Written by: Kate Hopewell-Smith Come summertime you can’t open a newspaper or magazine without articles about getting your body ‘beach ready’. Many women are secretly terrified at the prospect of getting into swimwear publicly, because whilst very few people actually suffer from body dysmorphia (the belief that one's appearance is unusually defective) most women have body issues. The truth is that I deal with this reality on a regular basis because I shoot a lot of boudoir photography. Last week I put a few pictures on Facebook from a shoot that both I, and the lady To View More >>

Kate Hopewell-Smith believes that the more confident you are, the better photographer you'll become. But she worries about the lack of confidence in our industry, and wonders how many photographers are considering whether to carry on or not… From my experience meeting and communicating with lots of photographers there is a serious problem out there with lack of confidence, which for some can become quite debilitating. In fact I describe it as an “epidemic” –extremely prevalent, widespread. I read a lot of photography magazines but I can’t recall ever To View More >>

Written by: Clare Breheny When I worked in a corporate environment we would have literally hundreds of company-specific terms and acronyms that we used in meetings and emails to describe processes, systems, customers, products etc etc. When someone new joined the company we’d forget and spout out all these three letter acronyms, and we would see their face glaze over as if we were speaking a foreign language. For us, that was how things worked and what things were called. It was our day-to-day language and modus operandi. It would take a new person joining to remind us that To View More >>

Written by: Clare Breheny When someone asks me what I do for a living and I tell them I’m a boudoir photographer, the usual response is, ‘Oh, women getting pictures for their husbands,’ or ‘Oh, like a bride giving it as a gift on a wedding day’. Every time I shake my head, and explain that’s it’s WAY more than that… but how do you say modestly that the time you spend with them might actually change how they live their lives? Whilst working with a bride embarking on her wedding day is very rewarding, some of my favourite clients have come to To View More >>

The first time I truly understand the power behind a brand name… I'm pulled over in Customs to be searched (I've obviously forgotten to take my nail file out of my make-up bag again – It happens far too often!) I open my bag and they start their search. The security guy is rummaging around my bag and unpacking it, naming everything as it came out, "Make up bag… novel… album…" So I stop him right there. "How do you know it's an album?" (It's in a Queensberry box.) "Oh," he said, "we see these boxes coming through all the time, we just To View More >>