A few months ago, I was asked to shoot a V8 Vantage that a friends father bought for himself as a 60th birthday present. We met up in the Yorkshire Dales, in the Buttertubs Pass & Ribblehead area, to shoot off some images of his pride and joy. 

It was a beautiful day - a bit too beautiful, if I'm honest - extremely bright sunshine and barely a cloud in the sky, meant not much in the way of dramatic skies or stunning sunsets, but I was reasonably happy with what I shot...

Just catching up on some updates here - I realise I've been a bit slack on the blog recently!

First up, I'd like ot mention the power of social media! On August the 12th, I ventured out into the darkness of the moorland above Scammonden reservoir, not far from where the M62 reaches its highest point on it's journey between the Urban sprawl of Leeds-Bradford and Manchester. The aim was to capture som eof the Perseid metoer shower on camera. It was reputedly going to be one of the 'busiest' Perseid showers for a number of years, with peak meteor rates of around 100 per hour. In reality, above the glow of the surrounding cities, I counted more like 20 per hour- most of which were typically out of frame! As the cloud rolled in and out, conditions were far from perfect. In a brief break, I spotted the Milky way, clearly visible overhead, and so I thought I'd capitalise on th eopportunity and capture that, instead. I shot a 3 shot vertical panorama, with the band of stars and space dust clearly visible to the naked eye, right above me. I also managed to get a single meteor in frame too! Bonus!

Happy, and starting to feel a little tired, I returned home and the next mornign, quickly post processed the RAW images I'd shot, and posted a single image to my facebook, 500px and Flickr pages. In doing so, my twitter feed is automatically updated with an "I've just uploaded a new image" type of thing, and it was from there, that the BBC Look North program contacted me to see if they could feature my shot on their evening news program. they also shared it on their facbook page, and I received many comments and likes as a result. I was very happy. Here's a screen shot from the popular social media feed, and a copy of the original image, below:

I had the pleasure of being asked to shoot a good friends wedding up on the Isle of Skye a few months ago - as you'll probably be able to tell from my blog, I'm a huge fan of the Western Isles, and jumped at the chance to capture their wedding. It was actually the Bride and Groom, Martin and Becs, who introduced me to the wonders of Skye, a number of years ago. Since then, we've visited without fail every year! Sometimes, we've managed two or three trips up there in a single year! It's a truly special place.

Their wedding took place at the Sligachan Hotel - a place where many a Cuilin adventure have both begun and ended. With the wedding outside(!), the Scottish weather was very forgiving and other than a brisk breeze it was a perfect setting at the foot of the Cuilin Mountains. The bridge on which they got married, dates from the 1820's - possibly even earlier, but thankfully is no longer used for anything other than foot traffic - it provided the perfect setting for a truly fantastic wedding day. Here are a few of my favourite shots from the day:

Received some fantastic service from Moo.com, again this week - we decided to order some thank you cards for all of the wonderfully generous people who've given us gifts for our newborn son, Oscar. Surfing the net, and trying to find a print company who would produce a 'Thank You' card that suited us, we simply couldn't find something that stood out from the crowd...

For my photography, I've had a few sets of Moo MiniCards printed over the past couple of years, and it suddenly dawned on me that we could do a similar thing, as our thank you's...

Since Oscar had entered the world, any visitor, gift bearer or random friend that got a cuddle, had been snapped by the proud parents, with the majority uploaded to our social networking sites - we decided to utilise moo.com's prinfinity service - a different picture on every card... Fantastic - everybody who had been kind enough to give Oscar a gift, and had had a cuddle from the little man, would get their own, personal memento of the occasion...

We opted for 'rounded edge' business cards, with a shot of the generous 'gift-bearer'/'cuddle-giver' on one side and an image I took of Oscar's tiny foot, and hospital bracelet, a few hours after he was born, on the reverse side:

They'll be winging their way out to our friends and family over the next week or two! Here's how they turned out: Thanks Moo!

I've almost finishing the mammoth task of editting all of Danni and Graeme's shots from their wonderful wedding up in Northumberland - The wedding was at the beautiful Linden Hall, MacDonald Hotel, on a fantastic summers day.

The photo's will be being delivered to the bride and groom this week, but in the mean time, here are a couple of the happy couple, on their special day:

Oh, and while I'm here... a dramatic, cinematic style sneak peek, from my facebook page, a week or two ago: