#Weddings at the Tythe Barn, Caroline and Greg’s sneaky peek

Between Christmas and New Year I was back at one of my regular haunts, The Tythe Barn, Launton. Anyone who follows my blog or Facebook page will know I shoot several weddings at the barn and it is certainly one of my favourite Oxfordshire wedding venues.
Caroline and Greg came to me highly recommended by the barn and booked me for their big day. I have always wanted to photograph a Christmas wedding at the barn and when Caroline and Greg booked me I was more than delighted. The weather on the run up to the wedding was, as you will probably remember quite stormy, so naturally I was slightly concerned what the weather would be like for Caroline and Greg. The barn is a perfect venue should the weather turn bad as there is plenty of room indoors for the wedding guests to enjoy. Still, I did not have to worry as it was a glorious sunny day. Caroline and Greg had their wedding service at Caroline’s family church in Ambrosden with part of the service being taken by a family friend. The light on the day was amazing, if not a little sideways, but that’s all one can expect this time of the year and I was just grateful it was not raining.
The barn put on their usual high standard of service, food and drink for the lovely couple and the guests danced the night away with a DJ dishing out some pretty groovy tracks!
Here is Caroline and Greg’s sneaky peek. Plenty more to come and I hope the galleries will go live later next week.

Jim Morrison – A Salty Seadog

Some 15 years ago whilst I was at college I did a series of portraits of retired seafarers in Falmouth, Cornwall. Those men who had spent their lives at sea, working the Cornish harbours, fishing and saving lives in the seas around Cornwall. One of the gentleman I photographed was Jim Morrison (nothing to do with The Doors!) Jimmy was a lovely man, retired and at the time, was in his eighties. He had plenty a tale to tell of his life aboard his boat named Eclipse moving cargo from one Cornish harbour to another under full sail.

These images were very well received locally and I had a few of them in an exhibition at a Truro gallery. Two of the images sold almost instantly to the gallery owner’s son who wanted them for his home. Some years later (15!) and I get a call from the gallery owner, (John – who is also now retired) who has been trying to track me down. I moved away from Cornwall 13 years ago and lost touch with John but thankfully I have still the same mobile phone number which he kept filed away.

He was after two prints of the images his son had bought for a friend who admired them on his gallery wall 15 years ago. His friend lives in Munich but had mentioned she would love a couple of prints if John could find me.

Times have moved on in the world of photography and those negatives that I made on my Hasselblad film camera would be stored away in a box somewhere at home. I spoke to John a couple of months ago and we agreed it would be a good idea for me to search for the negatives in January when I was a bit quieter. One night last week I unpacked a large box full of negatives, wow my film processing costs must have been high. All of my college negatives are in folders and it didn’t take too long to find the images I was looking for, all still in amazing condition. Now, I have the negatives but I don’t have a darkroom anymore, so they need to be into an electronic format. I sent the negatives to my lab for scanning and they arrived yesterday. The images look fantastic on my Mac screen and it is testament to the amazing optics of the Hasselblad camera I shot the portraits on – such an amazing camera that I still own! So a quick retouch to remove dust spots from the scans and the files are now ready to be printed. I would have remove dust marks with dye back in the day but Photoshop sorts it out now.

So times move on, our ways of recording images and outputting them has changed but the images of Jim Morrison will always remain dear to my heart. Such a wonderful man.

Here are the two images of Jimmy and his boat. Limited edition fine art Giclee prints available on request to info@marklordphotography.co.uk

The world of #Biomass energy…..

To those that know me and my work, most of the time I am photographing things with two to four legs, people and animals are what I specialise in.

This time last year I had a call from a local marketing company after I was recommended to them by a local design company in Thame. ‘I’ve got a bit a of a challenge for you’ said the voice down the phone. ‘What do you know about biomass energy?’

Ironically I had photographed a small biomass boiler in a pub I photographed for the Princes Countryside Fund a few months before. Biomass energy is a very efficient way of heating and many businesses are using it now to heat their premises due to it being cost effective and better on the environment. I had photographed a small boiler in a shed that was heating a small country pub but apart from that my knowledge was limited. Always one to rise to a challenge I accepted this gents offer to meet up for a coffee and discuss the project. Biomass boilers run on small wooden pellets that have to be manufactured and I was asked to photograph everything from the plant in Wales where the pellets are made to a swish BMW showroom and leisure centre in Milton Keynes who use biomass energy to heat their premises.

‘It’s boring stuff’ I was told, ‘you are going to have to be creative’ and ‘I’m thinking black and white’ came with the brief. So dates were put into the diary and off we went to these various locations to photograph the world of biomass!

It was brilliant, I totally enjoyed the whole project. I have always had a design head on my shoulders, wanting to be a product designer before finding photography many years ago. I enjoy the processes involved and the way we start with this and end up with that. I will bore you no more, but biomass can be interesting (he says hesitantly….) To find out more about biomass energy here is a link to follow.

If you are looking for a photographer for any commercial photography projects then please do get in touch, I would be delighted to discuss your ideas you may have. My client was thrilled with the images and told me if i can make biomass look exciting I can probably make anything look interesting.

Here are a few of my pictures from the biomass days……

This is what I love so much about my profession. The way that one thing leads to another through referral and how one day I can be photographing a beautiful country wedding and another day a mucky old boiler. Variety is the spice of life they say. I think so!