Getting away from it all

London life can get you down. Super fast paced, overcrowded, too much pollution, too many people who think it's acceptable to do a poo on your doorstep on a Saturday night (seriously, don't get me started, that's 2 weeks out of 3 now - the downside to living in gritty East London I guess). Sometimes you just have to get away from it all.

Yvonne and I had been planning a trip to Turkey for a while, but when I say "planning" I actually mean "not planning". There was much talk of the trip, but due to the aforementioned super fast paced life we'd not booked flights or accommodation, or even considered where we might go and we were due to leave in under a week. Turkey deserves better than that, so the decision was made to hire a car and explore some of the English countryside instead, a decision which turned out to be a good one.

We had the car in London for one night before heading off so I did something I've been wanting to do for a while, I rigged up a tripod in the passenger seat and fired off some long exposure shots of me behind the wheel. There's plenty of info online about how to do this, but in a nutshell here are the settings I used for the shot below. f/22, ISO1600, 4 seconds exposure. Not sure if this is how the rest of the world does it, and I'm sure with a little experimentation I could do a better job, but I was pretty pleased with how it turned out.



Next stop was the Three Choirs Vineyard near Gloucester, about 3 hours out of London. Yeah, that's right, England has vineyards! Who knew? The place was stunning, beautiful rooms with beautiful views of beautiful vines.



A little wine tasting seemed to be in order. At first I thought a whacky chef was playing a pre-halloween prank by substiting one of the wines for vinegar, sadly this wasn't the case, but it actually didn't matter at all. Strange as it might sound the wine was the last reason we went there, I mean with France, Spain and Italy on your doorstep there's never a shortage of great wine over here (sidenote - I picked up a bottle of Vevue Clicquot for £25 at the supermarket yesterday, same bottle goes for $80+ in Australia), we went to Three Choirs for the early morning strolls in crisp fresh air through rows of vines whose leaves have just turned with the seasons, we went to see cows and sheep going about thier business, and we went because we considered it highly unlikely anyone would do a poo on our door step. Oh, and the photo ops weren't bad either.





Next up was a trip to Chepstow Castle just over the border in Wales. In my relentless pursuit to see more things you'll never see in Australia (Kryall Castle doesn't count) I actually forgot that I'd been to this castle before. Oops. Not to worry, it's always great poking round an ancient structure, an a Tuesday night on the verge of winter meant the crowds were down. I love the light streaming in through the windows of castles, especially on a gorgeous girl!





Cream tea later that day followed by Bath the following day and a trip to Stonehenge on the way home rounded out a world class short break. Londoners, heed my advice and get out of town of a few days, sure, the stress of London will come right back the second you try to negitiate London traffic on your return, but a few days out of the big smoke is just magic.

Prime Time with Mum and Dad at Kew Gardens

Another weekend, another crazy adventure, this time my cohorts were none other than MUM and DAD!! (and Yvonne of course). The parentals saw their way clear to spend a whole 2 days with their 2nd born son as part of another 5 week epic Euro vacation (bring on retirement I say!) and it was great hosting them at my Old Street Studio (which is actually my flat).

So, an unprecedented 3 sets of brackets in my opening paragraph, I get the feeling this is going to be a classic blog entry (or is it?). Anyway, we cracked some bubbly upon their arrival, nothing like a bottle of Bollinger on a Saturday afternoon, before heading off for dinner and a show - Chicago. We were all pretty bushwhacked after the day so retired early in anticipation of a busy Sunday.

We'd planned many moons ago to pay a visit to Kew Gardens on the Sunday, and after some early clouds we were blessed with a perfect London autumn day, the ideal conditions for 2 generations of Bills men to go head to head in an intense, unspoken photographic competition. Dad's a photographer from way back, when he was my age he took Mum and a MASSIVE heavy hardcase camera bag filled with manual focus prime (non-zoom) lenses on a trip round Europe, back then people didn't have the luxury of zooms, if you wanted a wide focal range you brought a lot of lenses, simple as that. Lenses like my SIgma 18-200 were an unspoken luxury.

It's interesting though how things come full circle.

I've been thinking a lot lately about shooting with prime lenses and using them for weddings, but there's a lot to consider. The benefits include superior image quality and wider apertures which allow better low light shooting and incredibly narrow depth of field which opens up some great artistic opportunities. The downside is that they're less practical, you need to move your feet to get the framing right which isn't always possible - if you need to move back to fit everything in but there's a wall behind you then you have to change lenses, a 10 second process that could cause you to miss the moment. Another downside is that they're EXPENSIVE (well, the ones I want are at least!) and it's hard to justify spending vasty sums of money on lenses when I already have the those focal ranges covered in my top of the line Canon zooms. The third and final reason I don't use them for weddings is because I don't own any, apart from my Canon 50 f/1.8 which I would never use at a wedding due to the slow focussing.

