Jeff Ascough's Blog

Ascough Silver Actions are now ready!!

My long awaited action set 'Ascough Silver Actions' is now available for purchase. All the information about the action set is available from www.ascoughactions.com

I am really happy and proud of this set as they are the closest I've got to achieving a true film look to my images. They set has been used on all of my images since November 2008, including all of my blog pictures, and my website gallery.

They are currently on offer for a limited time, and if you are based in America the weakness of the British Pound makes them really affordable right now!!

Natasha & Paul

One thing I love about my job is that no two weddings are ever the same. One week I can be shooting 300 guests at a big marquee reception in the middle of the country, and the next I might be covering 40 guests at a small, intimate, family orientated wedding in the leafy suburbs of Greater Manchester, just like this one.

I seemed to be blessed with some lovely weddings this year, and this was no exception. The couple were an absolute delight to work with, and it was a joy to shoot the wedding even though we were fighting the rain at times.

Natasha has just seen her pictures, and sent me this lovely note of thanks;

"Wow! What do we say to show our appreciation? Words just don't seem enough. The photos are simply amazing and capture the day perfectly - even after watching the [online] slideshow at least ten times they still evoke a tear!

You are simply amazing!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cool new blog feature

Typepad have improved the 'comments' section of their blogs. What this means is that people can reply to comments that have been made by others in a threaded format, very much like a forum works. If you want to reply to a comment, then simply hit 'reply' at the base of the comment you wish to respond to. You can also add html into your comments. It also gives me the option of directly replying to someone that asks a question.

This is a really cool feature.

travel is so glamorous

Ask most wedding photographers, or look at their websites, and you will find that many offer to travel all over the country to shoot. I myself used to travel some 20,000 miles a year to cover just forty weddings, but last year I made the decision to move to the North West and to stop traveling great distances to cover weddings. If I am honest I have turned away a year's worth of bookings, simply because my preference is to now photograph a lot closer to home. I like to drive to a wedding in the morning, and drive home again in the evening. After nearly a year of covering local weddings, have I made the right decision? In a word ABSOLUTELY!! It was one of the best business decisions that I have ever made.

Before the popularity of the internet, most photographers worked in a local marketplace. It wasn't until I got my first website back in 2000, that I started to get work outside of my area. Over the following years I got into the habit of taking the first wedding that came along for a date without giving any thought to the location. It didn't help that I was based in Derbyshire at the time, and being right in the middle of the country it was fairly easy to get to most places. Quite bizarrely, between 2004 and 2008, I shot just two weddings out of nearly 200 within ten miles of my home. Looking back, this was simply ridiculous.

This year only three weddings actually require travel, and having done the second one of them this past weekend, I'm glad I only have one left to go!! So what is the problem with travel, after all it's supposed to be glamorous isn't it?

Logistically, getting around the UK's motorway network is nothing short of a lottery. I covered a wedding at Blenheim Palace this past weekend, and chose to drive down on Friday afternoon. A very simple two and a half hour journey turned into a six hour marathon. The M6 becomes a car park on a Friday afternoon, along with the M1, M5, M40, M4 and M25. So instead of chilling out in my hotel room, I was getting stressed and frustrated stuck in traffic. By choosing to work locally, my knowledge of the region's road system means that I have a far better chance of avoiding any problem areas, which leads to less stress, and ultimately a fresher and more relaxed photographer on the day.

Working locally, also means that I can cover more than one wedding a weekend. During the Summer it is not uncommon for me to cover a Friday and a Saturday wedding, or a Saturday and Sunday. To cover a Saturday wedding with travel would mean driving on Friday, shooting Saturday, and driving home Sunday. That's three days to cover one wedding. There is no chance of booking another wedding that weekend, so financially it doesn't make a lot of sense to travel either. I also have to factor in the loss of time out of my working week. A Friday wedding would mean Thursday traveling, and that's a pretty short week. This in turn puts pressure on my business, post processing, and album design which affects my client service. Again this isn't good for business.

Recommendations are the life blood of any business, and as you might expect we get a lot of recommendations. The problem with traveling to weddings for so many years, is that a certain percentage of the recommendations I get are for weddings from those places I had to travel to in the first place!! Again, this makes no sense whatsoever.

I love to see my clients before the wedding day, but for years I hardly met a client before the morning of the wedding. If a client is getting married in Sussex, the chances of them coming to see me, or me going to see them before the day is pretty much non existent. My work and reputation have always given my clients confidence in booking without meeting me, but I think it does make a difference being able to meet a client before the day. Working locally, I am now able to do this.

Travel expenses are another source of frustration. I know of several UK photographers that never charge a client traveling expenses, even though the wedding may need two nights accommodation and at least a tank of fuel. The last wedding I covered in London cost nearly £500 in expenses. I doubt there are many businesses that could afford to cover that sort of loss week in, week out. 

So why do photographers still offer to travel all over the UK? Is it the prospect of shooting each weekend in different places? Maybe, but it might be nothing more than a confidence thing. The wedding market is so congested these days, that photographers panic and take on the first thing that comes along. As I mentioned earlier, I was as guilty of this as anyone else. However, I firmly believe that working locally is far less stressful, easier to market, and gives the opportunity to offer a higher level of service to the client. Since moving to the North West, I believe my work has become stronger, and my passion for shooting weddings has increased dramatically; my client service has improved and I'm happy with the way everything is now running. I firmly believe that this is all down to my decision to live and work in the North West.

