Abbey Ruins – Part One

Woo! I have been dying to share the results from my photo shoot with Chanelle & Craig Segerius-Bruce so much so that I don’t even have the full set yet so I’m going to do it in two parts.
I met Chanelle for Sushi a while ago and we got a-chatting about doing a shoot together. We knew we wanted to come up with an idea that wasn’t ‘overdone’ (even non brides-to-be worry about doing the same as everybody else…maybe I should read this article I wrote!?)
Anyway, we came up with an idea revolving around an old castle and black…lots of black. This little inkling of an idea then evolved into the shoot you see below.
Despite buying a black dress from Ebay for the shoot, when it came to the crunch it just didn’t look right so we went back to old faithful, my Maggie Sottero wedding dress. The necklace and bracelet I’m wearing were custom made for me by Jo of Your Something Borrowed. I made the black veil myself out of some black tulle, a hair slide and lots of glue(!) and also brought along some various other colours of tulle which ended up coming in very handy (yes that is me splayed across a big rock and no it wasn’t comfortable..or glamorous!)

We trekked our arses all the way down to the Abbey Ruins in Reading town centre but when we got there it was all gated off with warning signs for potential falling rocks. Oh noooo! So what’s a Rock n Roll Bride and photographer(s) to do? Hell break in and do the shoot anyway of course!

Chanelle & Craig were fantaaaastic and played around with a new technique called ‘painting with light’. I had to stand very still in one position for a number of shots while one of them moved around me flashing a flash in different areas to highlight various spots. I think you can see the results are pretty darn spectacular and give the images a real high fashion, edgy look. Chanelle is also an amazing re-toucher and has worked for Mario Testino (oh yes!) so I knew me and my far from perfect skin were in good hands.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy looking at these as much as we did shooting them - stand by for part two!

(For the full part one set, head over to my flickr)

Credit: Chanelle & Craig Segerius-Bruce