Yesterdays shoot was all on location at my friends house in Leicester – thanks so much to Abi for letting me shoot in her new home!! Janine is a gorgeous red-head with a freckly pale complexion so we wanted to emphasise this as much as possible for the first few shots. Later on taking inspiration from the cover of the most recent edition of Papercut Magazine we went heavy on the eyes and asked Janine to be a little more aggressive in her poses. So from soft to hard we took the shoot through a little story in Abi’s home ending outside in the garden with wet green leaves all around. This was also the first shoot I have fully styled in a while mixing in quite a few vintage pieces I have accumulated over time! I loved it!

The finished shoot will soon feature in my fashion portfolio! So that’s it now from me for a while, although I hope to be blogging more on my own site as well as dedicating my time to Notworkrelated. I hope to be shooting a little bit of fashion and portraiture along the way!

Model: Janine @Oxygen Model Management
Hair and Make-up: Jessica Nurse
Styling: Helen Roscoe

Shot with Leica M9 and Leica 50m f2.0 summicron lens, post-produced in Lightroom

Model: Anna T from Oxygen
Hair: Leighanne Regan
Make-up: Jessica Nurse

So I thought I’d better post something new on here from a shoot I did on Monday. With the combined efforts of Jessica Nurse make -up, Angel Sayers hair stylist, and Leanne Vasko  @Boss Model Management we combined our ideas, wardrobes a random fox and a wonderful set of antlers! It wasn’t all so bizarre!

Full shoot will go into the fashion portfolio soon!

Shoot with Leica M9 and 50mm f.2 Summicron lens

I had the great pleasure of attending Aston Martin’s head office earlier this week. I photographed two of director’s of Aston Martin…no pressure there then! CEO of Aston Martin Dr Ulrich Bez is a pro when it comes to posing for photographs and along with The Times and Bloomberg Magazine photographers I managed to elbow my way in to shoot the portraits outside of head office in Gaydon. The sun was in and out as is the case at the moment, so I used a mixture of flash, no flash and reflected light. Following on from Dr Bez, the CFO Hanno Kirner stepped in to his portrait taken, he’s a very tall man so I was on my tip toes photographing him! Dave was shooting some lovely fly on the wall imagery with a slightly different take on what was going on.

Along with a few lovely cars to work with including the new Virage we went on to document a group of 40 17 year olds looking at applying to do engineering at Warwick University. They were truly spoilt with a factory tour, head of design presentation and a sneak peak of the One 77 building. What a day out for them!

Aston Martin Magazine, Summer Issue 2011

We now have the long awaited publication of the summer issue of the Aston Martin Magazine. We wouldn’t usually get this excited about but this particular issue does contain a 5 page spread featuring a nice selection of imagery shot during our time on the UK launch of the new Aston Martin Cygnet. We were sending images out all the time during our work on this commission so it’s nice to finally see some of the work in print going out to the masses.

To add further to the excitement (I’m not sure if we’re supposed to be that excited about it!) but it is the small things that count! Another story on the Bonhams Auction held on the 21st May features a further collection of imagery Helen shot not long after the launch. We do love a published piece or two!

For more information on this project and to see what we were photographing follow this link.

Something pretty cool is happening at Notworkrelated at the moment! We have launched a one week competition enabling one lucky winner to enter a prize draw on twitter for one of you to win our first print from our travels in Japan.

All you have to do is follow this link to our website and so long as you’re on twitter you’ll be in with a chance to win!

Good luck!

Grand Prize (1 winner):
- A photographic print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper with a semi-matt finish. Here is the print that you can win…

Martha is a real delight to work with, we had loads of fun with the shoot and captured vintage through the decades finishing with Martha as she turned up to the shoot in her stripey cropped jumper and chinos trousers, stripped back and warming.

She’s never quite had a bouffant like it! Thanks to the expertise of make-up and hair stylist Julia Jeckell, Martha acquired even more height to her 5ft10 inch frame.

In The first few shots I wanted to capture Martha appearing to be awkward, as if the model wasn’t quite there in the shoot, with her mind wandering off, distracted by other things. This led through to outdoor shots in a mixture of locations including a gorgeous grassy field at the back of my parents house where Martha was more free and able to add subtle expression and strong body language.

It was great set-building and taking vintage furniture and props from the house into the field or behind the green house, and thanks to Emily we obtained a fantastic vintage wardrobe whilst Dave snapped away in the background to get some nice fly on the wall stuff.

I Loved it and can’t wait to shoot again! The finished story will appear in my fashion portfolio very soon!

Photographer: Helen Roscoe
2nd Photographer: David Rutter

Make up and Hair: Julia Jeckell
Styling: Julia Jeckell and Helen Roscoe
Wardrobe: Emily Elwood
All round good fun, a few test shots and patience from Sukie Bea (my gorgeous 2 year old neice!)

