Last week I had my favourite shoot I’ve ever done with the best model! This shoot had it all - adventure, tiredness, epic views, sheep, coffee, and a drive up a super steep “hill” that made my mouth water.. 

Our original plan was to meet in Snowdonia for an epic shoot, but as Katey was over 100 miles away with a full 4 days of work with me slotting in between, it made little sense to spend half the day just driving especially as we were aiming for a sunrise shoot. A little search for something closer leads us to the Shropshire hills, specifically Long Mynd. The views were beautiful and the most crucial part, there’s a road leading to pretty much to the top! This made it a total no-brainer and would drop my own drive from 6 and a half hours to 4 and a half. As you can imagine I was happy about that!

One of the benefits of sunrise being around 5.10 am was there being very little traffic on the roads, mainly on the road up the hill. Which was basically 20 a degree incline, single track, and scared the absolute hell out of me! However, it was only 1.2 miles and we didn’t meet any cars to try and manoeuvre past so I call that a huge win. 

We got to our spot just after sunrise, jumped out of the car and gave the area the quickest scout in case my original spot had a better place to shoot from. Our original spot had epic views and had the sun literally rising directly in front of us! (Behind Katey).  With those views though came the wind.. The spot was very open to the elements and the wind was very much present! I ran back to the car and grabbed a C stand, heavy-duty boom arm and sandbag. I threw my Godox AD300 on it and attached a Godox 90cm parabolic softbox but I was convinced it was going to literally fly away! I switched it for a 60cm x 60cm pop-up softbox, which gave my about 5% more confidence I’d be leaving with all my equipment.. 

As we all know, the light changes so fast! We had Katey wrap herself in red tulle as fast as we could, I got my settings down in record time and fired about 20 shots, changed lenses and ripped another 20. At this point, I could see Katey was freezing so we stopped shooting and got her back in the car to warm up. In the time it took to get warm again (about 5 minutes), the sun had risen higher and gotten harsher. We had our epic sunrise shots so it was time to look for another spot with a different feel to it. 

Luckily this spot was about 20 metres away from the first. But it felt way more precarious for my equipment and it was a way steeper angle and a decent drop for my whole lighting rig to disappear down. I jumped on my C-stand legs and tried to get them embedded in the ground. If they could have briefly grown roots to help me out I’d have appreciated it, but they chose not to. Rude. 

At this point, the thread on my boom arm decided to give up too, so I had a boom arm on top of the C stand that didn’t tighten. The only thing stopping it from spinning like a helicopter was the sandbag hanging from it and resting in the C-stand base. Katey was never at risk from the rig, Only my wallet and pride were.

We made it work though. For this second set, I wanted to have a different feel to our first set. We still shot the red dress, but I chose to embrace the light and get close to overexposing the background, because why not! With an epic location like this, it's easy to think of doing the most “epic” and dramatic skies in every shot. I could have shot at 1/4000th and got a moody sky, but we already had that vibe covered. Instead, I chose to shoot at 200th, ignoring every fibre of myself screaming it’ll be too bright and wrong! To say autofocus wasn’t happy would be an understatement too. Everything was heavily backlit, making autofocus struggle to actually focus or missing altogether. Just a little bit of a challenge for it to overcome. But the little Fuji did alright. 

Again, the wind and coldness were relentless. We made sure to work fast, mixing it up between close-up shots, wider shots, horizontal and verticals, and all the angles I possibly could. We ended up with around 150 shots in total before running back to the car and getting back to normal temperatures. We spent a solid hour shooting, admiring the views and speaking to the sheep, before getting back down the “hill” and avoiding any traffic. Result. 

We stopped for a little comfort Starbies coffee and porridge breakfast and reviewed shots. At this point it was around 8 am, we’d been awake nearly 5 hours, and already had the most epic shoot possible. All that was left was the 4 and a half hour drive home to look forward to..