Speedy Head-shots and networking opportunity...

If you are self employed or starting your own business you might be interested in what I am up to next month!

I am going to be part of a networking session in Guildford. Run by Bricks and Bread, it is a weekly session where Trudy and Josh are available for a free mentoring session and you can chat and spend time working alongside other small businesses in a local pub. I'm going to be offering Speedy Head-shots for £35 for anyone who comes on Tuesday 17th of September... you can also get one-to-one time with a business coach and some free grub!! book here to get your place reserved.

So, 'Speedy head shots' will be a quick photo shoot to get a small collection of portraits. You can take a couple of minutes away from the activities to do a mini photo shoot with me. The images could then be ideal for making your twitter/social media profile professional, personal and welcoming. You will have the High Res images available to download via Dropbox. All rights to these images would then belong to you and they would be yours to do with what you will.

Hope to see you there!! Tuesday 17th from 1pm to 9pm at The Britannia Pub in Guildford :-)

check out my website for more info on the speedy head shots and all the packages I offer!

www.charlottestrawbridge.co.uk

Sanctuary

Avoid making a commotion, just as you wouldn’t stir up the water before fishing. Don’t use a flash out of respect for the natural lighting, even when there isn’t any. If these rules aren’t followed, the photographer becomes unbearably obstrusive. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

Your bedroom is your sanctuary. Ieva was kind enough to let me take these images in her room, relaxed and peaceful... and looking gorgeous of course! 

Have i mentioned how much I love natural light!!??

A naked artist, a nice police man and me...

Every good photograph is an opinion; it says something revealing about the subject. Achieving that magical, fleeting moment is the essence of portraiture. It's truly collaboration between photographer and sitter. - Joe Budne

A couple of nights ago I collaborated with an artist friend of mine. She wanted me to photograph her in a small stream near where we live with water gliding over her skin. Using a long exposure we wanted to create a silk-like layer over her body, creating shapes from body parts emerging from the water... 'best laid plans of  mice and men...' and all that!

So, it turned out that the stream was a little shallower than we had anticipated ;-) we couldn't really attempt to get the images we had planned but I am actually quite pleased with shots we got in the end anyway. 

It was a fun experience, public nudity is definitely not something that goes unnoticed by passers by but no-one bothered us as we took the shots. At some points Genna, the artist and collaborator extraordinaire, was standing in her own little world with her head under a small waterfall. She couldn't hear me when I was calling to her asking her to stand still, change position or to tell her the exposure was finished, but we got there in the end... it's got to be said she has some serious 'mind over matter' skills. The water was freezing and she managed to stay solid as a rock and come across as serene and tranquil. Beautiful job Genna.

The shoot came to quite a sudden end as a police man rode past on his motorbike. At this moment, Genna's head was submerged in water and she stood beneath the running water with her eyes closed, blissfully unaware that the police man was even there. Luckily, he was a lovely man and I managed to convince him that for the sake of art I needed to take a couple more shots. He was actually more worried that some bad men could get the wrong idea at this time of night and told us we could be here just not so naked.

Anyway, these images aren't exactly what we were going for but it only gives us room for improvement! Next time we will check the water is deeper than an inch and that nice policemen on motorbikes won't be interrupting us.

Concept...

A palimpsest (/ˈpælɪmpsɛst/) is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped or washed off and which can be used again. The word "palimpsest" comes from Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος (palímpsestos, “scratched or scraped again”).

I am trying to really think about the concepts behind the photo shoots, sets and series I am doing at the moment. 

Over the last year I have mainly just taken one-off portraits of the people around me, catching a moment or trying to capture an essence of a person in one image. I want to get away from this and really spend time planning or at least have an idea of what I am aiming for before snapping away. Not necessarily a really complicated concept, just more thought than your average point and click, pretty pics. With this in mind my most recent shoot with Eftychios, a greek architect student, was inspired by his thesis; the idea of 'Palimpsests'.

Eftychios is exploring the idea of palimpsests within the context of architectural interventions in order to rehabilitate and restore abandoned or ruined structures. 

In the 19th century 'Muralla Nazari', the wall that surrounds Granada, was partially ruined by an earthquake. Antonio Jimenez Torrecillas proposed a visual re-write of this ancient landmark and so a new, modern design was added to the existing wall. This is a perfect example of a palimpsest. Through writing his thesis, the Muralla Nazari has begun to mean something more to Eftychios; a connection that I wanted to develop.

With this set of photographs I was hoping to do exactly that; portraits of Eftychios with the Muralla Nazari. 'Palimpsest' being my inspiration. I wanted to take his idea and use it within the context of photography... the new narrative over the old.

I have uploaded the whole set here, so please take a peek, but my favourites...

Behind the scenes...

