“The Apprentice Wedding Photographer” photo shoot for PhotoPlus Magazine

I had a brilliant day up in the lakes last week doing a shoot for PhotoPlus Magazine.  The feature is “The Apprentice Wedding Photographer” and involved coaching a budding wedding photographer through a wedding day. Obviously we had to mock the day up so I invited James and Janine to be my couple.   (I photographed their real wedding last August.)  I also asked Jodie from Jodie Make-up to assist because she’s a hugely talented make-up artist and a lovely person to have around on the day.  My apprentice was Dr Howard Gould, a physics teacher at Repton School in Derby.   Once I’d persuaded him that the photographs I take are more about love than lenses we had a fantastic day  We were also joined by Pete from the magazine, Jesse – their own photographer who was photographing the ‘action’ and Kerry and Rachel from Contemporary Photographic Training (CPT hosted the day at their studio in Staveley.) We started the day off with a pre-wedding shoot (mostly because I wanted James and Janine to have some photographs of themselves which weren’t based on a fake wedding) and because I wanted to show Howard how much fun we have doing this.  It poured down all morning so we found a barn nearby where they had some cover but I still had natural light to work with.  James and Janine changed into their wedding clothes at lunchtime and we went up to church and pretended to have a wedding.  It didn’t matter that it was fake because of the chemistry between them – it was really important to me that we had a real couple rather than models.   The feature will be in the May edition of the magazine, available from 5th May.  For the photographers out there I’ll be running Getting Started with Weddings at CPT on  May 11th and October 12th.  Anyway I’ve twittered on enough so here are a few of my favourite pictures.

An action shot of Jesse photographing us photographing them

And finally a photo of me and Howard courtesy of PhotoPlus Magazine. For more information on PhotoPlus, and to subscribe, go to http://www.photoradar.com/photography-magazines