Lifestyle pottery videos

Here's some of the footage that I did for Kilkenny potter Nicholas Mosse on a beautiful sunny day. It was fantastic to shoot these pieces in a lifestyle way, not as decorations but as great tools to cook delicious dishes. Lisa McGee, their passionate marketing manager, was so helpful in the styling and  with the help of a couple of continuous lights, we got a lovely look to them. Actually if you are into very personable blogs about food and craft with nice shots and variety, she has a wonderful blog !

Mo's goodbye shoot

Years ago, I think 2005 or 2006, I was working in this horrible job that triggered the sudden and highly committed change of career for photography, and Mohamed was there too and hated the whole place as much as I did. If it wasn't for that mutual feeling, we may not be the best pals we are now because he's quite religious and I'm not, I like my glass of wine, especially when editing, he will never drink alcohol, he loves shopping, even to pick a nice outfit for his sister, he likes expensive designers outfits, I would rather take every freckles out of a whole session of a redhead than go into a shopping centre ( and I love redheads, I'm a sort of fake redhead myself but that'd be a tedious task to remove all freckles, right?), and would literally die if I had to spend more than €100 on one single item (that isn't photographic, that's the only exception I think)...Anyway, I think our massive differences are what make us great pals because it's so entertaining to fight in a playful way, like my 2 kitties really !

But Mo's leaving the country, never really liked it anyway and there's so much that awaits him out there. So we planned on a goodbye shoot, right in the middle of ramadan...and I say fair play to him. Imagine how interesting such a shoot can be when you have conflicting personalities in the studio !! Mo was one of my first victims when I was learning about lighting, that shoot was ridiculous, it managed to make it online for a short while but it's gone. Then we had the "Mo in the city" session where, dressed in his bestest elegance, he walked about his favorite places in town (BT, trinity, Grafton..), very casual shoot, and everyone looked at me thinking I was some sort of paparazzi with my long lens, and this then made him a celeb..who is he ? That was good fun and we had lots of great shots from it...But I think it's only on this 3rd session that I truly captured who this fella is, and I'm delighted. He's probably going to kill me for posting them or for the ones I'm choosing but it's only because I think he's amazing just the way he is, like the song says. Farewell Mo, may you have lots of smoother adventures than your Irish ones !

Wedding coming soon ! and a new html5 website here !

So this Saturday I'm shooting Dani and Catherine, such a cute lovely couple with a great story, who are getting married in a church...it's so exciting and scary for me because it's only really my 3rd wedding and my first one in a church ! We did our homework, we now know where we're going to take the lovely couple shots and group shots in Phoenix park, and we checked the reception place, the Angler's rest, beautiful set up !

I'm hoping the priest will allow me to have a camcorder on a tripod so I can do a montage of the day too but that's just bonus I guess. If not, there's not a chance I'm going to compromise the quality of the photography by taking a few video clips this and there with the 5DMkII.

And as per my own homework on how the heck you handle a church wedding, I found this guy David Beckstead and a video about his own view of what a wedding photographer is and all. Very refreshing not to hear about "do a shot list" and all this burden of rules that you normally find about wedding photography that takes the fun out of the equation and makes it an expectable formula.

I love his style, I love how it's very intuitive and in the moment.

Now, that said, David, you seriously need to update your website because, as highly personal as it is, it's all wrong, slow to load, too messy to know your way around, not enough info...nevermind the playlist of music that no one is really interested in, that tells a lot about how much this genius doesn't need a website to promote himself.

I've just redone my website in html5 very recently. It used to be flash because it was easy and funky, but google doesn't like flash and google rules the world these days...plus not everyone could see it properly and that's the real reason.

in the course of my languages&business, and photo studies, I had 3 modules of webdesign...3 of them ! I worked on pagemill, dreamweaver, golive and a couple of others that are too ancient for me to remember... all of that time spent wrecking my head on a piece of coding, and here I  am designing my current website with wix, that does all the coding for you ! 

A website is like a haircut, it takes ages for you to find what it should be like, how it should reflect who you are, and actually who are you anyway ? I went through a lot of styles and I'm nearly at peace with my current website, but I just know I'm not quite "there" yet in finding a middle ground between my personality, what I want my website to look like and what potential clients would want to see.

I'm in the process to do a website for make up artist friend of mine, can't wait to give her a proper nice looking website, and I worked for ages with my friend John Dawson on his very unique website, pay him a visit, there's a lot of humour and talent in there.