I’m feeling really bad, because I should have written this about three months ago. Anyone who has had a shoot with us in the mean time will of course have met our bubbly and elegant new photo shoot co-ordinator Jodie McGrath. So I guess this is a belated welcome to the Cooper team Jodie!

Jodie joined us late last year as the silly season of Christmas fast approached and she’s quickly settled in to be the friendly face and voice of Cooper Studio! Make sure you say hello next time you’re in the studio or on the phone (contact us, here)! And, just because I can, here’s a few more pictures (she’ll kill me for this!):

Jodie’s job is two fold: She’s an accomplished photographer, so she might be undertaking your photography assignment, and Jodie is also in charge of planning all of the photo shoots in the studio.

In other news, we say goodbye to Mirco Bortolozzo, who has handled production and order fulfillment for the past three years. Mirco is now off on an adventure through Asia – I believe he’s somewhere in Vietnam as I write this! Good luck Mirco!

Mirco’s position has now been filled by a fellow Italian – Valentino. By co-incidence Valentino grew up in the same part of Italy as Mirco. More about Valentino soon!

It’s been a riotous start to our portrait photography calendar this year, and it’s always the way that when you’re busy, updating the blog gets delayed, which makes it seem like nothing is going on! So far this year we’ve done some incredible portrait shoots, with a big focus on contemporary beauty – more about that in a later blog post!

One of the things that we love doing at Cooper Studio is fitness themed portrait photography. I thought today I’d share some of the recent work we’ve done based on fitness:

We often have customers who have been working very hard on their bodies at the gym or are very heavily involved in a particular sport. It’s a fantastic time to celebrate your body, isn’t it? (Actaully, I can relate to this, as I’m also working pretty hard at the gym at the moment – maybe I should book a shoot for myself!)

When preparing for a fitness shoot, here’s a few pointers:

• If you do weight training, bring some weights to the portrait session with you
• In fact any accessories will be handy – note the climber in the photos above? He brought rope and chalk. See how well the chalk worked out!
• If you bring weights, also do some reps just before the shoot – we all know how that has an immediate effect on the hardness of your muscles.
• Don’t wait to be in absolutely peak condition! If you’re anything like me that’s always just over the horizon and always will be! How about just rewarding yourself for how far you’ve come today?
• Consider some nude or semi-nude images – they are obviously not for everyone – but if you’re proud of your body why not have some tasteful body shots while you’re in great shape?

We’re always happy to help you plan a shoot. Contact us if you have any questions, or would like to know more!

We’ve just had the absolute pleasure of photographing the very beautiful young model Cara in our Perth photo studio.

I was lucky enough to be the photographer for this shoot, assisted by our photo shoot co-ordinator Jodie.

Cara lives in the Northern Territory, where she is represented by Making Faces Model Management, but she travels down to Perth fairly often and took the chance to have a photoshoot with us in our studio on her last trip.

After Cara arrived on the shoot day she took some time to work on hair and makeup in our changeroom and then we started the shoot on a plain black background with Cara wearing a really striking red dress. After a few frames, it was already obvious it was going to be a great shoot – although Cara was feeling a bit nervous she really lit up for the camera!

When preparing for a portfolio shoot we always advise you to bring too many clothes, rather than too few! And Cara brought a number of tops, dresses and several swimsuits to the shoot, as well as some amazing Kailis pearl jewellery. For the next shot we decided to team some black bikini bottoms with a cute black top and we shot another great sequence on the black. After this we switched to natural light, using our windows and reflectors to create some more amazing swimwear photos.

We also had some fun making a little documentary of the shoot. Jodie whipped out a spare camera and took some great photojournalism photos of the shoot. We’ve made it into a cool YouTube video – check out some of my “dance moves” as I direct the shoot! The video is here:

httpsv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubIIFBxFyC4

After the shoot I’m glad to say that Cara loved the images and ordered one of our lovely image boxes, which are proving very popular for our model portfolio and beauty shoot customers. If you’d like a shoot like this contact us!