In November last year I've announced the start of my new personal project about espionage along with the very first photograph of the series: Vik Moreno as James Bond.

Following this, I've been to doing a photoshoot at a famous spy location in London: No. 2 Audley Square. This place on the South of Audley street has a lamp post that was used by the Russian spy in back in the mid 50's. The agent would mark an 'X' with a chalk on the lamp post to let his controller know he needed to meet. The photoshoot was held in the evening and the low light condition coupled to a continuous rain made the work quite a challenge. But I managed to get good shots of Alan Titchard from Wizard Walks in London. I won't be revealing too much about this photoshoot until the end of the project.

This month Eye Spy Intelligence Magazine issue No. 66 will be featuring Alan's portrait on the cover (bottom right) and a 4 page article about my espionage project featuring samples of my work. Eye Spy Intelligence Magazine is sold in 36 countries to a readership of about 100'000, so this is really good news for me and I'm really excited to share this with you all.

Eye Spy Magazine #66 is now available in any good newsagents.

I went to a London Strobist meetup recently, it was really cool as usual with lots of great photographers and models.

The weather was quite freezing so shooting outside was a bit tough but OK though.

Light wise I tried different things:

- for Murphy Thomas (top left), I've tested a new setup, one flash bounced into an umbrella and another flash clamped on the same stand pointing in the other direction to create a hard and soft single light source.

- for Rachel-Claire, the shoot was done in a student room so in order to re-create a night club ambiance I used three speedlights: the key light was gridded and clamped on a rail and pointing to R-C's face, a blue gelled flash on the desk in front of the model pointing towards the shelf, and a double full CTO gelled flash hand held by a fellow photographer behind R-C and pointing to the background.

- The light for _La is rather simple, an overcast day...

Thanks to Permadaylight for creating this great video clip of the London Strobist meetup group last Halloween 2009.

The meetup was organized in Club Life, a night club in Vauxhall. Lot of photographers and models turn up with the help of MUA.

If you are interested in photography and particularly into off-camera flash then I strongly suggest that you visit the group's website (see links below).

There was another meetup today in Stratford, we managed to get an ex warehouse and gathered 20 photographers, 8 models and 4 MUA. Pictures will appear on the group Flickr stream soon.

Sorry for the long radio silence. After our holidays in Montpellier (France) that has started with a 4 days of nightmare trying to get into a plane: 3 flight cancellations, 12 tickets! I got sick with a very long and painful cough. But it seems to go away slowly now.

Back in September last year, I went to Paris for some training and to meet the Strobist@Paris meetup group. After the meetup, when all other photographers have gone home for dinner, I stayed around and waited for the sunset to see if there would be any photographic opportunity. I wasn't disappointed.

As I was wandering around I met a group of teenagers and proposed to take their pictures. They were over-excited and accepted the offer. They are a group of friends that live in the same town, dancing and doing music together. They are now a little association that regularly meetup in a room in their school and around Paris, especially here at "La Defence"

2009 is ending soon. It was for me a wonderful year and I hope it was for you all as well. I've met new wonderful people some of which are now friends, I've learned and shared new techniques but I need now to spend more time with my wife and visit old friends.

For all who do celebrate Christmas, my wife and I wish you all to spend a wonderful Christmas time with your family and friends. For those who don't celebrate, we wish you to enjoy this end of the year and have a great party for this new coming year.

This is my last post of the year, and I hope 2010 will give me more time to update my blog more regularly than I did in the past 12 months. I see you all in 2010 for an even more wonderful photographic year.

I've started a new project around espionage and have started shooting for a series on how most people would imagine a spy. Of course the most popular spy would be James Bond 007, a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming. James Bond was an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service, a handsome gentleman surrounded by his bond girls! That's how probably lot of people would imagine a spy, or maybe Jason Bourne?

But this image of a spy is far from the truth, but this is another story...

Halloween 2009. The London Strobist group has organized a meetup in a night club: Club Life in Vauxhall. They gathered around 15 photographers, 9 models and 3 makeup artists. The group rented out the club for half a day and had fun testing new lighting setups and sharing knowledge. That was where I met Vik Moreno and knew he would be my perfect subject for my new project on espionage!

I started to use off-camera flash in my photography works back in 2007. At the time I used to photograph everything with available natural light, playing around with reflectors and finding angles that would match the ambient light. But then I started to learn using a flashgun in a proper way and became addicted to the fact that having a flashgun in your bag makes it your own available light that you can carry with you where ever you go and use it whenever you need it. But as exciting as it is when you start to get nice balanced shots, you tend to go all the way with flash only and forget the natural light. Don't forget that lighting with flash is not The way but just A way to light your image. So recently I forced myself to include natural light shots in my sessions.

I've recently been contacted by several photographers, including Tony Kieu, my cousin in Australia, wanting to start taking photograph of models but just don't know where to start with. As most of us at the beginning, they started to take portraits asking their wife or a family members to pose for them, then, after a little (or big) while both parties can sometimes start to loose interest and the photographer just wants to get into something more challenging: photographing a model.

Taking pictures of a friend, of your wife or of a family member is something easy. It's a person you're going on well with so it's easier to be open and do some crazy things. Meeting and photographing a stranger is something else. For a lot of photographers it can be a really big challenge which can get worse with the time if they don't make the jump and try it.

Hopefully, with the help of the Internet, you can prepare and liaise with models online which makes it easier to arrange a meetup for a photo session.

A while ago I wrote a post on how to take advantage of a cloudy day for nice portraits. Today I will talk about how to take advantage of a bright sunny day and use the sun as a second light source and get great shots even at noon.

I love location photography and prefer it to studio photography as I find it more challenging and interesting to play with all the different background available to you. The challenge is to handle the weather or difficult locations such as crowded areas. Trafalgar Square is one of them, always very busy and even worse it is a private place which means if you are shooting with a big DSLR, playing with flashguns then you will sooner or later, more sooner than later actually, meet the security guards.

Alba texted me one night at 10.30 to see if I was available for a shoot the next day. Well, I was but only at lunch time. So we sorted out a location to shoot that is easy for me to access at that time and Trafalgar Square was it.

David Hobby from Strobist.com has at last launched the 2nd season of the Boot Camp series.

For people who don't know what Strobist is, Strobist is a blog created by David Hobby in 2006. David Hobby was a photo-journalist at The Sun in Baltimore, USA. David was sharing his off-camera flash lighting techniques using small and portable flashguns instead of the heavy studio heads that photographers used to carry with them with the help of assistants. His teaching and photographic skills are such, he now have a worldwide community of fans. If you are interested to learn how to properly light your photographs, I strongly suggest you to go and read his Lighting 101 and Lighting 102.

"The Boot Camp is a series of assignments designed to help the newbs to get off their collective butt and actually go shoot something. If you are more experienced, you are more than welcome to participate. But understand that, at least at first, we'll be dialing the degree of difficulty back a little."