I can now say I’m a ‘pro’ – I have been paid three times for my photography and this is the first processed image from my first paid-for portrait shoot.

This incredibly beautiful woman chose me to capture her image to celebrate her 40th birthday. I was honoured and proud to be chosen to do this for her. She’s an Australian, living in London and she wanted some good photos to send home to her family back home in Brisbane. She saw some of my portrait work on PBASE and contacted me to ask me if I’d be interested in helping to commemorate her ‘big day’.

Boy, am I tired now. The shoot went on for three hours and involved six different costumes, two different backgrounds, some sitting, some standing, some lying down and 165 photos in all. This has been the most intensive photo session I’ve ever done but I am so pleased with the results, it has been a really hard job to choose which one of the pictures to use for my PotD. This one gets it by the narrowest of margins, largely because of the wonderful pink sequinned Stetson that was among the things Karen brought with her. She’s a lover of pink stuff too.

I’ve learned a great deal today, mainly about watching my subject. I’d never met this woman before so I had no idea of what her ‘best bits’ would be. In fact, it turned out that most of her bits were ‘best bits’. I’m not sure I’ve seen such a lovely woman in a long time.

All-in-all I think I’m lucky to have been commissioned by her for my first shoot because she’s so beautiful that I’d have had to be completely useless not to get some great photos of her. This has boosted my confidence no end.

So, there will now be a fairly extensive period of ‘processing’ the images, though it can wait till tomorrow morning, I’m too tired now.

See the rest of the shoot here