Sora Aily in Dublin

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[NSFW] – Kirsty Olive in Dublin

[NSFW] – Lareina Slight

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Mary Lafferty in Dublin

 

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Kelly Donegan – Botanic Gardens

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Kelly Donegan is on a serious fitness buzz this weather. She is training hard and eating healthy…. basically everything I don’t do. We shot for the Irish Sun as part of a week-long fitness feature that Kelly was doing for the paper. It consisted of a number of days shooting for her in different locations and with different photographers. This particular section was for bikini’s and we shots it in the Botanic Gardens in Dublin.

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It was a fantastic day when shooting in the Botanic Gardens….. well it started off raining but the sun came out and lite up the place along with increasing the temperature.  The humidity and temperature are the first thing you notice when walking into the giant greenhouse.

The team on the day consisted of a few regulars and one new member. Clothes styling and Hair styling were performed by the Nicole and Shauna Spain duo. Make-up Artist Sharleen Collins was there to make sure that Kelly looked great. Finally, videographer Richard Finlay was there to get footage for the project. He was shooting Kelly at all the various stages of this feature and put together a nice little video as seen below. Check out his webiste here: http://www.brideandgroom.ie/

Lisa Nolan – Sunday World

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It has been a while since I last shot with Lisa Nolan. As I said previously, Lisa was one of the very first people I shot on my own back in the day. Those old shots have long since been confined to the archives…. never to be seen again 🙂 . Back then she was with the Bscene Agency She is with Assets Agency these days doing great for her self. You would have seen her on the TV last year on the ICA Bootcamp along with being a presenter for the online “The Guy Show” on YouTube.

This time we were shooting a piece for the Sunday World back in May. You can check out some of my other published work also.

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We were shooting in one of Dublin’s top night venues, Krystle on Harcourt Street, under the Russell Court Hotel. It has been a popular venue for photo shoots in the past, the large green leather chair has been the backdrop for several pictures. With that in mind, I was trying to use other parts of the venue as a backdrop. One such part on offer with this curtain at the side of the VIP room. It match in well with the corset that Lisa was wearing. I love the shot of Lisa above, it a cute laughing shot.

The style team consisted of Laura Mullet as stylist and Julie Caulfield on Hair & Make-Up. This was the first shoot I worked with Laura and I was very impressed with her work. We got on great and have since worked together on a lot of shoots, which will be up on the blog her in good time. Julie of course is no stranger to the blog  and needs no introduction at this point. But if it is your first time here, Julie is a top class Make-up artist.

After the shoot, Laura had to head off to do drop backs to Ann Summers, i.e. dropping the clothes she borrowed for the shoot back to the stores where they came from. This is one of the jobs of a stylist… one of the tedious parts for them no doubt. While Laura went away, Lisa and myself headed down to the Hotel for a carvery lunch ( great value for tone of food) and we went through some images.

Below is a shot of me hard at work. This is a behind the scenes shot from Laura’s phone taken pretty close to the time of the actual shot used above. You can’t see it in the set up, but I had a light just behind my left shoulder with a bare reflector for a hard light. You can read more about the shoot from Laura’s point of view on her own blog, Lipstick Gossip.

Any comments or questions, leave them below.

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Lynn Kelly – Ninjamode

Lynn Kelly, the former Miss Universe Ireland (2008) has been causing a bit of a stir lately with her workout regime. Posting workout photos on her Instagram Feed was getting a Lynn lot of attention, and rightly so as she looks incredible. Lynn trains in No. 17 Personal Training, in Merrion Square, Dublin. Indeed since she started training there, a whole team of her fellow Assets models have started to train there, including Hazel O’Sullivan. If you follow Lynn on twitter, you will get the #ninjamode reference 🙂

Lynn had gotten in touch about a year ago to get some new shots for her portfolio, I was really looking forward to it as back then I was still getting my name out there in the photography scene (still am). To work with high-profile and experienced models like Lynn would have been a great addition to my portfolio. However, between different things happening and scheduling conflicts, we kept putting it off… until recently. I got in touch with her again and the timing worked out great for both of us and we made it happen. We planned out a shoot with the aim of getting it published and took it from there. I called up Aimee Connolly to get her on board for Hair & Make-up, she did an amazing job as always.

