MKJ Photography

Reflecting the weather we are having here at the moment in Scotland, here's one from my archives. It was for the Scotsman Newspaper who were running an article about farmers in the Scottish Borders. It was a great day out and the farmer was a pleasure to work with.

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My other passion asides from photography is riding motorcycles, I have done both now for over 34 years and still enjoy them as much as I did when I started. What better thing to do than combine both together. I have a good selection of bikes already on my website but have been trying to get this shot for a while now. 'Adventure' bikes are becoming big in this country now and I've wanted to get a photo of a rider on the ultimate representation of this type of machine, the BMW 1200GS Adventure. I got in contact with Alan Dalziel of BMW Motorrad in Dalkeith and after a wait for decent weather met up at Gosford Bay on the East Lothian Coast. This was a simple two flash shoot. Key light on the right had a half cut CTO filter on it and shot through a 22x22 Lastolite Ezybox. Rim light on the left had a snoot on to direct the flash mainly on the rider and bike keeping the spill of light very tight and providing nice seperation from the background whilst adding some nice highlights to the rear wheel and the leg of the rider. The one unexpected thing I noted was the light bounced off the grass and lit up the bottom of the bike a… Read More

I was really happy when this shoot came through. It was to photograph a part time firefighter in a place called Carradale which is on the Scottish west coast. It was going to be a long drive to get there but when you're driving through the lovely scottish countryside in Autumn that kinda makes up for it. Steve, my subject, was on time but light was dropping away quickly so I sorted out two flashes in the roof of the building then lit him with a flash shooting through a softbox camera right along with another flash on the fire engine.

We managed to finish this just before the rain really came in strong. Inside the garage  took many more photographs of Steve in different poses but this is one of my  favourites (below). Just a simple flash and softbox shooting through the window of the vehicle. Wrapped the job up and headed off into the very dark and stormy night along 20 miles of single track roads to get to the main A83. All in all a very satisfying job, I hope to get more of these in the future as they are such a joy to do.

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Meet Lee, Bee and Mel of the Pyrokatz fire and dance troupe. I had seen their website and thought they would be fun to photograph. I arranged to meet up with Mel and explained that I would like to do a series of photographs of them in their various guises. For this shoot they had just moved from using cat masks to actually using make up for the same effect, I think it works very well. Lighting for this consisted of one top light, softbox just behind me and a flash below shooting up. They have plenty of other outfits and I'm especially looking forward to photographing them with their fire, I'll post those photographs as soon as I've taken them. Read More

Yes, the sun does shine in Scotland and a lot of times it can cause problems. This was a chap I was photographing in Glasgow the other week, he's a new business development manager and his company were wanting a series of portraits of him for release to various trade papers etc. We had taken some indoor shots and then went outside to take photos wearing some of the protective gear that has to be worn on building sites, a nice reflective jacket and white helmet, nice! The sun was blazing away on my right so I put an off camera flash to my left with a Stofen diffuser on for this particular shot, kicking in a good bit of light to get rid of the heavy shadows. I had previously been using an Ezybox diffuser but wanted a harder light. I'd taken some shots at f5.6 which pulled in the background a bit so you could see the detail of the building in the background. Then I decided to open up the lens wide to really throw the background out, f2.5 @5000th of a second, not often I do that but I really like the effect. Post production all I did was add a vignette to darken the corners down a bit. It's always tricky photographing in… Read More