Over the past few weeks I have enjoyed running my 1 on 1 workshops with Arnel, Karl, Matthew, David & Rebecca.

Last Saturday was day 2 of the workshop which was a group bridal shoot in the Southern Highlands. It was a day to put some things the delegates had learnt into practice, stretching themselves and getting some gorgeous photos in the process!

A big thanks to the team that helped put the whole thing together:

Patty & Roger @ Summerlees for your gorgeous property
Yvette, Claire & Michelle @ Ethix Makeup for your stunning makeup and hair
Sheree, Barry, Kaleb @ She Designs for your breathtaking styling and custom props
Nelson & Bianca for your help assisting on the day
Dennis @ Pretty in White Malyasia for your delectable, beautiful wedding gowns & the wonderful Jenny Sun for bringing the dresses back from Malaysia for us!
Tanya & Leanne for your patience and beauty infront of the camera

and to Naomi – for putting up with me in the process of planning, last-minute organising and your down-to-earth ideas.

We had a great day despite a few early hiccups in the planning and the weather played nice considering we had next to none of the forecast 35km/hr winds that everywhere else had! We started at 11:30 and ran until about 7pm. We did have rain roll in and out throughout the day, almost 4 seasons in the one day, but we managed to get most of the themes setup how we had planned. Weatherzone was telling me it was around 6 degrees C, but it felt more like 2 so the 3 girls were amazing infront of the camera while we were well rugged up!

we started with a nautical fashiony theme…

then onto the Summerlees driveway with Leanne for some photos…

we were the first people to photograph Sheree’s new set as below, Barry made it for the shoot! This would make just the most amazing ceremony piece for any brides looking for something extra special for their wedding day. (Naomi is totally threatening a vow-renewal just for Sheree’s styling)

you can see the last time we worked with Sheree at Alex and Malcolm’s wedding.

My little sister Bianca came along to help out and ended up putting on a dress for some fun & extra gorgeousness… Thanks B!

thanks again all for an EPIC effort.

Over 8 months ago I photographed the gorgeous Neil & Melanie’s wedding at Sylvan Glen.

Mel loved her photos and talked about doing a bridal down the track. They both live up in Cairns, so when Mel suggested we shoot the bridal up in Cairns I loved the idea! I turned the shoot into a mini-holiday and they were super kind to let me hang with them for the week. We had a great time and I had a much needed break in some lovely warm weather. It was actually really hard to come back to temperature half of what we had there! Cairns was gorgeous. I’ve even entertained thoughts of shooting weddings in Cairns in our off-season.

Naomi visited Cairns as a kid, and we chatted about a year ago about this amazing location – Paronella Park outside of Cairns. We even looked it up on the net and agreed it would be fantastic to shoot there one day. When Mel suggested Paronella for her bridal I was barely able to contain my excitement! Paronella is essentially a rundown spanish theme park which was created by one incredible man, Joe Panorella back in the 1920′s-’30′s. It was one of the earliest theme parks in the world, even before Disneyland was ever created. They frequently have weddings there and many use it for their location photos.

Here is a couple from Paronella and a few at the end at Mel’s local beach…

these buildings were unbelievable…

Paronella was kind enough to leave us a remote control for the lights at night so we could continue shooting after it got dark and they were running Japanese tourist groups through…

I can’t thank Neil + Mel enough for their hospitality, love and awesome company for the week!

As much as we’d love blue skies for our weddings, we don’t always get them. I’d love to personally provide the perfect weather for wedding photos for my brides, but the best I can do is put in a few good words for them.

I got thinking about rainy wedding days after last Saturdays wedding. It rained most of the day.  I remember back to Dale & Megan’s wedding in the Hunter Valley last year. It rained the ENTIRE #$%^& day! They wanted to have an outdoor ceremony and some nice photos amongst the vineyards but the weather said otherwise.

I ended up shooting a bridal free of charge for them later in the vineyards at Bowral. They both dressed up again and we took some location photos with just the 2 of them. You can view their bridal photos here. They ended up including these photos in their wedding album.

So for all the current packages, if it rains the whole day we are offering those brides a FREE bridal shoot on a non-raining day.

I will leave you with one from Matt & Jess’ wedding on Saturday…

see some more of Matt + Jess’ photos here.

Last June I attended the Sydney Jerry Ghionis workshop. While I was there, I met Andrew from Impact Images. He runs a wedding and portrait business up on the Central Coast.

A few years back I first came across Stockton Beach at Anna Bay and I took some landscape photos there with some old slide film. Ever since going there I have wanted to go back and shoot some brides (or in this case model-brides) amongst the dune. I invited Andrew to come up and join us for the shoot.

I worked again with the superbly talented Danielle Hampton, from Makeup by Danielle. If your ever looking for a makeup artist in the Newcastle / Hunter Valley region I suggest you definetly contact her.

Our two models for the day were Rebecca Frith (blonde) and Sarah Boulazeris. (brunette)

All our gorgeous dresses, bar the black dress Rebecca is in at the end, were provided by Award Winning Newcastle Bridal Designer, Kel-Leigh Couture.

I found a spot where you can drive in a normal car, right up to the dunes so after a steep climb up a dune, we were among them and setup base camp… (image courtesy of Andrew)

ok so most of that gear was mine… how embarassing
We tag-teamed models – swapping during the early afternoon… I had Sarah first…

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Kel-Leigh also provided this gorgeous green dress…

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Rebecca brought some very cool shoes, so she changed back into what she wore that day and she rocked the next few shots…

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Thanks everyone for an awesome day! Check out Andrew’s images on his blog-post here.