When planning out a shoot to get it published, what I have learned so far is that there are two main things to take into consideration…. back story and pictures. The back story is the text of the spread, the hook of the shoot. A spread being a double page spread, usually 3/4 of the space is pictures and text and the other 1/4 is adverts. Timing the shoot to coincide with something interesting in the models life will help with getting a shoot published, i.e. the ICA Boot Camp with Rachel Wallace or Tallafornia with Kelly Donegan. If there is nothing interesting happening with the model at the time and if they are not that well-known, then the chances of getting a spread are reduced… you might get a quarter page out of it. If the models are of a higher profile, then you have a better chance of landing a spread. Of course, it goes without saying that back story alone won’t land you a spread, the pictures are going to be the main part of it.  The main rules of thumb that go for the pictures is that sex sells and give the photo editor choice.

For Lynn’s shoot, we decided to focus on her super hot “ninjamode” body that she has been sculpting with the help of John Belton and Sophie Kavanagh… who are now known as #Team17. Initially we were going to shoot in My Studio but Lynn sent me some shots of the gym and I liked the look of, in particular the outdoor gym section. I liked the outdoor section as it is different to a normal gym shoot. There is a big climbing rope out there too and as soon as I saw it I knew the type of shot I wanted to do with it.

Shooting on Location is always a challenge…. but a fun one. It’s great to get out of the studio and to be able to have shots that are different from your usual studio stuff. For this shoot, I decided to keep it as simple as possible in terms of lighting. All of the shots were lit with a single speedlight in an umbrella. Using speedlights is easier and faster than using my Elinchrom studio lights when on location… and in particular when space is tight. Another reason for using the speedlights is that I wanted to shoot at 1.4 for these shoots and the studio strobes would not stop down enough to obtain correct exposure. Helping me out with the light and gear on the day was Jason Ennis. Jason works for me in my School, Sports and Events Photography Company, DE Photo Ireland, so it was good to have him on board and giving him some experience.

Big shout out to John, Kevin and Sophie for helping us out on the day. They have a great setup, go check it out if you’re looking for a gym in Dublin. Thats if for now on the shoot. It was published in the Irish Daily Star and Irish Daily Mail on November 29th. I will be hopefully shooting with Lynn again in January, in studio this time. Stay tuned for that 🙂

In the mean time, follow Team17 on twitter:

https://twitter.com/Lynnkelly_

https://twitter.com/No17PT

https://twitter.com/Johnbelton 

https://twitter.com/KevNo17

https://twitter.com/Courtneyohara

https://twitter.com/soph_no17

 

Rachel Wallace – The Hotel Room Shoot

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Rachel Wallace is back on the blog for her second outing. Rachel is another one of my subjects becoming a regular on my blog. Although this is just our second shoot,  we had our third a few days after this one and the fourth is in the works. She is tied with Alyson who is  heading for shoot no. 4 also.

Score keeping aside, there was a business end to this shoot, and indeed all my shoots with Rachel. The brief for this shoot had two parts. This shoot was  filmed for parts of Rachels bio/introduction piece on ICA book camp, which will be on RTE next month. The first part of the brief was to stage a shoot for TV.  The shoot images were also used for a spread in the Irish sun which was Published on Feb 23rd, that was the second part of the brief.

Rachel is fantastic to work with. A re-cap of Rachel’s story can be found in the post on our first shoot HERE. She is still with Assets and going strong, getting plenty of work. The ICA book camp should be a real boost to Rachel’s profile once it is aired and no doubt she will go great in the final.

This shoot was in the Bewley’s Hotel in Ballsbridge. They kindly lent us a room for a few hours for the TV crew to do an interview and for us to shoot for a bit. This is the second time I have shoot here, the first time being over a year ago with for my Day with Hannah.

