Mel Pettit Photography

People photography…and more!

Posts from the ‘Portraits’ category

The trouble with being busy is…..

http://melpettit.photography/portrait_portfolio.html
http://melpettit.photography/portrait_client_area.html

There’s just not enough hours in a day or days in  a week.  Being busy is wonderful, far preferable to sitting around and doing nothing.  Sometimes though you can’t be busy doing what you want to do, you have to be busy doing something else, hence the long break since my last post.  I’m trying to rectify that as I have done a tremendous amount of shooting, I just haven’t been able to get it all out there.

Ayla Rose-5828 An early burst of summer back in May found me working with the rather lovely Ayla Rose.  I’m going to be posting a lot more images of her in a few different styles, but in this post I’m looking at some of the portrait shots we got.

We made our way to the Nacton side of the bank of the River Orwell, just outside Ipswich in Suffolk.   The day was nice, we had been blessed with a but of sunshine and some warmth, and it was dry.   We wanted to shoot some portraits first, before we changed to another style.

After a short walk we stumbled across a number of sites that offered something to add to our shots, not least this rather large lump of weathered tree trunk.  Ayla needed no encouragement to use it!

The tide had only recently receded at the time we shot, so the foreshore was muddy and it was very, very soft.   I hadn’t realised that when I asked Ayla to sit Ayla Rose-5853on an old protruding stump. She wasn’t put off in the least and got on with it, though we did have some problems with the mud that clung to her feet and ankles.  In true model style, wetwipes were produced from a cavernous bag and the mud disappeared from our later shots.  Wonderful!

You can see more shots from this set by clicking on either of the links above.  I hope you enjoy them.

I thought it would never happen…..re-branding.

Five years ago, when I first got properly into photography I was convinced that one site would fit all, and people would arrive in their droves to view my photographic masterpieces.   How naive can one person be?

For ages, I was told that viewers wouldn’t want to see my wedding shots alongside some of my raunchier stuff, but I chose not to listen and carried on posting all of my work side by side.

Now I’ve made a decision to separate out my wedding photography onto a dedicated site, here at http://www.melpettitwedding.photography That’s weddings dealt with!

My portrait, family and fashion work, along with other non-nude photography will continue to be posted at http://www.melpettit.photography.

All of my other work, from fashion nude through to erotica, will be posted to a new site, to be revealed shortly.  It’s under construction right now, and I’ve decided that it won’t carry my name, as a Google search will find and show all of my work, which is exactly the opposite of what I want to happen.

That’s the future for me then!  I hope you’ll dip into all three of them, I’ll be watching my Google Analytics figure to map my progress.

Portraits & Redheads

I may have said this before, but I absolutely adore doing people photography.   There are so many things you can do with the human form but I love a good, honest and simple portrait.   I find a head and shoulders shot drags you into the eyes of your subject, capturing a look that can never be recreated in exactly the same way again.   In one 160th of a second you are taken right into the soul of the person you are photographing.Rachel-6795

I love this photograph of Rachel.   I was lucky enough to work with her for about a year, and even luckier that she wanted to do a session in the studio with me.  Rachel is not a model, so the whole studio thing was a bit scary for her, but within 10 minutes she was relaxed and we were producing a series of shots.

Soon after we started the black dress went on and with red lipstick complimenting her gorgeous red hair I knew we were ready for some close-up head and shoulders portraits.

The idea was to get some shots with a fairly shallow depth of field, giving a bit of a dreamy look to the shot.   Although taken in the studio we turned the flash off and moved the light in closely, using only the continuous modelling light. Rachel’s position was crucial as I wanted the shadows in just the right place around her nose and I think we achieved that.

The second shot is of Annie Moya.   This was the first time I had worked with Annie, and the only model I have so far booked for a whole day.

I met Annie at the train station in Peterborough and then we set off for the studio.   We got through a number of styles in there, including this portrait, before going to one of the numerous local nature reserves to do some work outside using the ever changing backdrops that are crying out to be used in people shots.

You’ve got to hope that you get on when you’re working with someone for eight hours and you’ve never met them before, but thankfully we were good together and soon settled in to producing a wide variety of images.Annie Moya 1049B-

In this shot Annie also went for a gorgeous black dress against a grassy background although that can’t be seen in this shot.

Portraits and redheads – what a great combination!