So, what do prime lenses have to with beating my Dad in a Kew Gardens photo competition? Well, I decided to only shoot primes on Sunday, I brought along my nifty 50 and I managed to get my hands on a Canon 100m f/2.8 MACRO lens courtesy of my main man Danny "Z Score" Zada (funny side story - I picked the lens up from Danny on Saturday, I found him at a quiet pub near his house where he'd popped down to watch his beloved Chelsea, the problem is he lives just near Emirates Stadium and Arsenal were playing later that day, so instead of enjoying a quiet pint with a neutral crowd the pub was packed to the rafters with rabid Arsenal fans all gunning for Aston Villa!). I lent Dad my Canon 24-70 for the day, so he was equipped with some very tidy glass of his own. The scene was set, battle lines were drawn, here's what we came up with.

The following shots are mine:


(this one was shot at ISO 25,600 in the 5D mkII for you photographers out there)
















And here's what Dad brought to the table:











And here's one of Mum we combined on, mine's the left - I think Dad's is better actually, and it pains me to type it!!



All round a tremendous weekend, made all the better by some first class steaks and tasty wines for dinner. Is there anything better than taking photos with your Dad on a crisp Autumn day in one of London's most beautiful gardens when the leaves are turning?

Wedding: Lara and David

I'd been sick all week, and restless night were filled with fevered dreams of the wedding I had to shoot on Sunday. My health improved slightly as the week progressed, but I was far from 100% when Sunday rolled round so I was glad to at least be on familiar territory. Danny and I returned to the fantastic Montague on the Gardens hotel in Russell Square where the familiar sight of Gerhard and team were there to greet us, this time for the wedding of Lara and David, and what a wedding it turned out to be!

First of all let me say a massive thanks to Lara and David for being such an awesome couple to shoot, they'd allocated us plenty of time to shoot and as a result we were able to get some great unique shots. This was the smallest wedding we've done with just 25 guests, but less is more as far as I"m concerned, the day had a very intimate feel throughout and gave everyone the chance to spend some quality time with the couple.

It was my turn to take shots of the groom getting ready (for whatever reason I usually end up shooting the bride) so it was great to try something different. While Danny was hitting home run after home run with his bridal shots (seriously, these shots are amazing) I took the groom and his parents down to the park for some casual portraits.







(David's Swiss parents loved the squirrels in the park, and so did I - I still get a kick out of seeing them running round!)




The ceremony was held in a small atrium, a perfect little glass ceilinged room full of natural light. And love.







Following the ceremony we took the formals before getting the whole group together outside for a shot. I was standing precariously on a narrow wall next the BBQ for this one!







While everyone settled in for lunch I was feverishly working away on the laptop putting together a slideshow for later on. This was the first time I've done this and I'm convinced this has to be a regular thing moving forwards, having shots to show the couple on the day is great, and it's a perfect way to make the reception guests who weren't at the ceremony feel involved in the whole day. Once I had the shots from the first part of the day sorted dinner was finished and we headed out with just the couple for some coupley shots. As luck would have it light rain was coming down, but sometimes you have to roll with the punches so we grabbed some umbrellas and set about making some memories.





















As you can see the sun came out right at the end, the perfect end to a perfect wedding. Ok, who am I kidding, we all know the slideshow was the perfect end to the perfect wedding!

I suck at Oktoberfest

It's official. I suck at Oktoberfest.

I came to this conclusion on Saturday night, some time around 11, when I retired to my hostel bed stone cold sober having just waded through the debris of a Munich on the final weekend of the beer festival. That's not to say I didn't have my fair share of litre steins earlier in the day, but at some point my sensible switch kicked in and I decided to hit the cokes instead, I even had a coffee at 10:30!! Worst. Party animal. Ever.

In cruel twist of fate I actually picked up some sort of bug which has rendered me housebound today, I was in a bad way before the drugs kicked in, I even shed a few tears when Flower (head meerkat) was killed by a cobra on Meerkat Manor this morning (and then I announced this fact to the world on my blog - this fever is brutal).

There were 13 of us who made the trip over, most of whom arrived late Friday night, but my flatmate Dave and I arrived early Friday afternoon.