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On the 2nd day at Anna Bay I had our good friends Erica & Luke, my little sister Bianca and Jessica over on the sanddunes. I was dearly hoping for a nice almost-cloud-less day with a pretty sunset but the weather had other ideas. We had a very small window of shooting before it rained and we clamoured into the make-shift basecamp we had setup. Naomi and the boys, including Caleb also joined us and managed to get some sand boarding in before the rain

Jess’ 21st birthday was just around the corner, so we stuck it out and got a few happy-snaps with her and her friends.

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happy 21st Jess!

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I’ve been super busy recently – there was 11 e’sessions and 1 trash the dress I’ve shot which probably won’t be blogged on here. In the interest of keeping my blog partially alive in the meantime, here is a sneek-peak from another bridal shoot I organised while up the coast before I’m off to a double-header…

If your friendly with me on facebook – you’ve probably seen some others ‘leaked’ on there already

I was recently on holidays up at Anna Bay, just north of Newcastle in NSW with my family. The time away was a little bit of a break but also for me to shoot some photos on the sand dunes at Stockton Beach. We arrived on the Thursday and the next day, I met up with model Melanie J and makeup artist Danielle Hampton for the shoot. The weather played nice for most of the time and enabled us to great these photos. It was impossibly hot so we didn’t venture onto the sand dunes but stayed on the cooler coast at Birubi beach.

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behind the scenes of the above photo – 110cm of mola beauty-dish lighting…!

lots of blue which I LOVE!

then we made it into the water, but it was short lived! There was lighting hitting the water not too far away in the distance and we thought it better to call it a day
Poor Danielle was holding a big metal stick standing in the water next to me!

thanks Mel + Danielle for your amazing efforts!

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Early January I received a new, bigger, shinier beautydish for my flash. A whopping 43.5″ (110cm) in diameter it looks not unlike a big metal wok (albeit just a little bit more expensive!) I scheduled in a test shoot to have a play with my new lighting toy and I was stoked to have  Piper Oneill model for us.

Yvette from Ethix makeup also joined us and did the gorgeous makeup.

This weekend coming up I’ll be on the sanddunes near Port Stephens shooting some more bridals over a number of days.

lighting for beauty shots is actually quite difficult and I found I have a lot to learn

silliness is always encouraged

after I got bored of taking photos inside we headed down to Fitzroy Inn in Mittagong for a few shots…

then onto another secret urban location…

…and back to editing.

Once again the very talented Jenny Sun and I did a for-fun bridal shoot in the Southern Highlands! I blogged out previous shoot here and both Naomi, Caleb and I were looking forward to seeing Jenny again. This time we ended up at Red Cow Farm at Sutton Forest for the shoot. Somewhere you have seen a few times recently on the blog for e’sessions (and one coming up).

We put together a team of our personal favourite vendors from the Southern Highlands to help us for the shoot…

Megan from Visionary Hair
Yvette from Ethix Makeup
Erica from Erica Jayne Floral Designs

Our two models for the day were Danielle Byrnes (blonde) and Alexandra Pruze (brunette). Jenny sourced the amazing wedding dresses from Pretty in White, a leading wedding couture designer in Malaysia and brought them home on the plane! (as you’ll see, they are not small dresses!) We also had some gorgeous jewellery on loan from Pastiche.

We had an amazing day… althought being threatened early in the day with typical Southern Highlands weather and a light rain mid-shoot, we were very happy with how it went! In the late afternoon we went for a crazy drive in search of some fields during what I call ‘Jenny-light’ (last few hours of daylight). Thanks to google on the iPhone, we ended up contacting local wedding and reception venue Summerlees cottages and were given kind permission to shoot in one of their back paddocks. We arrived just in time to catch the last remnants of light for some spectacular finishing images.

Make sure you also check out Jenny’s images from the shoot – a very different totally awesome take on the day!

Anyway blah blah… hows about some images…

We started around midday and while I took my time Alex shooting in a slow way – with lighting etc, Jenny was buzzing around with Dani…

Megan’s hairstyling is always stunning, you can never seen any pinning or such…

no not a composite…

and a behind-the-scenes of the shot above…

love this next one – sitting down really suits this dress…

then swapping again for some more shots with Alex – love the back detail of this dress…

it rained so we had a break indoors…

then back out and into some bright sun…

I love the fun of this next one…

I love the colours the flash brings out in this next photo…

and natural light of the above – all thats changed is no flash…

hijacking Jenny’s shoot of Alex…

f/1.2 yummyness…

Dani was such a cute bride…

Alex was very vogue and equally as stunning…

again hijacking Jenny..

then onto a field for the last of the day… probably my favourite shot of the day…

or this one… ahhh too many favourites…

swapping again…

love this one… of Dani in the ‘squirrel-tail’ dress…

the light went so the flash came out again…

sunset was just incredible… Jenny and I were jumping up and down like schoolkids!

Huge thanks to Megan, Yvette, Erica, Alex and Dani for their stunning efforts!
Next time I think I should head over to Malyasia for our next Vibrant + Jenny shoot!

Following on from Esteé’s gorgeous wedding earlier, Esteé wanted another excuse to wear her beautiful dress again. We started the photoshoot in an old theatre that Esteé has found. I love it when our clients find amazing locations I didn’t know about before! After that we ended up at Bellambi beach where we coaxed even Andrew into the water, despite his mild protests that it was a ‘trash the dress’ shoot and not trash the groom

Check this location… awesome!

plenty of people were stopping to watch – along with some old pensioners who looked horrified