We all had great fun yesterday during our first studio day of the year. We had 4 sittings in total each lasting for an hour. The venue for the event was at Roberts Hall Scout Hut in Priory Street Farnborough. The hut was brilliant as it’s spacious enough for our needs.

We are planning on running more studio days throughout the year and into the future. We have a number of options for future venues in and around Farnborough. I shall be announcing the next one as soon as I have more details. However if you would like to come along to the next session, please drop me an email so that I can put you on the list. I shall then get in touch once we have a series of dates for the year ahead.

We are looking for a decent number of people as each day starts as early as 9am and runs through till at least 5pm. You can book a half hour slot (ideal for couples) or an entire hour for a more intensive shoot (ideal for families).

Andrew and Diana Spiers with their daughter Daisy

Tina and I had a great time photographing the wedding of Andrew and Diana Spiers this past Saturday (6th February) at Wokingham Registry Office and Cantley House Hotel, Wokingham. The weather and light were lovely albeit freezing cold outside. I look forward to meeting up with them soon to go through their photographs.

As an aside we highly recommend Miltons Restaurant which is located within the Hotel grounds, their food is first class

To view the complete gallery, please go to nicklewis.net/gallery/weddings/spiers

As featured on fotomoto.com

Having just woken up (well that was an hour ago), eating some breakfast, waking up with a nice strong cup of tea, I check my email and am delighted to read one from Fotomoto to notify me that today I am their featured artist. I only wrote about them the other day in my previous blog entry. So if you have come to this site via Fotomoto and have never been here before, welcome and nice to meet you! Please take a look at the gallery pages and tuck into the blog entries, stick around for as long as you like.

Anyway better be off – Doing a wedding shoot today!

As featured on Fotomoto!

Featured on Fotomoto.com!

Two images of mine have recently been picked as part of the Fotomoto Valentine’s collection, the “Ranunculus” image that is highlighted above from www.nicklewis.net and “Candles” from www.journog.com my photoblog project. This is really exciting news as I have been following the progress of Fotomoto very closely in recent months and use it on both of my sites to sell prints.

Valentine's tulip - well it's not actually called that but it could be for you? Why not buy a card or print for one of your loved ones?

So how is it going with Fotomoto?

I wrote about Fotomoto a little while back and this stimulated some interest through the blog comments with many people asking me about the service, how it works, how effective it is and whether I’ve made sales with it.

Selling digital images direct to clients

Nouvelle Vague tuning up on stage

Professional photography is tough these days, there is no denying that and none more so than in the world of live music. Hundreds of photographers are hungry for images of the current artistes and it becomes something of a lottery in making those much needed sales. This shot was taken with the intention of offering something a little different, not so much for the fact he was smoking on stage, in fact it was at an outdoor event, so I believe that is ok?!! I just loved the fact that the band were doing their own preparation, chatting away in French, setting the levels, tuning up and so on. Some of my peers were getting a little fidgety, quite common, as a lot of waiting around takes place at these events which can be boring – I spent a little time capturing what was going on around me. The light as you can tell was very low, so I cranked up my ISO to 800, kept the aperture wide open and shutter speed around 80th of a second. In these scenarios, noise (or grain in old film parlance is unavoidable) and quality tricky to maintain.

Three Hussars mounted on horseback ready to take to the arena

I have decided to spend a little time going through the archives and sharing some shots from previous years. This is one of my favourites from 2009 and was a fantastic event to cover, I can still vividly recall the thundering of the hooves charging past and the smell of gunpowder. It was a visual feast and I came away with some pleasing shots which of course makes it even more worth the while.

I also enjoyed my ride on a golf cart that night as the Queen’s Assistant Chief Steward gave me a lift across the grounds of Windsor Castle to the Showground which was one of the most unusual little journeys I have taken in recent years. He was a very chatty gentleman and told me a little bit about the event along the way before dropping me off at the press tent where the equestrian photographers were polishing off their shots from the day’s racing, made me ponder over how I could get into such things being located close to Ascot. They had massive 800mm lenses though and my budget won’t stretch quite that far for a little while to come!

