We were delighted to receive a return invitation from current chairman Ivan Finch to speak at the London Portrait Group on Tuesday the 6th of July @  http://www.pinweirestaurant.co.uk

Our last visit was a couple of year ago and Faye and I are looking forward to it immensely. Just need to find some images to show! I did say more news on our STUDIO MENTORING but with much gardening and our sold out BOUDOIR ACADEMY workshop on Tuesday time has once again escaped me. Not much of an excuse I know but the best I can come up with. So looking forward to working with Anita and Holly one again and hope all 10 delegates have safe journey’s to our venue.

Part of our new programme will be the creation of a new web/blog site devoted to our exclusive child portraiture. This will then leave us with a website for our Mentoring and Workshops one for our Art Nudes and finally one for Children.

Today’s image is from a session on Sunday. Created in our garden, not without difficulty as the sun just kept beating down. We did part of the session in the studio and we will post some of those later but I do love this simple, pensive image.

We have spent the past 3 days working in the garden. The only sounds being the birds, waterfall, Classic FM and the occasional aircraft, sheer bliss though very hard work. Filling 18 hanging baskets was only the start but we can now settle back and look forward to a wonderful and colourful  summer although we do have a couple of large trees to remove but’s that all for another weekend! What these past few days has allowed is some quiet thinking time which was very welcome. Time to consider all the requests for workshops here in the UK, Europe and  America and the increasing number of photographers looking for mentoring in a wide variety of area but all relating to becoming and maintaining a successful wedding and portrait business in difficult times. As you may have noticed we have posted some business ideas in previous posts but mostly the site has been about our general work, Art Nude, Boudoir and seminars. We already have a new website in design that will host all of our Art Nude work, our seminars and Limited Edition images for sale and that will launch some time in the next couple of months. So it was while I was planting a bed of ’snow in summer’ I came up with the idea of a site that would just be devoted to our musings on the business and practical side of modern social photography. Not just how to take pretty pictures, not just how to use a reflector or how to pose a child but the mechanics behind a successful business. The Marketing and Promotions, the PR and Presentation, the Sales and Products all contribute, along with quality portraiture, to running a successful business whether it’s home or high street based. So for all of you who have been emailing us about mentoring you have been listened to and our ideas are being formulated, however it will come with a cost, a reasonable cost but then knowledge and experience do count for something. It may take a couple of months to see the best way to offer this service but it will happen some time this summer. Please be patient but we will be offering group mentoring, one to one mentoring, tele mentoring and email mentoring so no matter where you live in the UK we can offer you help and our advice. We are also looking to host mentoring clinics around the UK for a small groups of selected studios where we can have face to face meetings and brain storming sessions with studio owners. If you would like to receive advance notice of this new project please drop me an email to trevor@yerburystudio.com

Today’s image is from a recent studio session. Simple, classic lighting.

Just to prove that we also do babies here is an image of Faye’s from last year. Today we are mentoring a photographer on exactly this subject so looking forward to that.

Another image of the delightful Kyla from yesterdays session here @ Claremont.

Kyla was a star for our session today. 3/4 changes, indoor and studio and not one complaint. More later.

We have had a busy week with more to come including my daughter’s wedding this Sunday! Today’s image is a simple studio portrait taken a couple of weeks ago using our faithful, 25 year old+, Bowens softbox.

Of all our studio styles the one that retains its popularity year in year out are our classic Black and White Signature Portraits. They still make up to 60% of all our sessions and despite the ‘white’ wrap round so popular with many photographers our clients still love our distinct and different approach to the portrait market. In other words we set the trends and don’t follow like sheep. Its all about a personal style or even a studio style, many photographers tell us they can spot a ‘Yerbury’ portrait a mile away because of the strong classic element that has a timeless quality unlike some of today’s portraiture which, though fashionable, is, like fashion offering clients a product of a limited lifespan. Regrettably in this day and age many photographers are failing to find a personal style preferring instead to latch onto the style and technique of others. If you have no personal style then you will always struggle to achieve success so you will always find us reinforcing this during our workshops where we ask delegates not to go away and copy our style, or indeed any other successful photographers style, instead take what we do, what others do and go away inspired to develop a unique style that you can be proud to call your own. You want your clients to look at your work as unique to you and not available anywhere else. As I always say, whatever other photographers are doing in your own vicinity don’t make any attempt to copy them or undercut their fees but simply run at 100 miles an hour in the opposite direction.

Today’s image is from a recent Yerbury Signature Portrait Session and we will be running a workshop in July here at Claremont, limited to 4 delegates, on classic posing, studio lighting and how we present our Signature images.

Today we are back in Family Portrait mode and if you remember an images we posted a few weeks ago of a pregnant lady with gold material well then here is the result an beautiful and simple black and white portrait of a mother and her new baby.

Not a good day, very busy getting all the images mounted and wrapped for shipping to BOWENS tomorrow. New backgrounds hanging, steamed and looking wonderful in fact I can’t wait to get a client into the studio. However I was not impressed with a couple of things I found out today, first a photographer offering portrait sessions and all the images sized and burnt to a couple of DVD’s together with a list of shops and websites where to get them printed! Then I came across a site where not only one of our product lines has been copied but on examining  the site further I came across at least 2 other photographers who have been ripped off! Please try and be original!

Today’s image of Clarissa Dickson Wright is from the CITIZENS collection.