Christina Lauder Portraits

Well we made it into the studio this week. It was wonderful. Well not all the work leading up to it was though. Several weeks ago I had gone ahead and made several bookings for this week believing that I had plenty of time to get the studio finished in time. I very naively neglected to incorporate the things I couldn't control into the project plan. But even with a delay to our plasterer, parts for our electrics not arriving, a problem with the glass for our large window and varnish for the floor taking 2 days to dry instead of the stated 8-10 hours, we managed to make just it in time. At this point I was getting really excited. Each time I walked into the room I could see the finished product getting closer and closer. Of course that's when the worry of staining the floor kicked in. After spending all this money on a great floor I didn't want to ruin it by making a mess of the stain. And what a mess it started out as too. As I spread the first stroke of stain on the floor ...

I've always known that I've wanted to do baby bump portraits but without having done one comes the fear that I may not be able to do them justice. Well I no longer have that fear. Last week I had a fantastic photo shoot with my good friend Zoe. I'm sure it helped to do this first with a friend as it did involve a little experimenting and a little nudity which for me anyway needed a little getting used to. Zoe on the other hand didn't seem to have a problem at all. Why is it always the clothed person who is more uncomfortable than the unclothed. In order to ease our way into the shoot I opted for the fully clothed poses to start with. And we gradually worked our way down to the bare essentials. This is a technique I will employ for all future shoots as well seeing as it seemed to ease us in quite nicely. By the time we made it to totally nude I hardly even noticed. Not that all baby bump photos need to go this far though. We actually ended up finishing off with cl...

For the past several months we've been working on a project that is going to completely transform Christina Lauder Portraits. Previously we've been working from our home. We have a dining room which is big enough to convert to decent studio space whenever we have sessions booked in. But it has always meant moving furniture and making sure the entire house was clean every time we had a client come around. And it makes it very difficult to do laundry when I can't hang it out to dry by the dining room radiator. Well these are problems of the past for us now. In less than a week we should have our new studio up and running (I hope I've not just jinxed it by putting this revelation in print). This has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember. This was our backgarden at the start of the build. It seems like such a long time ago. At that point it felt like we would never finish. This photo was taken on September 11th. But it wasn't until October 8th that the fir...