Poole as well as further afield.

One of the things I most love about Highcliffe Castle weddings is the proximity of the beach – just a short walk down the zig zag path, and you’re there – a fabulous setting for beautiful pictures! If you do want to go to the beach, and I really hope you do, you could always have a spare of shoes handy, if you didn’t want to wear your beautiful wedding shoes on the sand! But there are so many lovely spots for pictures at Highcliffe Castle, and another favourite is that big beautiful totally gorgeous front door!

If you are having your reception at The Castle, that’s great – the caterers linked with Highcliffe include Merlins and Beales, both of whom are fantastic! If not, why not look at The Lord Bute, and there too you will not be disappointed, by the food nor the hotel, and the service you’ll get is superb!

Have a look at Highcliffe Castle’s website, and if you want to see more of my work at Highcliffe, you can do right here.

I’ll also be at Highcliffe Castle later in the year, in a shared exhibiton with some other local photographers – look out for Exposure 3! More details to follow, and if you want to be kept informed about forthcoming exhibitions (I’ve got three this year!) and other events, do sign up for my email newsletter – don’t worry, I won’t constantly spam you – if you get one newsletter a month, I’m doing well! And I have four pairs of complimentary tickets up for grabs – email me with your name, address, and wedding details!

Tags: beach, Bournemouth wedding, Castle wedding, Christchurch wedding, Highcliffe Castle, New Forest, The Lord Bute, volkswagen, wedding photographers

Based in Christchurch, wedding and portrait photography I also covers many day nurseries and playgroups in Bournemouth, Christchurch, Ringwood and elsewhere in Dorset and The New Forest.

I love visiting the nurseries! I usually have two sessions each year, one in the spring, and another in the autumn, and love getting to know the children over the years they spend there! So sad when they leave and go to big school.

The old days of one pose in a boring brown strut mount have long since gone – today’s proof cards have four poses, and you can go online to see more, and choose from such a wide range of products – mounted prints, unmounted, keyrings, mugs, T-shirts, teddy bears, canvas wraps – all sorts of things!

A while ago, I reached the limit if what I could do, solely by myself; I photographed the children, edited the images, printed the proof cards, bagged and labelled them with the order forms and pricelsts, created the online albums, collected the orders, send the files off, put all the prints in the mounts, bagged, labelled and delivered them back to the nursery – phew!

Which was when I sought alternative solutions, and after looking at many different companies, decided that Dunns Imaging offered the solution that came closest to what I wanted – multi-pose proof cards, and online previews and online ordering, and they put all the packs together, put the pictures in the mounts, and package everything! Leaving me free to do what I love – create gorgeous images!  

 But the Dunns solution wasn’t ideal – simply the best I could find at the time. The ordering was system was rather clunky (good technical term) and not at all intuitive – to see a larger image, you had to select a product, drag the image onto it, click it, click something else, and you could see a larger but still unrepresentatively fuzzy version. And it was slow.

Well, last week, I had the honour of becoming only the second photographer in the whole of the UK to have a sneaky little look at what they are going to be doing in the spring. The website that you, the parent, sees is being completely overhauled and all the issues I had with the old system have been addressed and more besides – it’ll be far more intuitive, much easier to use, clearer, quicker AND it will work on your iPad, iPhone, and all other smart phones and tablets – really excited about it, and it will be live in time for the spring photoshoots!

Also coming in the spring are some lovely new very funky backdrops – it’s time for a change from white!

I would like to take on another two good nurseries – so if you are a nursery owner or manager and are looking for a different photographer – call or email now!

Tags: bournmouth photographer, child photography, Dorset, funky backdrops, New Forest, playgroups, professional nursery photographs

I’ve got a shared show coming up next year, and it will be themed around portraits, and this seems like the perfect opportunity to revisit my Obsessions art photography project!

I’ve always had the intention to revisit this portrait project, started way back in 2008. The concept is to photograph people in a context that reflects their passion, their lifetsyle, the love of their life, enjoying their hobby, the thing that gets them through the working week! I met some amazing people doing this project, inclduing a beautiful belly dancer, the barbed wire collector (probably the only one in the UK!), the bell ringers of Christchurch Priory and many more. Space was limited at The Red House Museum in Christchurch where the exhibition was held, but it made for a lovely small exhibition.

The subjects were invited, or responded to some of the publicity that the exhibition generated, and I am inviting you to respond now – get in touch and tell me about your passion!

Tags: art photography, Christchurch portrait photographer, Dorset Portrait Photography, portrait exhibition

 This new venture, rumoured last year, is coming true! You’ll be able to get married on the beach in Bournemouth!

Melanie Kiani, from Bellissimo Wedding Planners, which will organise the services, said: “We are very confident that no-one in the UK has done this.”

And I look forward to seeing many happy brides enjoying the beautiful sunshine, and getting some stunning pictures for them!

