Now had this been a real portrait session I would have had the ‘wardrobe conversation’ with my clients before the event and hopefully avoided the dreaded ‘red’ and ‘large logo’ choices.   I say hopefully as ultimately the choice of clothing is yours, but the suggestions I make are really well founded, so that you have the best possible images from your session, I’m not being pedantic or arty – honest!

A splash of red was/is often used by artists to draw the viewers eye into a picture, as it is an extremely attention grabbing colour.  As such it is on my list of colours/things to avoid in portrait shoots, you need to be centre of attention, not the clothes you are wearing.  Logos are the same unfortunately, I know they are trendy and teenagers love them, but in a still image they scream at you and distract from the person wearing them.

Back to my son and our lovely walk…….  fortunately his jacket hides most of the Bath Uni logo and I have managed to tone down the red a little or cheated and made black and white 

The competition is for a school aged child/young person (5-16yrs) the prize includes a session plus five mounted frame ready prints and is easy to enter but does require you to put your thinking caps on!

I’ve recently bought two chairs as props; I’d love it if you could come up with some wonderful locations we could place them for a portrait session.  I recently took one of them plus my daughter to Sunnydale Park to test drive it (blogged here) but I’m sure there are much more interesting locations.

Locations to be within a 20 mile radius of DE23 (though I might be tempted further a field if you come up with something truly spectacular) and needs to have road access for transporting the chair.

Competition closes 30th September and sessions to be taken by the end of October 2011.

Please follow this link to fill in the entry form.

Below are some of our holiday snaps, probably of little interest to all but friends and family, as it’s mainly the ‘kids’ in search of a phone signal, creating rainbows in the Aberglaslyn Pass, trying to avoid the camera, or generally goofing around!

“Emotional roller coaster evening, thought I’d lost all baby photos from camera, then found them & watched last 9 months slideshow, tearful”

I love looking through old photographs and am lucky that both sides of my family seemed to have collected lots.  As a child I’d sit and rummage through an old suitcase of photographs and ask my grandmother about the people in them, people I’d not met but still a part of me.

Many of us snap away with the latest point-and-shoot and even our phones, but what happens to those photographs?  We all lead busy lives and how many of us, I wonder, set out with good intentions to create something wonderful with precious photographs, but never actually get round to it.  I’m as guilty as the rest when it comes to my own photos and I do wonder  if our grandchildren will be able to view our  digital images.   Digital media is unstable; hard-drives crash, CDs and DVDs degrade and who is to say how technology will develop;  whether our irreplaceable photographs will be accessible in twenty years let alone a hundred years time.  I’m determined to try and make time to do something with my photographs before it’s too late, what about you?

Maybe something as simple as having prints made at a lab and then filing in a box with dividers for years or events;   mounting in a scrapbook or album and perhaps including school reports, tickets to events etc;  creating a more elaborate photo book; or creating a photo collage for the wall.

While I’m on my soapbox:  I’ve often thought about the demise of letter writing,  it’s so easy to email and text; even my mum texts now!   I miss the thrill of receiving letters and have some old ones tucked away from my parents and grandparents, they are lovely to reread and bring those people and moments to life in a way photographs alone can’t.   Perhaps write a letter to your children and store it with some photographs, they may not appreciate it now but in the future it might well be priceless to them.

As I like pretty pictures with blog posts, it seems an ideal opportunity to share a few images of a little something delivered yesterday to a lovely client, aptly called the Memory Box 

Thank you for allowing me to be part of your special day and I hope your chosen photographs bring back happy memories for years to come.