Two Years Together

This is more of a personal post, just over two years ago, at the beginning of my third year of university, something amazing happened, I met a wonderful human being, little did I know, that encounter was the beginning of something beautiful.

We became good friends within days and great friends over the following weeks, then one day something changed, sparks flew, fireworks banged and I know it sounds corny but there really was magic in the air.

The Night of Our First Date

Two Years later...



Shanice and I celebrated our Two Year Anniversary on Friday, she came down to see me and we spent the last few days together, over the weekend we enjoyed each others company, took the dogs for long walks, and exchanged I Love You's.

The Night of Our Two Year Anniversary

This is just a little insight into me aside from being a photographer, I hope you have found this interesting, please leave me some feedback either on my blog or on Facebook or Twitter @JamilTeja

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Til' Next Time,

See Ya Later!!

Forgotten Moments

Don't you just love it when you're going through your old pictures from photoshoots, reviewing what you've done in the past and seeing what you can bring into the future with you?

Well last week I was looking through a photoshoot I did while working with a talented Make Up Artist - Tanveer Khatri, in Leicester during the beginning of my third and final year at De Montfort University.

You can see the blog posts for these photoshoots here: Armina and Siobhan.

But I was looking through the pictures and I saw these pictures that I felt I hadn't seen before, and it stood out to me, 

I was shocked that I hadn't picked up on these pictures sooner,

I'm so glad that I went back through this folder and found those pictures, It's gone straight into my portfolio!

The lesson I've learned from this is to firstly organise my pictures better and then secondly, review my pictures more often, you never know what you could have missed.

If you have any questions for me, you can contact me on facebook at www.facebook.com/JamilTeja

or you can hit me up on twitter @JamilTeja

Til next time, see you later!

LPSA 2012

I've been searching through all my hard drives (I have 12 in total and range from 320GB to 2TB in memory,) looking for this set of pictures, I've wanted to share with you all since I've started this blog.

These are the pictures from my very first Paid Event, I'd been photographing events for free to gain experience since 2009, but as this was the first time I was getting paid it was like a test, to see how well I could perform with people I didn't know, in a location I was unfamiliar with.

I remember I was a little bit nervous as I arrived, but at the reception I was kindly greeted by Gurgeet, one of the pharmacy students at De Montfort University on the Pharmacy Ball Committee, she was very helpful and accommodating, she directed me to the main hall to set up.      

As soon as I set up my camera, lens and flash gun I started approaching people, I was feeling better since Gurgeet had greeted me and now I was ready. 

The group of people in the picture are the first group of people I approached for pictures, I snapped off a couple of frames and reviewed to check my focus and lighting (especially for shadows) and was horrified to see they pitch black, I checked my settings and they were all correct, I then looked up and my jaw dropped. The ceiling I was bouncing my flash off was atleast 20 ft high! no wonder the pictures  were coming out so dark, I asked them for a few more images and changed the direction of my flash and clicked!

This is the image I produced, I'm really happy with it, that was my first test. 

I'm glad that was the first problem I met that night as it made me aware of my ceilings.

I noticed as people started arriving they were stopping on the staircase just before the Ballroom, so I waited there and captured some more pictures,. This time my ceiling was very low making it very easy to light the ladies. 

In the main Ballroom, the ceiling was about 10 ft tall, I tried fiddling around with my flash gun to bounce as much light into my subjects, I'm really pleased that it worked and that the images came out bright and colourful.

Here are some more of the memories I captured on that night.

Overall, I had a great night, it was so much fun, 

I met so many new people and it was an amazing experience.  

The Pharmacy Committee loved the pictures so much they invited me back to photograph their 2013 Ball!

You can see the pictures from the 2013 Ball here.

Portrait Session with Armina

This is another portrait session I worked on in collaboration with Tanveer (the make up artist) back in October 2012. I asked my friend Armina, who was also studying photography and video to be a model for us. The concept behind the session was to create a Autumny/Wintery scene for the session and to accentuate this by using brown colours which are the colour of leaves towards the end of Autumn.

We decided to conduct the session in the gardens near the university, thinking that it would be covered in leaves and be very colourful, however the day of the shoot it was very dark and gray, I used 2 flash guns to pour even light onto the model. In hindsight I would have added a third light to illuminate the surroundings, I would have also brought my reflector along to help light up the surroundings.

Behind the Scenes

I am very happy how these pictures have turned out, If I could change anything I would have liked to have more time with the models and experimented with a variety of different locations to achieve a better variety of pictures.

Hair and Make Up by Tanveer Khatri

Want to see how I get blurry backgrounds? take a look at this

Portrait Session with Tammy

Portrait of Tammy

Tammy has been a friend of my sisters' for many years now, a few years ago she started to move into part time modelling so I decided to ask her if she wanted a portrait session, she said yes! 

We were both home from university over the Summer, if I remember correctly it was the Summer of 2012 and I had been inspired to test out some new poses and some off camera flash set ups.

We went out on a beautiful Summers day, the weather was perfect, we took a stroll through Bournemouth Gardens and found a few interesting spots. some brides and benches and some long reeds.

I used a 1 light set up for these images as it was a really sunny day and I just needed to throw a bit of light into her face.

I am really pleased with the images we captured on the day, Tammy was such a pleasure to work with, she was very friendly and took direction well which made my job so much easier!

if you would like to see more of my work check out My Facebook Page

My First Ever Make Up Session with Tanveer and Jakia

I think I've told you before, I met Tanveer through my friend and we collaborated on a portrait session and Tanveer asked Jakia to model for us.

Tanveer wanted to try a few different make up looks, we decided from the beginning of the session that we were just going to use a clean white background as she was interested in using the pictures in promotional material for future Make Up Artist jobs. 

Thomas' 21st Birthday!!

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Rahim's Wedding (Part 2)

When we arrived at the Wedding Reception I quickly ran inside and got ready for the couples grand entrance as Man and Wife, It so was lovely to see how many people attended the happy union of the happy couple.

I can honestly say it was an honour and a privilege to be asked to photograph the happy couples wedding, photographing this wedding has really helped me focus more on wedding photography, 

it's now been almost two years and I have been in contact with Rahim and his sisters in law are getting married on Saturday and they have asked me to photograph their wedding too!

Hopefully by this time next week I will have a new set of images to show you!