How many things in life do we buy & not use? Most kitchen gadgets I use once or twice, and then stash away neatly in the cupboard never to see the light of day again,  All that money spent, all that good intent to make a change and no return.  The same can be said […]

There’s a lot of new building going on in Leeds, so on a rare sunny February day I decided to take the 5D Mark IV and the 24mm tilt Shift lens out and going capture some of the new and classic architectural delights.  I decided to start at the new Wellington Place developments which is

What do you do on a wet day in Sheffield? Well if you’re Clare Jane Garret, you get a dancer called Sarah Hobson and paint her green, then get a milliner called Hannah Gray to create a fantastic headpiece and create a real-life Medusa! This was all done in a dance studio near the university

DJ and production duo “Wh0” are a mysterious pair currently rocking the House dance floors around the UK – They’ve both been around in their regular DJ slots for years and have remixed some of the biggest acts around. So after a gig in Leeds a few weeks back, we met up at this amazing

What’s it all about? About a year ago I came up with an idea,  it was based on years of photographing companies and what had worked best. It offered individuals who may be just starting out (or ready for a new set of images) 5 photos of them for a bargain price… and other people to act

Photographer Recommendations are King – But Are they Right For YOU? The best way to source most products and services these days is to ask for recommendations based on people’s experience. It can certainly filter out solutions, products, and providers who have given a good experience. Most people look at Amazon reviews or What Hi-Fi

Jaeda Portrait Shoot at Morley Golf Club Direct answer: This gallery post covers a second portrait shoot with Jaeda, a 12-year-old model and competition diver, photographed at a ruined spot inside a Morley golf club on a bitter January day. Despite wind, cold, and rough weather, the conditions ended up adding proper drama to the

Everything is video these days, we are all told to do Facebook lives or record things from the seats of our cars, in car parks, before meetings to engage with our audience. I’ve spent the last year creating video content, be that behind the scenes footage of a photoshoot, close-ups of food or even photoshop editing videos. It’s

It’s the way that you do it… “It ain’t WHAT you do, it’s the WAY that you do it” – As the Bananarama song goes. That’s probably true in most businesses but it’s certainly the case with photography. It’s not just the end product which counts, but how you get to it. I’ve been shooting

Finding old photos can be a pain – if someone asks if you’ve got photos of Liverpool (or something like that) in future, how quickly could you locate them in your file system? Or if you’re looking to create a print of Ingleborough, could you find all your photos of the hill and quickly make

I know – sometimes it’s too dark to shoot and you don’t have any off-camera kit, so you have to use your flash “on camera” But the light you get off a direct flash is horrible – there’s an example in the video below. It serves a purpose, but it creates a passport photo look

We love working with creatives – one day after a fashion shoot in Leeds we discussed what we could do for our next project. I wanted to do it over in Liverpool for a change and to help Denise with travel, and it grew from there into a wedding. So the team on the day

HDR used to be painful in LIGHTROOM If you’d shot 300 shots of a house, you’d need to merge them down to 100 photos – that’d have you anchored to the computer manually selecting and merging photos for AGES. In fact, if I’d done more than 10 shots, I’d use something like PHOTOMATIX to blend

1 Shot from 2 parts This is one of the many beautiful waterfalls in Iceland – not often seen as it’s on a 4×4 route and well-hidden. It’s called Fagrifoss – they’re all fosses! In this tutorial I show you how I took the shot with the 24mm TSe lens, taking 2 photos ready to

Imposter syndrome, self doubt, feelings of doom, am I doing the right thing… everyone who has taken the plunge to leave employment and go it alone will have had all of these in varying degrees.  In 2010 when I finally got my redundancy from “the job” I hated, I just started telling everyone I was

Abi In The Woods Abi’s a talented dancer from west yorkshire and got her dream to pursue dance at ballet school this summer We took her and family to some woods near Bingley to get some photos next to a folly – then to end we used this long woodland track as a background. Thanks

