Mark Anderson photography has a contemporary approach to black and white and colour photography which has gained us a reputation for delivering distinctive and highly imaginative photography.

We have developed a unique studio providing a highly personalised service offering commercial architectural and landscape photography, portrait and wedding photography, children and baby photography, and party and special event photography.

Please enjoy our blog site which provides regular updates on what we are doing - or look over our main website www.photoarte.co.uk for our full range.

Three years ago on Christmas Eve my backup external hard drive failed within days of my internal hard drive failing. It was very scary stuff, I almost lost my whole career – around 8 terabytes of photographs. It cost me about £1500.00 to retrieve it all and ever since I have been extremely careful with my backup scheduling and with formatting memory cards properly.

Holiday time is almost upon us and there are two things you need to think about before you pack up your cameras and head off to the great outdoors:
Memory!!! Back up your hard drive, and format your memory cards properly.

One thing I talk more about than anything else to students and fellow photographers is the importance of backing up your hard drive and how to handle your memory cards. I think I have said once or twice that you haven’t become serious photographer until you’ve lost your photos on a memory card or had your hard drive fail.

Losing data happens to just about everyone. And once it has happened to you it rarely happens again. With memory cards, particularly with the more expensive ones you can easily install photo-rescue software that usually will locate and restore pictures that get lost on a memory card, and if you back up your hard drive regularly you won’t loose everything.

Note that I said “usually.” There are no guarantees in memory card photo rescues. But there are several ways to boost your chances of success.

1. Always carry spare memory cards. If one starts giving you trouble, put it in your pocket, away from the other cards, and use another one. Once you’ve transferred the data from the dodgy card to your pc throw the card away. In my experience memory cards that start giving you problems can’t be trusted in the future.

2. Once you have transferred your images to your pc and backed them up format the card.

3. Blank memory cards that act up should be reformatted in your camera. (Use the camera’s menus. Look for “format.”) Then try them again. If they still give you trouble throw them away, memory is cheap enough these days to buy a new card.

3. Always reformat your memory cards before using them again. Don’t just erase your pictures. Continual erasing is the main reason memory cards go bad. Reformatting gives them a clean start.

4. Never allow any software of any kind to erase photos as they are transferred to your computer. Keep the pictures on the memory card until you have seen all of them on your computer.

5. Don’t do ANYTHING to the bad card. Don’t try to read it again from your camera and don’t try to store another photo on it. You’ll need to put the bad card into your card reader – not from the camera, and run your photo-rescue software.

6. For all of our commercial work we use cards that are no larger than 2GB. The reason for this is that if the card fails or a camera is lost or stolen with a card in it I won’t loose all of my images. Buy 4 x 2GB cards rather than an 8GB card. Also keep the cards in the plastic covers they come with, grains of sand and fluff can ruin cards.

If your memory card fails and you can’t get your images from it here are my choices for memory card rescue software:

For Windows, I recommend MJM Data Recovery from www.mjmdatarecovery.co.uk/photos/free-photo-data-recovery-software.html. It’s free.
Note that MJM rescues only JPEGs, the standard photo format. If you need to rescue photos in other formats, try PhotoRescue Wizard PC, from www.datarescue.com/photorescue. It’s about £20. The demo version (free) will rescue up to 10 photos.

For Macs, I recommend the Mac version of the same program. It’s also about £20 and will rescue up to 10 photos without payment. Get it from the same site, www.datarescue.com/photorescue.

And for hard drive backup I use Timemachine for my macs and there are plenty of good applications for pc. A backup takes some time to transfer your files so don’t do it the night before you leave on holiday. The great thing about Timemachine on a mac is that you can go back to the point in time where you lost data and retrieve it without having to bring all of your backed up data across. Go down to pc world or go online and you’ll find an external drive to do the job.

And buy an external hard drive that is larger than your internal hard drive, you’ll be surprised how much memory all that holiday video takes up!

If you are off on holiday in the next couple of weeks I hope you take some great pics, I’m going to run a holiday photography competition in September so bear that in mind!

Simon and Karon have been buying my photographs for years and they have a large collection of my London and New York photographs in their house in Clapham, South West London. I was very pleased when they asked me to photograph their wedding. For More information on wedding photography go to my dedicated wedding photography site.

