I won a couple of contests - yeay!

So firstly I won a small contest on Model Mayhem : The concept shot of the day (Males)



with this photo of Miles Leeson and his son entitled "Protected"



And then this weekend I came third in the photography category for the Think Pink III contest on Deviantart (out of literally hundreds of entries so that was quite cool) with this photo taken in the recent shoot with Charlie:



Entering the contests has helped to raise awareness of my work by driving people to my portfolios to see my work so it can't be bad. I have just entered the Witcher Contest on deviantart with this photomanip:



The Witcher is a new game coming out. There are thousands of entries so I'll not get too excited just yet but we'll see.

Lessons learned the hard way......

So.....the lesson for the day is:

Get the model to sign a model release BEFORE the shoot!

Problem: The model from the last shoot decided she didn't like the pics and didn't want them to be used. (Great!)

Given the hundreds of pounds I spent and hours of preparation organising this shoot I was not prepared to be beaten and throw them all away - especially as the pics turned out so well (in my opinion anyway).

Solution: I managed to take the facial features from models I have used in ealier shoots and blend them to the face in the pictures in question to reform the facial features to such an extent that they no longer resembled the model in question.

Result: I think the pics look better than they did before......phew! and no model release form required seeing as the person now in the pics actually doesn't exist.

That will not happen again!

So the new pics:




the full series can be seen at my deviantart page: http://fairieswatchoverme.deviantart.com

First of 3 - Journey to Rivendell

So........ firstly my intended model didn't turn up for the shoot yesterday (less said about that the better).

Turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I manged to get hold of Jess, who I hadn't yet worked with and not only did she have the perfect look for the shoot but she was willing to jump straight in there and then and was a star to work with.

So here's a "behind the scenes" shot:




and here are two of the finished pics:

PICTURES REMOVED - SEE NEXT POST FOR DETAILS AND FULL STORY

The dress was a vintage "medievel style" wedding dress and the hooded cloak was made by me at 2.30am the night before (lol). The wig is a Cosplay wig that came from Japan.

The background effect was created using the strips of hanging material and coloured light gels seen in the "behind the scenes" shot above and then some careful blending and blurring in PS.

More pics from the series as always can be seen on my deviantart page http://fairieswatchover.deviantart.com

Huge thanks to Jess for stepping in at the last minute and being so brilliant.

vintage goodies

Managed to aquire a vintage "medievel style" wedding dress:



It's awesome and perfect for tomorrow's shoot, which is with Emma. We did a shoot with Emma a couple of years ago when we were looking for a live version of our cartoon mascot on smileonthetiles.com.

Here she is:



This shot of her reminds me so much of an old photo of Elizabeth Taylor when she was young.



Next post will be all about tomorrow's shoot................