APOGII’s MD – Mike Munt This is MD of design and illustration agency Apogii – Mike Munt. He came on our 3th Share the Shoot day – which was early 2019. Watch the live action and some of the great photos we created for Mike. The whole creative process should be fun and it’s all

In 2018 we had out 7th trip to Austria and got images on all 5 days of the trip – this video contains some of my favourite moments from the holiday. It’s well worth a look if you’re pondering coming

Do you recognise this ford? Here’s the ford you see the old car go through at the start of All Creatures Great and small, a BBC TV show through out my childhood. It was compulsive viewing in my village as a child, with everyone either being a farmer or working on them. this is a

A new look without a new site Websites can be a stressful thing to create, write and update – you’ve got to think of all that functionality, the copy and layout – it’s usually the first victim of procrastination! So how do you give your existing site a brand new look, with minimum impact to

As spring begons we say good bye to another winter, and what a fantastic winter is was for workshops at McFade photography. We had a series of weekend workshops, places like Liverpool, the Yorkshire coast and lots of bits in-between. Then we had some night workshops which took us around famous landmarks in the dark,

Leeds Architecture in 2019 Winter’s a great time for Leeds architecture photography. The sun is low in the sky and sets around 5PM, so you’re not out waiting for ages in the evening. We’ve done this before of course, here are some shots from 2014 and some from the shopping areas in 2014.  On the

Give me grey and day There’s nothing more boring than a blue sky to us photographers!  So when we got this dramatic sky all day on my last trip to the northeast, it really was a gift.  Pinnacle Bridge, Sunderland First off we went south to see the new bridge in Sunderland. It’s the tallest thing

Leafy November Shoot This November I did a shoot with young Jaeda, a star of the future who’s not only a great model but a competition diver too!  A portfolio shoot around our mutual hometown, Morley, hair and styling by her mum, makeup artist and skincare consultant, Michelle Sharman – who also did the art

NIGHTSCAPES 2018/2019 Begins! It all started last night in Roundhay Park – our winter of light painting around Roundhay Park saw us using torches and gels to colour the world! New for 2018 is a “Manker MK 35” torch – this claims to have a 1.4Km beam – it does shine a hell of a

Getting used to a noisy sensor again! Drones have tiny noisy sensors compared to your DSLR – if you’re used to brightening up shadows on an underexposed shot with your camera, you’ll be shocked how bad this is on a drone RAW file.  So what can you do? Bracketing and HDR is the answer.  Bracket

Another series of photography workshops came to an end in Manchester on 26 September, and what a summer it turned out to be. It feels like ages since we started with the beginners’ evening in Leeds, which, in true Yorkshire fashion, was the only evening where it properly rained. 2018 was amazingly dry and hot,

3 Weeks with a Drone….  So I got one – I saw just how small the “mavic air” is on Youtube and thought the time had come!  Reasons why I got one…  It really does fit in your hand Has a 12Megapixel camera which shoots RAW 4K movies Simple to use for a beginner  Masses

Copyright tracking just got easier How sure are you that your website images are all legal to use?  By that, did you buy a licence or hire a photographer – or did you just pop on to Google to get a few shots, assuming no one would ever know.  And the chances WERE that you’d be

Mean, Moody and Mono Sometimes you don’t get that perfect light – the colours are missing and you’re tempted to get back in the car and drive home.  But so long as you’ve got a little definition in the sky and it’s not pouring down, then stick around – get some shots with the intention

When you’ve done a shoot and have hundreds of shots to trawl through, you need a quick way to get the skin tone the right brighness on your subject. It’s not straightforward enough to use Auto Settings – that will take account of the background as well as the foreground and skin – so you

One of the most common issues we get are people asking to cancel (or come on a different workshop for no extra cost) – it could be work related, or a sick pet or anything life throws up. We have to say no in order to stay in business – hope this explains why!  We

It’d been on the cards for months but just hadn’t got round to doing this shoot with Brad. So on Weds, we met up at The Tetley in Leeds and got some great images around the Dock Street and Brewery Wharf areas.  Dock Street Great for headshots as it has these converging walls behind you, and