Saturday was a windy but otherwise a sunny day and the confetti shots on the steps of The Chelsea Town Hall were excellent. The party moved morved across the road to the Bluebird restaurant where they had their reception.

Simon and Karon will take their honeymoon in New Zealand later in the year.

Last Weekend Asha and Justin were married at Asha’s parents beautiful home in Surrey. The wedding lasted all weekend and typically with Asian weddings the guest list was enormous with friends and relatives arriving and departing during the weekend. Both Asha and Justin come from large families and this week the couple will travel to India where they will repeat the ceremony for their Indian relatives.

Asha and Justin have asked me to come to India to photograph the Indian celebrations but unfortunately I am committed to work this weekend in the UK. For more wedding information go to my wedding site http://www.weddingphotographerslondon.uk.com/portfolio/

Asha and Justin will be exhausted I’m sure by the end of this weekend and they will be pleased to have a well deserved break when they Honeymoon in India next week.

Last night I photographed the Hornsby House Summer Ball. It was a fundraising event supporting two charities, The Myotubular Trust and The Jennifer trust.

It was a masked ball and all of the guests arrived wearing masks, some as unconventional as Darth Vader’s headress and a world war II gasmask. It was a clear warm evening and the guests were able to have drinks outside until they went in to the marquee for dinner. A promise auction took place later in the evening raising further funds for both charities.

For more information on Event and Party photography go to: http://www.eventphotographylondon.uk.com/events/home/
The photographs will be up on my site by Monday afternoon.

The Crypt as St. Paul’s Cathedral allows relatives of those who have been awarded an OBE to get married there, the crypt is also known as the OBE chapel. Jessica and Charles in fact met at an event St. Paul’s Cathedral two years ago and so getting married there was particularly relevant.

I met them both with Jessica’s mother at my Battersea studio last December and I’m told that since then Jessica and Charles have been to an incredible fifteen weddings! So, having seen what others have done at their weddings the couple had a pretty good idea of what they wanted to achieve and I they think they pulled it off in great style.

For more information on Wedding photography go to: http://www.weddingphotographerslondon.uk.com/
The photographs will be ready to view by Wednesday this week.

On Saturday Rebecca and John got married at The Brompton Oratory and the reception was held at Cannizaro House in Wimbledon. Three hundred people attended the ceremony at the Brompton Oratory and around 150 attended the reception at Cannizaro House. I met Rebecca and her mother Emma last year in April at my Northcote Road studio and they have been an absolute delight to work with. I think Saturday was the hottest day of the year so far in central London and the wedding party and their guests were very relieved at about 3pm to be standing in the cool breeze up on the Cannizaro Hotel Terrace Wimbledon Common.

We have two mid week wedding to photograph this week and a wedding in North London next Saturday.

Good luck to Rebecca and John, many thanks to you and your families for all of your hospitality.

Wedding Photographers London

Wedding photography websites are probably one on the most visual sites there are on the web. It’s a highly competitive industry and brides are extremely discerning. I have recently overhauled my wedding site, the previous one was, and certainly looked like, it was built by myself while on holiday in Devon last year. Luckily many of my wedding bookings come by word of mouth but unsurprisingly not that many were attracted by my clunkly 1980’s looking website.

Wedding photography and what is now on offer has changed enormously in the last few years largely due to digital output. We can have a couple’s images up on our website as quickly as the Sunday after a Saturday wedding, amazing albums can now be designed on line with companies such as Graphistudio, couples, and their families and friends can share their photos on webpages, and of course the benefits and huge possibilities offered by social networking sites like facebook.

Wedding Photographers too are a diverse breed. We have to try and set ourselves apart from others offering similar services. Price of course is one way of making your presentation more appealing although with wedding photography I do think you get what you pay for. A good blog is something I think couples look for, if they can see that you’re busy and that you are covering the type of weddings that they aspire to then they are more likely to make an enquiry.

So I hope you enjoy the new weddings site, I really enjoyed taking my part in it although my website designer Solly in New Zealand has to take most of the credit. His details can be found on the right hand side of this blog.

Taking pictures with your phone is great fun, as convenient as you can get, and you can share the shots with anybody in the world almost instantly. There are some things to remember though.

