Much of the audience at Poole’s Lighthouse where a little unsure of what to expect from Jerry Dammers’ Spatial AKA Orchestra, a 20-odd piece ensemble playing a fusion of Ska & Jazz while paying homage to Sun Ra – an eclectic, unorthodox jazz musician whose career spanned the 50’s to the 90’s.

Dammers also threw in a couple of reworkings of his own back catalogue, notably ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘International Jet Set’ – now renamed ‘Intergalactic Jet Set’.

This was the perfect progression from 2Tone, growing from maturity and outside influences and you could see at once why the idea of a Specials reunion without a reworking of the songs was never going to work for Jerry Dammers.

Cool, classy, dramatic, relaxed, Natural Weddings.

Check out more of our services as wedding photographers in Dorset at Natural Weddings.com

Call us now on 01202 779604 to see what we can do for you as your Dorset wedding photographers.

The phone box’s future had been put in doubt recently after Studland Parish Council decided not to adopt it for £1 when offered the chance by British Telecom.

Fears about the cost of upkeep had dissuaded the council, but now BT have said that there are no plans to remove the phone box even though the council declined their offer.

A BT spokesman told The Daily Echo that they would not remove a kiosk where there is a clear social need, last year 41 call were made from the phone box.

Having used the phone box for numerous photoshoots we’re glad it’s staying, even if it is clear that it’s used more for photographs than it is for phone calls!

Over the last twelve years we’ve been the photographer at hundreds of weddings in Dorset and thought we’d give you a quick look at some of our favourite venues.

Check out more of our services as wedding photographers in Dorset at Natural Weddings.com

Call us now on 01202 779604 to see what we can do for you as your Dorset wedding photographers.

Rubicon People were moving into new premises in Poole High Street and they wanted local scenes, featuring CEO Lloyd Banks’ daughter in their trademark purple somewhere in the images.

We shot a number of images around the Poole area, all featuring our model and produced the finished images as canvases, some up to 5′ across!

“Steve was invited to tender for our project and was chosen (from a field of 5) for his creativity, understanding of our needs and competitive pricing. I won’t hesitate to use him again as his work was extremely good.”

Lloyd Banks, CEO at Rubicon People

We recently spent a couple of days taking new photographs for the Queens Hotel in Bournemouth and produced some great results for their new website.

“We booked Steve for a photo shoot of our hotel. Steve worked with us for two days to get a series of images of the function rooms, bedrooms and communal areas. We found Steve very easy and pleasant to work with. Most importantly we have been really pleased the images he has taken. He stuck to the brief and showed the hotel in exactly the light which it needed. Steve was also flexible and punctual. We will certainly use him again.”

Layla Gordon, Sales and Marketing, The Queens Hotel

To see more of our photographs and to check out a great hotel in the heart of Bournemouth visit the Queens Hotel’s new website or The Queens Hotel’s photo gallery.

But can you take it too far?

L’Oreal are obviously full of very intelligent marketing people but after seeing this Shampoo for “Mid to Long, Fine Hair, that turns Greasy” I wondered if that might be TOO specific.

Maybe I should start offering PR photoshoots for “Businessmen in their late 50’s who are carrying a few extra pounds, losing their hair and dreaming of their youth” or “Business owners, late 30’s, in sharp suits, planning on building a business empire before they’re 50″.

This might be too specific?

Perhaps a wedding package for “Brides, size 12-14, mid-length, auburn hair, with 2 or more bridesmaids”?

All I know is that I won’t be using this shampoo as it’s not for “Short to Very Short, receding hair”.

I’d love to see comments from all of you marketing people.

A total of 232,990 couples got married in 2008, the lowest number since 1895, say the Office for National Statistics.

This is a drop of 1% in a year from 235,370 in 2007 and the marriage rate (the number of marriages per head of population) fell to its lowest level since records began in 1862.

But despite this Seeker Photography are seeing an increase in interest in our new iWed wedding photography service. Continuing on from our revolutionary approach to taking wedding photographs more than a decade ago (we were among the first photographers to introduce wedding photojournalism to the UK) our new service brings wedding photography into the digital age.

Seeing the way that so many industries (including music and movies) have moved away from physical products to downloads we decided that it was time to make as big a change in how you receive your shots as we made 10 years ago with how we took them.

Now friends and family can go online and download your wedding photos instantly, and not just proofs with a copyright notice across them – we’re talking about the full hi-res files suitable for printing themselves!

Steve Cook of Seeker Photography said “We have always looked for ways to stand out in the wedding market, not by gimmicks and fads but by constantly evolving the art of wedding photography and an attention to detail required by our couples. iWed is the logical next step in the progress of the industry and we feel it gives our clients a great service at realistic prices with no restrictions on how they use their images in the future.”

It is always important for businesses to use fresh photography on their promotional material and websites and local images can help to connect with local markets. Seeker Photos.com has a whole catalogue for people to choose from, with a wide variety of Dorset landscapes and other images representing the south coast, local companies can advertise the fantastic area that we work in.

Because we wanted Seeker Photos.com to offer the very best local images we opened it up to all contributors and the website now features over 2000 images with more than 80 contributing photographers.

We live in a great part of the country, your customers live and work here because they love it, connect with them by accentuating what you love about the area.

You can find more information and view the exciting new Seeker Photos.com – the Image Library with downloads from only £5 by logging on to www.seekerphotos.com

Releases with a photo have a much better chance of being published and the image helps increase the prominence of your story from a brief mention in the business section to a possible feature article with more column inches.

Try these tips for success:

• You should always have current headshots of everyone likely to be mentioned in your press releases.
• Have a selection of natural industry specific working shots of your main people, CEO, directors, etc, with and without your company branding.
• If your press release tells a story ensure that your image reinforces this with the same message with enough impact to grab the attention of both the Editor and the readers.
• Whilst a headshot is useful and great for adding to a simple release, a feature picture can make the story. We’ve had numerous occassions where our image has promoted a run of the mill story to prominence including two paragraph pieces taking up half a page!
• Have a library of stock images taken of your business, shots of your premises, staff, processes and products – these can be handy for releases when you don’t have the time or resources for a specific shoot or to make available to publications to supplement existing stories.
• Always get landscape and portrait shots, and make sure that your images and method of delivery are accepted by the publication – there’s no point going to all of this effort only to get it wrong at this point!

Professional images are one of the most effective and economical ways of reinforcing your brand and communicating with current and potential clients – just check out these examples of how our images have been used in the media to promote our clients.