Our second portrait workshop the summer was with Nicola Papperazzo, Chloe Mason and Andy Blue McLaren. We split it into a couple of locations on the west end of Leeds city centre. Starting in the flowery Park Square, where I showed people how to use flowers in the foreground to add blurry texture – like this one

Our little secret! All photographers and designers know how to do this – and it is REALLY easy to do – and it really can leverage that photography investment to your advantage.  We use Adobe LIGHTROOM to do it at McFade, but there is a free tool called “IfranView” which does it as well.    Leverage your

Can mixing a holiday and photography ever work? So you’re off somewhere amazing for your holiday, with friends or family who probably are not photographers – or at least not as serious as you are. Can you really make this work?   The dream holiday photography…  For the die-hard-photographer who wants photography perfection, you really

7 – License to use the images And finally, the one no-one considers. When you commission a photographer, you are paying for them to create images, edit them and a license for you to use them in your business. You don’t own the images – the photographer retains the copyright unless otherwise agreed. It’s a

Gone are the old days…  Stitching panoramic photos used to be a pain. you’d have to do all kinds of prep on each photo in LIGHTROOM first, then export them as high res files, then create a stack in PHOTOSHOP and merge them…. and it’d probably go wrong at some stage! The panoramic world has

6 – Time to edit the images This is just as important as shoot day, and in many cases, has more influence on the final look of the photos.  The signature of a photographers style is often in the edit. The sort of things we do at this stage are:- Look at every shot and

5 – Time to take the images So this IS the time we spend with you shooting, the contact time, the time on site – it’s where the magic is started, but by no means complete.  When people ask “what is your day rate”, I assume this is the thing they are expecting to pay

4 – A 3rd Party view of your business Following closely from point 3 – business owners are often too close to the wood to see the trees… Getting someone from outside into bounce ideas off is a great experience. We “see” things differently, the yellow stripe on the carpet above actually isn’t that big,

3 – Creative Mind and Ideas It’s often difficult for business owners to think of images to represent their business. If you’re an accountant and spend most of the day in Sage/Xero/Excel, how do you make that look unique and interesting?  We do this day in day out – meeting all kinds of businesses and looking for

2 – The Right Kit for the Job! They have invested in the right bits and pieces for the job. This really does vary on what subjects people cover and style they achieve. Portrait people will have the right flashes and backdrops, architecture photographers may have very expensive Tilt-Shift lenses, food photographers will have all kinds

Most businesses need images for websites, brochures, press, adverts…. the list goes on. So when you hire a photographer, what are you actually getting? Good ones will be expensive, they may quote £1000-£1500 per day even in West Yorkshire – how on earth can this be justified. If you read most marketing copy, we would

Blackpool – the beach, prom and Cleveleys Its got a bad press, Blackpool.  It’s glory years are long gone, there is a drug problem which I’ve never seen, for myself, but you hear about it…  But despite all that, you can get a great set of photos on the right day. We went over on a

Night Photography at Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds Ok, we’re really lucky to have a ruined abbey right on the edge of our city – and it’s got lots of free parking! So each year I take a new group of photographers down there to light it up with powerful torches and sparks. Here’s what we got

Ovenden Moor and Wind Farm Photographers have flocked to this wind farm over the years – the bright stone on the road really stand out from the darker heather moorland, the large turbines create fantastic subjects and if you can get some rotation on them, preferably 1/3 of a turn, they look magical.  I’d not been up

Is Portrait Professional 17 Terrible? My Experience and Verdict The internet is not kind to Portrait Professional 17. In the depths of comment sections, where opinions fly unchecked, there’s no shortage of criticism for this software. But is the backlash justified? In this post, I take a deep dive into my experience with Portrait Professional

The bright sky problem… We’ve all done it – had a great scene to shoot but not got the right filters to balance the bright sky and land! We end up with a boring bright sky and really dark foreground – it’s not ideal, but with most camera RAW files you can now fix this