1. Clean the lens. Over time the camera lens can get dirty and create a blurred image. Just give it a good wipe.


2. Pick your subject carefully Bearing in mind the usual limitations of camera phones. This means:
Avoid subjects in low light, at least if you want them to be consistently lit. The small sensors in camera phones cannot run at high ISO speeds (i.e. high sensitivity to light, permitting indoor photos without a flash) without introducing large amounts of noise. In most circumstances, this makes indoor photos other than in the best-lit places difficult.

Avoid bright reflections, and other “hot-spots”. This will either force the camera to under-expose the rest of the shot, or cause the camera to blow out the highlights on the brightest parts of the shot. The latter is worse, since it is sometimes possible to extract details from parts of the image that are too dark, but impossible to recover blown highlights (since there is no detail to extract). On the other hand, this can be used to artistic ends, such as with bright light streaming through a window.

Avoid anything that requires tight focusing. Due to their very short focal lengths (the distance between a camera’s optical elements and the sensor, again, owing to their small sensors), camera phones excel at shots where nearly all of a scene is in focus. However, this (and their typically weak auto-focus mechanisms) usually precludes focusing on objects very close to the phone, or having a very shallow depth of field to get a blurred background effect (this be faked in software later anyway).

Avoid “mirror shots”, as well as arm-length shots taken by yourself. Aside from them being clichèd, they require taking photos indoors and mirrors also often end up confusing auto-focus mechanisms. Get outside and get someone to take the photo for you. If you’d rather take the picture yourself, most camera phones have an auto-timer feature so you can set the phone somewhere and get into frame.


3. Set your phone to its highest picture quality and resolution. You might end up taking a good enough shot that you want to print it out; you won’t be able to do this if you only have a low-resolution version of the photo.


4. Turn off picture frames. A normally great shot may be ruined by a cheesy frame or background; if you really must have one, add the frame afterwards.


5. Turn off any other effects. These include black-and-white, sepia tones, inverted colours, and so on. These aren’t as necessarily as cheesy-looking as frames and have their place; nonetheless, these things are much better done in photo editing software afterwards than on board the phone. You may find, for example, that when you view your photo on a large screen that the colours in your scene are far too good to lose to black-and-white.

6. Set the white balance, if your phone supports it. The human eye usually adjusts for lighting, and so white appears white in any kind of lighting. A camera, however, will see that a given subject is redder than normal under normal incandescent household lighting. Better camera phones will give you the option to adjust the camera for this. If you have such an option, use it. If you’re not sure what setting to use, experiment.


7. Use your flash judiciously. If you find yourself using a flash because your whole scene is insufficiently lit, you’re probably taking photographs indoors in poor light. Don’t do this, a scene lit entirely by your flash will look unnatural, since on a camera phone it is not typically possible to aim the flash anything but directly ahead (i.e. you can’t bounce it off ceilings or walls, as with dedicated flash guns for SLR cameras). On the other hand, a flash is a good option for filling in shadows in harsh sunlight.


8. Frame your shot. Make sure that everything you want in the shot is in the picture, and ready to be captured. Some phones show the entire viewfinder, meaning that what is on the screen is exactly what will be captured in the image. Other phones, however, only show what is in the middle of the image, but will capture more than the viewfinder shows. It’s better too much empty space into your picture; you can always crop it later.


 9. Finally, take the picture. Keep your hand steady as you press the shutter button. After you take the picture, keep the phone in position to allow the picture to be recorded. If you move immediately after pressing the shutter button you will just get a blur!

Many thanks to Solly in New Zealand for reworking our Event and Party photography site. It just came online today and replaces the site that I built in iweb. I had fun building the original but the new one I think makes my iweb effort look a bit amateurish.
The new site is a wordpress site and so there will be lots of blogging, useful information and news about recent events we’ve photographed. I’m afraid the first blog has not yet been replaced by the latin mumbo-jumbo but it will be as soon as Solly has explained to me how I can make it work.
You can find Solly at solly@dieloot.com

I should have written this post on Thursday. The stall on Northcote Road was open on Friday and yesterday but we won’t be open on Sunday (today) or Bank holiday Monday.
You can order online for collection next weekend or give me a call.
Have a good weekend.