(As a sidenote if you're intestered in the back story to our trip which was named - codename Operation Beardvaria - you can check out this post on Dave's blog.) My initial plan was to leave the SLR at home, I mean, a big camera is pretty much the last thing you want to have to worry about in a beer fueled environment, but when I thought about it I realised I'd have Friday afternoon and Sunday morning to take photos, so in went the 40D and Sigma 18-200 (not an amazing lens optically, but it's super handy for traveling and capable of some pretty decent results). We spent Friday afternoon cruising round trying to capture the spirit of Oktoberfest with our cameras, for you Adelaideans out there imagine the Royal Show only with bigger and better rides, and instead of halls selling showbags they have halls filled with people drinking steins of beer, instead of the animals they have tents of people drinking beer, and instead of car demonstrations they have, well, you get the idea.







I wanted to practice a technique knowns as shooting from the hip, which, as the name suggests, involves holding the camera by your waist and shooting people who aren't aware they're having their photo taken. It's obviously pretty hit and miss, but I love the results you can get with a bit of luck.





And then there was the chaos of Saturday...





I had a bit of time to explore Munich along on Sunday, my flight was mid afternoon while Dave was off at the crack of dawn to get his flight (quite the valiant effort after a disrupted sleep night before). I was here 2 years ago so it was interesting to see familiar sights. The morning light was glorious and after spending a bit of time shooting downtown I decided to see if surf was up at the stationary wave. It was.



I'll leave you with my favourite image of the weekend, enjoy!



Oh, by the way, I'm still on the lookout for some Paris models, come on people, get on board!

Models required for PARIS PHOTO SHOOT!!

Friends, I'm on the lookout for a fun couple keen to head over to Paris for a photo shoot on Monday 19th October.

You:
- Fun couple who like having their photo taken
- Happy to spend a fair bit of time posing for photos
- Can get yourselves to Paris on Monday 19th October (I'll be getting an early train from London and a late train back, circa £79 return)
- Want to make friends jealous with stunning photos in the world's most romantic city

Me:
- Looking to build a truly international portfolio
- Loves going on photo shoots like the one in the video below.

Drop me an email if you're interested simon.bills (at )gmail.com

Photographer Simon Bills in action from Simon Bills on Vimeo.

The man behind the stories behind the photos of Simon Bills of Old Street Photograhy

On Saturday my good friend and Old Street Photography running mate Danny whipped up his patented chilli con carne and had Yvonne and I round for dinner. As the light was so nice we decided to come round a bit earlier and head to a little park down the road where roles were reversed and I fulfilled a childhood fantasy of becoming a super model.

About a month ago I took Danny and his wife Bec out for a shoot around London, we both thought it was pretty important to experience what it feels like to be on the other side of the lens to improve how we relate to the couple we're shooting, at the end of the day once you've got your technical wings photographing people is ALL about building rapport with your models, making them feel comfortable and getting them laughing and smiling naturally and enjoying themselves. I'm notoriously rubbish at having my photo taken, I tend to get a bit camera shy, can't smile naturally and generally get a bit awkward - I'm the camera shy photographer - but NO MORE!!

It's a lot easier having your photo taken with someone else, the style that Danny and both shoot is basically getting the couple to relax and have fun with each other - we're just shooting a couple of hanging out (sort of, there's more to it than that but you get the idea). It's a not a structured "Stand here, look at the camera, smile, NEXT". After we'd done some couple shots it was time to go solo, but this was fine as I was used to the camera pointing at me by now and my smile was looking less like a grimace than ever before!

So, I present to you..... me!

Wedding: Chona and Richard

Keen followers of my blog will remember Chona and Rich, a couple I met at J-Fo's party many moons ago who were looking for a wedding photographer. Well, those many moons came and went, and yesterday Danny and I finally shot the wedding, and what a wedding it was.

The standard chaos of a wedding day was in full effect, Chona's make up artist was caught in traffic and couldn't make it on time, it was looking like she'd have to have her make up done en route in the wedding car which was far from ideal. Thankfully the bridesmaids had a different make up artist who stepped in and saved the day, crisis averted. (Chona - I didn't catch the details of the make-up artist savior, drop me an email and I'll put her details in!!).





Chona had a stunning dress made by Kosibah Creations, the dressmaker Yemi was on hand all day to make sure the dress was looking perfect for the photos which certainly made our job a bit easier!





Once the early drama was over with the day unfolded beautifully, speeches were great (particularly liked Rich's younger brother's speech which likened Rich's approach to being an older brother to Wayne Arnold from the Wonder Years). Some early delays cut into some photo taking time (the planned 45 minutes turned into 6!) but in the spirit of rolling with the punches we all pulled together and got some great images.