Tags: beach, Bournemouth, Bournemouth wedding, wedding photographers, weddings

Parley Manor Wedding Photographs

I’m really looking forward to this weekend when I get to meet all the lovely brides and grooms who have booked Parley Manor, near Bournemouth, as their wedding venue for 2012.

It’s usually an extremely busy day, and I hope this year will be just the same, despite the quarter finals of the Rugby World Cup being on – the England match is nice and early and won’t clash!

Parley Manor is such a gorgeous venue for your wedding, and the opportunites for beautiful wedding photography are wonderful – so many different locations, so close to each other, and the chance to get fabulous pictures without taking the bride and groom away from their guests for hours!

Catering at Parley Manor weddings is taken care of by the fantastic team from Merlins Catering, who are also available for other venues in Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch, as well as further afield such as Birkin House near Dorchester.

Tags: Birkin House, Bournemouth, Merlins, Parley Manor, photographer, photography, wedding photographers, weddings

One event in the Arts By The Sea Festival, taking place now in Bournemouth, until 15th October, that I really wanted to see was the Grand Grotesque Parade. In fact, I was even considering taking part but couldn’t find anyone to do so with! It was intended to be a recreation of an event that took plac in Bournemouth way back in Edwadian times, in 1910. There’s little documentary evidence remaining it seems beyond some postcards, but the original event seems to have been politically inspired … and somehow that seems very appropriate for the times we are lving in now.

Some postcards recently unearthed show some characters from the 1910 parade wearing hats labelled Labour Exchange, Licensing Bill and Old Age Pension – how little the times change!

The 2011 Parade looked fabulously as it passed in front of the carousel on the Pier Approach in Bournemouth, giving the opportunity for some dramatic photographs, and then passed into the Lower Gardens. I deliberately shot without flash, wanting to work with the available light and atmosphere; as the light levels fell, I had to push the camera harder and harder, and ended up shooting at an amzing 6400 ISO, with some brilliant results – that’s a why we spend so much money on cameras like the Nikon D3 and fast f2.8 lenses.

Under the direction of Ali Sharpe, a choir chanted and enchanted as the Parade made it’s stately progess through the Gardens, past the Bandstand where later in the evening a wonderful Paper Cinema would be produced. And the local Bournemouth League of Steampunks (just love their style!!) added another theme to the Parade.

The Festival has been very good, and I’d suggest has brought to Bournemouth the kind of things we’d usually associate with more avant garde places such as Brighton – more please! The Electric Theatre at The Pavilion on Friday and Saturday was stunning, and the events in the Gardens through that weekend were exhilarating.

The Festival continues until the 15th October, and would hope that this is just the first one!

Tags: Arts By The Sea Festival, Bournemouth, Grand Grotesque Parade, photography, steampunk

Remember Thursday 18th August, the day of the flash floods in Bournemouth, Dorset? 

Well, in amongst everything that was going on that day, weddings were still taking place, and wedding photographers had to get the pictures!

I was fortunate NOT to be photographing a Bournemouth wedding that day but instead was in The New Forest, at the lovely Careys Manor.

Sam and Chris were getting married there, that day, and remembered planning their wedding back in the dark cold days of winter, looking forward to a lovely August day, with the sun shining, and everyone relaxing in the lovely gardens at Careys Manor ….. English weather!

Sam and Chris’s ceremony was at the hotel, as was the reception, so at least they were there, but so many of the guests, including Chris the groom’s parents, were getting held up by the floods and the road closures and the general chaos in Bournemouth that it was decided to delay the ceremony, to give everyone as much time as possible. The lovely registrars were able to wait an extra half an hour which proved long enough for the groom’s parents to arrive. and most of the other delayed guests.

Sam was fabulous – a lot of brides would have been distraught at such a turn of events, but she was lovely and just got on with the day, enjoying making her vows with Chris, and enjoying the Absolute Fun Casino in the evening!

Did you spot the table ident with the story about Sam catching the bouquet at her sister’s wedding, at Parley Manor - well I was there for that too!

Tags: Absolute Fun Casino, Bournemouth, Bournemouth wedding, Careys Manor, Dorset, New Forest, Parley Manor, wedding photographers, weddings

Apart from weddings, of course, I love music, especially live, and especially traditional! It was brilliant to combine that with my photography when I was asked to cover the recent Purbeck Folk Festival in deepest rural Dorset. This years festival was only the third, so it’s still small and growing but nonetheless some of the biggest names in the world of traditional music were there, notably Seth Lakeman, KAN, Po’Girl  and the wonderful Uiscedwr.

The new names for me that I loved included a young band called Dyer:Cumming – the future is exciting with such musicians around, the amazing Hat Fritz and Cara Robinson, The Moulettes and The Outside Track. It was great to have such close access to so many wonderful musicians, and to be able to get such good portraits of them in action! A big shout out to Paul, Cath and everyone who helped make the event so good, and brought such good music to Dorset.

You can many more of the images right here.

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Tags: Dorset, folk, music, photographer, photography, purbeck, traditional music, weddings