Random thoughts

Wow, the weather this week has been scorching. I can't remember it being this hot for years. On the North West coast we've been simmering in the high 20's and low 30's with little sign of an onshore breeze. I can just hear my Aussie friends laughing at us 'Poms' and our inability to cope with even the slightest increase in temperature, but don't forget the Ashes starts next week ;-)

I daren't guess how hot my office has got over the past couple of days; with two Macs, three monitors and half a dozen external hard drives chugging away all week the temperature has easily gone into the high 30's. I have had the window blacked out too, so that I can work in subdued light (very important when working on photographs) so in addition to the heat, I've not been able to get any air circulating. Shorts and t-shirts have been the order of the day in there!! 

I'm not sure if the weather will break by the weekend, but actually shooting in this kind of heat presents all sorts of problems for photographers. The biggest issue is dehydration. It is so easy to work for several hours at a stretch only to find that we haven't drunk enough water. This time of year, I ditch the 35mm and 24mm lenses in favour of the 16-35LII and use the spare slot in my bag for an extra bottle of water. It is so important to stay hydrated, as it affects concentration and fatigue levels. I consider myself to be pretty fit these days, but without water my stamina levels drop dramatically, and I can't think straight. On Saturday I'll be shooting for twelve hours and I expect to drink at least two 1.5 litre bottles of water, and several smaller bottles if it stays this warm. For me, it is important to stop shooting for a few minutes every hour just to take on board some fluids. Missing pictures isn't an issue, but my health is, and I know that there will be natural pauses during the day which are perfect for a quick break. 

Other essentials in warm weather are; a small towel which fits in my bag, a larger towel that stays in the car, a can of Magicool, and a spare shirt. 

Sun screen is a must. For me it's factor 30, as a couple of hours taking images on a nice sunlit lawn will give me the look of a boiled lobster without it!! A couple of members of my family have had issues with skin cancer, so skin care in the sun is very important to me. It is so easy not to consider these things when we are caught up in the wedding.

One thing we don't have to worry too much about is equipment. Although I was once shooting with a Leica M6TTL and left the body with the lens facing the sun while it sat on top of my bag during a drinks reception. The sun shone through the lens and burned the cloth shutter blinds as the lens acted like a magnifying glass. Luckily I had a spare, so the wedding wasn't affected; my bank balance after the repair - now that was a different matter!! 

The only major equipment issue when it is dry is dust creeping into the camera. Fortunately all of my Canon professional lenses come with a rubber seal around the lens mount which really helps. It is really important that when I'm shooting outside that I don't swap lenses too often, and I try to stay with just one lens on each body (I use two)  just to keep dust contamination at bay. It also saves me hours 'spotting' images in Photoshop after the day!! It is also a good idea just to take a blower brush just to clean away any dust that has accumulated on the camera body during the day.

..................................

I've been adding to my book collection over the past few weeks. I'm a big fan of documentary photography and I often think that if I couldn't shoot weddings, I would be off somewhere shooting a reportage for a book or magazine. My favourite books are all on the subject of social documentary, and a couple of them are now quite collectible; a Garry Winogrand book that I bought several years ago for £20 is now worth around £180, and a Magnum special edition book has doubled in price within eighteen months. I don't buy books for investment reasons though. In fact I've never gone down the whole 'investment' route with anything that I have bought; I still have a rare Leica M6TTL Titanium camera with brown hide leather, but like all my cameras it has major signs of use and abuse. A month ago I bought a Gretsch 6120 'Chet Atkins' guitar, which is simply gorgeous to look at, but I just want to play it and in a few years it will look like my old Fender Telecaster - well loved!! 

Anyway back to the books. I've bought stuff by Alex Webb, Steve McCurry and Jonas Bendikson in the past month. They've all been fantastic to look through, but the McCurry book 'The Unguarded Moment' is simply stunning. It's a large volume showcasing some of McCurry's best work with one image to a page. The size and quality of the images used in the book really emphasises his use of colour and tone. It is quite mesmerizing to look at. It is not my favourite book of the month though; that goes to 'Humanity in War', a book of images tracing the humanitarian work that goes on, often unseen, by organisations such as the Red Cross. The images are often harrowing, but in a way that simply wants to make you understand the conditions that humanitarian aid workers often find themselves in. It is a powerful body of documentary work from many different photographers and decades, from all corners of the Earth. Highly recommended.

..................................

We are now in July, and surprisingly I've spent very little money on equipment this year; mainly because I already have pretty much everything that I need. Equipment lust, the scourge of many a photographer, left me a few years ago, but when it comes to my computers though, this is a totally different matter!! When I first started shooting digitally, I could make a 500GB hard drive last all year, but now my 21 megapixel cameras are filling up my hard drives faster than ever. It's frightening how much storage I need! In an effort to stem the flow of external hard drives gracing my office shelves, this week I bit the bullet and splashed out on the 4TB version of the LaCie 4big Quadra. This is in addition to my purchase of two new Eizo 22" Colour Edge monitors, I actually wanted 24's but they wouldn't fit on my desk :(

I can't get over how much money computer equipment consumes, but I'm totally obsessive about producing the absolute best images that I can, and I believe that by having the best computer equipment I am not compromising on anything at all. With the equipment and software that I have at my disposal, I really have no excuses when it comes to my images. The Eizo panels are amazing, and are a significant improvement on my old Apple Cinema displays.

..................................

Last random thought for the day. Is it only me that thinks Real Madrid have completely lost the plot?

Have a great weekend.

Sophie & Bob

My favourite images from Sophie and Bob's wedding in Yorkshire. They are a really lovely couple, who had a beautiful wedding in a fantastic part of the world. What more could a wedding photographer ask for!!

The wedding images went online last week, and I received this lovely email from Sophie;

"I just wanted to say thank you so much for the photos, they're absolutely stunning! You really have captured the essence of the day. We're loving showing everyone the pictures and I have to admit there's been quite a few tears whilst we've been looking through them!! You're a genius!!"