Last night I had the biggest challenge of the new year thrown at me - my wife wanted me to take portrait of her!. Now that might not sound too daunting because I take a lot of portraits and have been taking pictures for years but when it's your own wife that's in front of the lens that does add to the pressure somewhat!!. I remember being on a photography work shop with a top photographer called Eliot Siegel (http://www.eliotsiegel.com/) and at the end of the two day workshop I asked him to take my picture for my website. He did a great job but I remember him telling me that taking a portrait of another photographer is a tricky assignment. Well this was a similar case with my good lady and thankfully I took a picture of her that she liked and I've posted it in today's blog. I took the shot with one 1000W Tungsten light with silver umbrella and a reflector held under her chin to bounce some light back into her face so it's a very simple setup and a good way to learn about portrait photography.

Earler in the week I had a shoot with BUPA at a care home in Birmingham for younger people who have severe disabilities. The home itself was really well run and the staff were clearly very dedicated to their work but it was quite a hard job to do as I feel so sorry for people that have such difficult illnesses to cope with. I found it very hard to stop thinking about the people I met there and it reminded again just how fragile we all are.

The annual Arc show was held this week at the Building Design Centre in Islington and this is a showcase for commercial lighting manufacturers to display their new products to architects and lighting designers etc. The show was very busy and I was there to photography an exhibition stand for a company called Occhio. Their products are beautiful and very high end and the stand looked great. I spent most of the day photographing both the stand and the reaction of their visitors and I also took some HD video clips for the guys at Occhio to put onto youtube. Their website is http://www.occhio.de/en/ and if you like beautiful lighting products it's well worth a look.

Yesterday I had a meeting with Philips Lighting to discuss their new photography guidelines and I hope to be getting some new work from them again soon. Last year I produced a couple of videos for them and I'll try to include a link to the latest one featuring the Natural History Museum in the blog sometime next week. They make some superb colour change LED floodlights that are seriously powerful and the Natural History Museum facade has been re lit with these LED projectors and the video shows the lighting changing colour.

Today I've been catching up on some post production and processing work and making a few calls to customers. The diary is filling up pretty quickly and I have a really positive feeling about the year ahead!.