Shot using Leica M9 with fixed 50m summicron f2.0 and 90m f2.8 lenses, and Hasselblad H3DII-31 with fixed 85m f2.8 lens

You always pick up tips along the way, so why not do a few blog posts about them? Hope you like it and it may give you a little bit of a taste as to the things we had to think about in order to make our travels run smoothly!

travel-tips-and-tricks-part-2

At the beginning of May we photographed the wedding of two very dear friends of ours Sara and Paul. Not a massively conventional wedding, set at The Bingham Hotel in Richmond, a lovely part of London and with only 30 guests we managed to capture their intimate day from the pre-wedding nerves to a cool little shoot around the area next to the Thames. We don’t do this kind of thing very often but it was great to do and have since heard that they are very happy with the images indeed! Sara wore a cocktail dress, very Spanish in style with a twist of Moroccan, whilst Paul played in cool in a tailor fit blue suit. Considering they threw it all together within the space of a few months it was a very contemporary and ‘Swedishly’ stylish wedding. As we were also guests it mean’t we could dress up for the day too, this is perhaps the most summery dress I’ve worn whilst photographing a wedding, good job the sun stayed out! We also tested the new Carl Zeiss 18mm lens which is proving to be quite a favourite with us both!

Copyright for all imagery belongs to Helen Roscoe and David Rutter. Photographs were shot using Nikon D700 24-70 f.28 lens and Leica M9 50m and 18m lens, post-production was done using Adobe Lightroom.

So for the past fortnight we’ve both had the pleasure of capturing and documenting the lifestyle that is Aston Martin in the city. Along with lifestyle journalists and car enthusiasts we’ve taken to the streets and driven historic routes around London, passed famous landmarks and have eaten (and photographed!) at some of London’s great restaurants and tea houses. Not all a party though it may seem this way! The purpose of us being there was to create imagery for their in house publications  along with providing photography for the articles that will be written about this cool little car. I guess we wanted to offer something different photography wise as the Cygnet is very different indeed from anything Aston Martin have ever produced.

We’ve worked alongside automotive photographer Dominic Fraser, with all of his knowledge and banter, alongside we had the Aston Martin marketing and brand communications team who were fantastic to work with…and then we had the tech team who spent many hours preparing the cars every day for the shoot. A wonderful perk to the brief was being driven around in an Aston Martin Rapide – a car worth somewhere in the realms of £120,000!! The drivers showed us a little of what they are able to do and sound like too! Oh and it was the absolute most pleasure to be able to photograph the very handsome model who is David Gandy, not just once but twice…well we were all pretty pleased about that one.

Below are a few highlights taken from the gig and what we shot along the way. This is the first professional collaboration Dave and I have worked on together, with his design knowledge working hand in hand with creating new imagery. Something that is Notwork is now becoming Itswork and we look forward to developing this brand. We’ve started a twitter feed for this project and you can follow us here if you like!

Many thanks and happy viewing!

Whilst the other journalists took off with their Polaroid cameras I managed to do some of the route with Hannah from the Press garage, who decided to step in their shoes for the morning and took a few snaps herself! The Conran Shop in Chelsea really does house some bespoke furniture finds. I’m not so sure spending £10,000 on a sofa is anything I’d like to do, however I did love the bath section and you can get some really unique contemporary and vintage style gifts for the home. The wool-knitted wall clock definitely did it for me! The Conran Classic 54 Collection is also a real highlight and the production of their catalogue for this collection is really well done – quite inspiring!

Photography for the Conran Classic 54 Collection was done by Julian Broad.

Above is Hannah and myself getting ready for the next stint of the drive around London.

The Bluebird Cafe in London was a fantastic venue to start to the day with all the Cygnet’s parked up on the outside courtyard.

The Cygnet parked up next to Scentevent wonderful florist located next to The Conran Shop.

We loved using the new 18mm Carl Zeiss lens on the Leica.

Hackett were involved in the launch also, offering a Tailor Fit experience with Jeremy Hackett himself! The cars drew lots of attention throughout London as we parked up.

Okay okay, so David Gandy joined us on more than one occasion…I think my heart was beating so hard at one stage…especially when my Dave got chatting to him! He’ll be including a review of the Cygnet in his Vogue blog.

Borough Market was another stop off point for the journalists to enjoy a spot of cheese tasting and a good coffee from Monmouths. Again Dave gets creative with the wide angle.

Some nice ambient shots of the evening events at The Conran Shop, where an orange Cygnet was parked for the full two weeks. There were so many other photos taken during our time on the launch and over time I’ll add a few more to the portfolio. All in all it was such a great brief to work on and a real privilege to be involved. I’m going to be shooting some fashion in June which I am mega excited about, it feels way too long and my portfolio is yearning for some new imagery again. It would be great to hear from you if you have any comments along the way.

Helen x

Copyright belongs to Helen Roscoe and David Rutter