Pure Vintage..

I've had a lovely little article published in Pure Weddings Magazine, featuring a fab couple whose Wedding I photographed last August. Click on the image to get 'the bigger picture', and you'll see a few of the shots I got round to taking on the day. The theme of the Wedding was vintage which is quite ironic because, once I'd shot the Wedding, I zipped off into town to see ageing punk rockers The Exploited! (I had a change of clothes before I went!) Reminds me of the time I went to see the UK Subs after finishing work at 11pm one night whilst working for the Sale and Altrincham Messenger. I remember arriving at The Russell Club in a suit and tie and the first words on arriving being some spiko leather dude screaming "F*ck me... a Mod!"

Ah, good times ...

Flare, flair, flares...

It's pouring outside, so here's something you definitely won't have a problem with today .. lens flare! Although - oh, I forgot - you can now add it to your pictures on the computer to make your shots more "interesting"! My, how fashions change! This advert for a Pentax multi-coated lens - designed to prevent flare - is in a 1972 edition of Camera Magazine, which I nicked when I was but a lad! (Well, I couldn't afford to buy it .. it was 75p a copy! Oh, and please don't tell anyone I pinched it! I've got away with it for this long .. ) It just makes me think about all the current 'trends' for 'fussing up' your Wedding photographs! Vintage looks, streaks of flare, insipid, bleached-out black and white! How out of fashion will that all look when a bride and groom look back at their photographs on their Silver Anniversary?

Amazing to think I was so keen on photography even way back then! I know I just had to have this magazine. It featured an "Iconographic Chronological History" of Photography - a whole edition full of photographs from Niépce to Diane Arbus - all names I'd never heard of at the time, but it's nice to think that - forgive me - I turned out to have a bit of a flair for the art myself. One thing's for sure if we're talking about fashions. In 1972, I certainly had the flares!..

Something old, something new .. eventually!

It's Vintage, darling, Vintage .. though I still maintain that, as they look through their Wedding albums on their Golden Wedding anniversaries, many of today's newly-weds are going to wish they'd had their photographs printed 'properly'!
Hey, ho.. the customer is always right!

One area of my work that is definitely not de-saturated is my Florescence flower photography. I've spent a lot of this Easter weekend having a big sort-through of it, and I will have exciting news about it .. soon!

By the way, my new rangefinder camera still hasn't arrived, and I've turned into a squrimy impatient kid watching for a ParcelForce van to turn up ... I want it, I want it!