Asked what he would tell young people thinking of a career in photography, Clark was emphatic. "Don't do it," he said. But as his face broke into a grin, he added, "Don't do it unless you want to work harder than you have in your life, and have more fun than you could imagine." - Ed Clark

Been working hard this weekend! I've been continuing with my 'Home away from Home' series but I took a break yesterday and went for a wander in the woodlands… I've actually had this little project in mind for a while and my two lovely ladies helped me achieve it! The idea was to take your typical beauty/fashion shots and instead of advertising jewellery or clothes i wanted to just use plants and nature, instead of using models i wanted to use my beautiful friends and i loved the idea of a natural light, woodland shoot. We had a lovely day's shoot, a lot of fun! For something different I thought I would post the 'behind the scenes' shots!

Obviously there are real photos too so if you'd like to see the actual portraits we took have a peak here! 

Home away from Home...

It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country. Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field. It is the gift of seeing the life around them clearly and vividly, as something that is exciting in its own right. It is an innate gift, varying in intensity with the individual’s temperament and environment. - Bill Brandt

I have started a new series.

I am surrounded by people living in a country that isn't their own and I really wanted to photograph them! I want to explore how people make themselves at home wherever they may be. We make ourselves feel comfortable by creating environments that feel familiar, with home comforts, people and objects that make us feel secure. We create a refuge and make ourselves at home with whatever space we are given; some quicker than others, some easier than others. 'Home away from Home' is taking a group of people who are living abroad and trying to capture this idea.

This is actually a subject that is really important to me as I have spent most of my childhood moving around and most of my adult life travelling and never settling. I am extremely quick to 'nest'! I can unpack and change a strange room into a familiar environment with in a couple of hours. I am really quick to make myself at home and all I need is something on my bedside table that is mine, a picture of a loved one hanging up on the wall and my lovely feather pillow that comes with me everywhere; straight away it feels like the space is mine.

So, anyway, enough rattling on... here is the beginning of my "home away from home" series. hope you like it!

Three men in a boat...

This month's Cornwall Life article 'A Taste of Cornwall'... photographed a local boat maker in his studio. Go buy it!!

Back in Granada...

All dancers are, by and large, a photographer's dream. They communicate with their bodies and they are trained to be completely responsive to a collaborative situation. -Annie Leibovitz

My social entrepreneur fairy godmother...

...amateurs worry about equipment, professionals worry about money, masters worry about light, I just take pictures...

- Vernon Trent

Exciting things have been happening and I haven't had a chance to post about them yet... I was contacted by the lovely Trudy Thompson, of Bricks and Bread (@bricksandbread), who has offered to be my business mentor for a year! As well as free business advice and all round mentoring magic, she works in partnership with the Start-up Loans Company who have just granted me a loan to help with my photography!! So, out of the blue, I have found myself with the most amazing support and a massive drive to take my photography to the next level!!! It all came about through social media. I have never been fantastic at networking but since this has happened I think I have officially been converted... I am never going to doubt the likes of twitter and Facebook again ;-) Trudy contacted me after seeing a link to my blog and website and she liked what she saw and wanted to help. We had a great talk about what I could get out of the services she offered and it went from there. I was a very happy girl having been offered help that I hadn't even been aware you could get!  Trudy and her trusty sidekick, Josh, help all sorts of different people; have a peek here at some profiles of the young entrepreneurs on her website (including me!). In the evenings Trudy does free advice sessions for young entrepreneurs aged 18-30 and she does a free saturday advice clinic for anyone so if you are at any stage of setting up or starting as an entrepreneur check out the links. Josh (@JoshingTalk) has also started running online google hangouts where young entrepreneurs can get together over the internet and bounce ideas off each other, another great way to network and he helps provide them with a base for business advice and progression through support from Trudy. As you can imagine I'm also over the moon I have been able to get a loan from the Start-up Loan Company. It has meant that I have been able to get all the right kit to compete with other professional photographers and not be held back at all by what camera I am shooting with. Unfortunately, photography is quite reliant on having the right gear and it can definitely improve your photographs if you have good tools to work with. I have just invested in the very swanky D800 Nikon camera, a quality flash and some lovely, lovely lenses... obviously, I realise that fancy equipment does not a photographer make but it helps!!! I had my first 'post-loan' job, with new camera, the other day and I really think I can see the difference in the quality of the images already. I just need to get to grips with it all and hopefully my photography will just go from strength to strength. So, just so this post is not all writing here is one of the shots. It's a photo from the 'Taste of Cornwall' series (probably won't make it into the magazine as it's not the smiley type but I just kind of like it)... Phil; one of the ferry men from the Fowey/Bodinnick crossing. Of course, I just want to say a huge thank you to Trudy for making all this possible x