File:Nothing To See Here (22221433565).jpg

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

Follow me on FACEBOOK
Follow me on TWITTER

Follow me on 500PX Follow me on GOOGLE+ Follow me on INSTAGRAM Follow me on PINTEREST

Yesterday I made the long drive up to Chippenham to work once more with Katie. Last time we worked together, back in January of this year, we we not blessed with beautiful natural light and the images were a little moody and grey. This time, however, we were a little luckier and as the day unfolded, the sun made an occasional appearance.

I arrived just before 9am and was greeted at the door by Katie's fiancé, Simon, who I had not met before. He invited me in and immediately ploughed me with coffee. By the time I left later that day, I think I had six and although I drove back, I could have easily flown. Anyway, as usual with models I get on with, we spend the first hour doing nothing but drinking coffee and chatting. Having spent a few minutes speaking with Simon, who I had more in common with that I first thought, Katie and I spent the next hour or so sitting in the garden chatting. Her little puppy, Luna, is no longer quite so little and she has managed to work out that her teeth are the best tool for getting peoples attention. She is a black labrador, as boisterous as they come and with more energy than Jedwood on ecstasy. She danced around us, nipping at my fingers, looking up at me with sad eyes that begged me to focus more on her. I did my best. The last year had flown by for both Katie and I and we both struggled to comprehend the fact that it had actually been 9 months since we last shot together. The seconds quickly melted into minutes and those minutes froze into an hour. Eventually, we decided we needed to actually take some photos.

We started off upstairs. This was my first photo shoot with the new Sony A7RII and I was really keen to see how it would handle the low light. I took a few shots with the Canon to start, but the images were dark and grainy, as I was having to shoot in excess of ISO 1600. So I plucked the little Sony from the bag and gave that a go. Wow, the images jumped off of the screen as if they had been taken at base ISO. There was little noise, the colours were great and the tones were bang on. Zooming in to see how the level of detail matched up to the 5Dsr and...well....its not far off. This camera is proving to be a keeper.

So we shot for a while, had a break, shot a little bit more. Katie is one of those models that makes being a photographer such an easy thing to do. She doesn't need to be instructed, or pointed in the right direction; she just knows how she looks best and is very authentic in the way that she delivers it. When her eyes are off camera, you would believe she didn't know she was being photographed. When her eyes are on you, its hard to tell from her expression how she feels about it. This is great for candid, authentic photography. The last thing you want is some smiling girl inviting the viewer into the image. No, you want to question, to be unsure. You want to wonder for a moment whether you are allowed to look into the image or not, and Katie is brilliant at delivering that feeling. Even I, the taker of these images, sometimes wonder whether she is happy, sad or indifferent in that moment. Her expressions are so authentic that they really could pass for candid photography. And that is the holy grail.

Im honestly not sure which style of image suits Katie best. She excels at boudoir, art nude and fashion, but for me I think it is her portraiture that stands out most. The main reason for this is that she is just so pretty. It is very hard to get a bad portrait of this girl, because even if the angle or the expression is not perfect, her eyes always dominate the image. Her eyes are so blue, they give even the most desaturated image colour. You may find yourself drawn into the image by them, focusing more on her eyes that you will any other part of the frame. For me, they are the dominating force in each and every image.

So out of the four or so hours I was there, we probably did only an hour of shooting. The rest of time was taken up chatting with Simon, fending off Luna and her new found teeth and watching Henry wander around the front room with his toy dinosaurs. For the record, Henry is Katie's two and a half year old son. What a polite, happy child he is. Everything he says is followed by please or thank you and he never stops smiling. When I left, he shook my hand and said see you soon.