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This shoot was styled by Nicole Spain of Flutterby Fashion Styling. This was my first time to work with Nicole directly. She styled the shoot for Lisa and Faye before but unfortunately could not attend that shoot. It was great working with Nicole on this shoot. Penny’s supplied the lingerie, which looked great on Rachel. The hair extensions were by Hotloxs Hair Extensions and styled by the great team at Blow Salons.

Ironically, the images that you see here are none of the images that you will see being shot on the TV show. After Rachel finished her 15mins interview, we had to get cracking on a shoot…. or pretend to shoot so the camera can get some footage of a shoot in progress. I didnt really set up lights proper or anything. We were just shooting for the sake of shooting…. so you have been warned in advice of watching the shot and thinking that they are crap shots :).

So the shoot had two briefs, a shoot for the sake of a shoot and a shoot for getting some press images. Upon arriving at the hotel early with my gear to recon the location, I had the sneaky suspicion that the room that was organise would be the standard hotel room that they have. Under normal circumstances, this would be a fine room but it is just too small for a photo shoot, let alone a TV interview. Lights, sound man, camera man, director, assistance, Nicole, Rachel and my self, it was going to get cramped.

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I got the key card and went up to the room and my suspicions about a small room were realised. I didn’t unpack any gear until the TV crew arrived. I was hoping the the producer who organise the room initially would be able to see if there was a larger room available, and so their was. We moved a few floors up and we now had a bigger room with more space.

So the TV crew got into prep mode and started to set up the camera, hot lights etc etc. I set up my Elinchrom lights and softboxes to be used as some props in the background…. Rachel was supposed to be on the set of a photoshoot after all. The Elinchroms worked great…. apart from the cooling fan that kicked in every so often. The noise from the tiny fans was enough to put off the sound in the interview. Luckily they cool down pretty quick, so after a minute of it being off, we turned be back on and it was good to go again for another few minutes.

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Once the TV crew got that they needed…… which was mostly some random photos been taking and some useless direction by me, they were off. Once they were gone, that left Rachel, Nicole and my self to work away and start getting our stuff done. Nicole had a selection of items for us to shoot. Some of those included lingerie from Pennny’s and t-shirts from another company.

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Lighting wise, there was nothing new or ground breaking here. I did how ever crack out the Orbis Ring Flash out of hibernation. I haven’t used it since Aug of last year. I used it for all the shots of Rachel on the bed as I wanted to give it a try….. no other reason really. I could have used the other lights that I had with me, such as the Elinchroms. I suck with the Orbis anyway for this look. It was armed with a 580-II and triggered via E-TTL cord. I was shooting in E-TTL move with +1 EV Flash compensation.  This is needed as I find that I need to up the juice a bit of the flash when using the Orbis.

 

Thats all for now, any comments or questions, holla below.

Anthony Byrne – Headshots in Dublin

 

Here are some shots from a recent head shot session with Anthony Byrne from Product 2 Market. It was a fairly straight forward run and gun headshot session.

Anthony is a graduate of UCD Michael Smurfit School of business. He has nearly fifteen years of experience in Business Development, Sales Management and Business Management, both in Ireland and the UK. He also was involved in the start-up and growth of two successful Irish software companies.

Anthony started his own business, Product2Market, in 2008. The company deals with Sales Outsourcing Consultancy and mainly works with Start-ups, Early-stage companies and SME’s.

Besides being the Managing Director of his own company, Anthony also is a Business Mentor with the County Enterprise Board in Dublin and helps support new and emerging Businesses reach their target market.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Anthony_Byrne

We shot around the Guinness Storehouse area in Dublin. The weather was really against us on the day and we were dodging showers of rain in between sunny spells…. typical Irish weather.

Lighting wise, I was running and gunning with an EX580 set up on a light stand with a shoot through umbrella with Pockets Wizards in TTL mode. I still haven’t really gone through the pockets wizards to put them through their paces. I have been so busy with other stuff, but I will get onto it soon.

As it was a bit breezy, the umbrella was not the best idea in the world, but its quick and easy. I kept it fairly close to me for each shot, i.e. close enough to keep my foot on it if a breeze was about to blow it over. It’s time like those when you really could do with an extra hand on a shoot.