Techically it was challenging, as I had no idea what the setup would be like, whether to take my 500mm and a monopod or not. The problem is my 500mm isn’t a f2.8 and in low light is about as useless as a car with no headlights after dark. So I took the risk in taking my trusty 70-200mm f2.8, a favourite of mine that has never let me down in concert photography. My fears were alleviated when we were shown into the press area, we had the run of the sidelines just behind a wooden barrier that separated us from the danger of being trampled to death. We had a great view of the action and it was a heck of a lot closer than I imagined it would be – to the point my lens was almost too long at some points and was quite a weird sensation to see the horses charging towards you at high speed, I felt as if I were in the thick of the action, I found myself wrestling with my manual focus and taking a few steps backwards towards the audience behind me which did cause one gentleman to complain…. they were all very gentlemanly and gentlewomanly there! I offered my apologies and took up a different position but you do get involved with your shots when it is happening at high speed, the camera engaged in high speed burst mode and the CF card is being stretched to the limits. It is this kind of thing that makes me feel alive.

Embarassingly I am scared of bangs, so when one of the guns went off, I nearly jumped out of my pants and then quickly regained composure to capture the gunpowder, smoke and atmospheric lighting. I couldn’t be a war photographer, too much of a coward!

I never for one minute considered the possibility that a missed delivery note left by my postman one day could sell for $145. However that is exactly what happened and has led me to gain an interesting insight into what sells best through stock agencies such as Alamy.

A missed delivery slip left by my postman sells for $145

I have thousands of images with Alamy and this collection grows year on year. Slowly the income I draw from this gets gradually better. Let me warn you though that this isn’t my main income and may never be but recently, I am starting to re-consider this rather negative attitude.

If I can sell mundane images of things such as Delivery notes, HTML on computer screens, boring signs in Slough and Croydon for fairly decent sums of money, what if I were to go all out and shoot lots of old crap? Would I be raking it in? Would I be laughing all the way to the bank?

I have two kinds of image in my burgeoning library, really nice ones (that you may so choose to hang on your wall) and mundane ones that are purely illustrative, such as road signs. The lovely travel shots that I particularly enjoy seeking out and shooting are set to sell as “Rights Managed” and the latter as “Royalty Free”. I have no idea if this is the right thing to do but after discussion with many a fellow photographer over the years, appears to be the “best way of going about it”. We all know what the differences are between RM and RF sales models but seldom understand them, to the point where we harness their potential fully to increase sales. It is all about balance and taking a chance, “You’ll never know until you have tried”.

2010 is going to be about experimenting with this concept, shooting a good mix of RM travel shots as I hope to do some of that this year versus any old stuff such as the pedestrian crossing sign below that I took in Italy purely because I want to see if I can make something out of road signs!!! Yes you may think I am barking mad and indeed in many ways I am. However I hope some of you are in agreement with me. I will be charting the progress of this idea through the blog in coming months.

Hmm a road sign, very exciting (not!) I know but it may sell for stock usage proving that you really can make money for old rope!

On a final note, I think that the image market is changing to the point that Royalty Free and microstock sales models are gathering momentum. Many photographers are naturally concerned that this will ultimately be the death of Rights Managed sales and diminished earnings as a result. I am not so sure as I feel it will create a bigger gap between the markets and their purpose will be far more defined which will in turn actually do Rights Managed a favour? Only time will tell but I am willing to try selling images through both methods because I have a gut feeling, I will sell more in the long run. You can never work against the market, as if you do, you only end up losing out. Buyers dictate to the world in which we live nowadays and we have to adjust to meet those demands. This is most certainly the case of the Photography business and many others besides, consequently it all boils down to being competitive.

A selection of recent shots (that have already featured on Journog) to kick start 2010. The weather conditions recently have been both fun and simultaneously a challenge, beautiful scenery, poor light has made things difficult though. However I am happy with what I’ve captured and hope that some other interesting opportunities will come up soon. More snow or perhaps it will give way to frosty and bright conditions? Knowing our luck, warm, wet and very dull skies will come along instead. A quiet start to the year but then having said that, my car has been stuck outside the house due to dangerous driving conditions!

Now is a great time to rummage through the archives and preparing my monthly update for Alamy. I’ve fallen behind recently and have a fair number of images earmarked for upload.

Getting married next year?

If you are getting married next year, now is a very good time to book your Wedding Photography and look no further than Nick Lewis Photography. If you book before the end of January, you can make a huge saving on your booking. Normally our pricing for a full days’ wedding photography starts at £1250 but right now we are offering our services for £750. This offer is only going to be available for the next couple of months, as it will close at the end of January 2010 from which our normal pricing will resume.

Please visit our weddings page to find out more about what is on offer plus other products we offer our wedding couples.