Hi folks, I’m just back from Achill where I was photographing Toni and Matt’s wedding. It was all based around the wonderful Mulranny Park Hotel. Gorgeous location and they were lucky enough to have great weather!

More later but for now have a peek….

It’s that time of year again when Corin Bishop Photography is getting involved with the national Happy Faces Day charity event.

Happy Faces 2012 Launch Banner, Corin Bishop Photography

When

Friday 30th March 2pm-5pm

Saturday 31st March 11am-5.30pm

Sunday 1st April 11am-5.30pm

Where

Athlone Town Shopping Centre

As part of IPPA Happy Faces in association with Canon, Corin Bishop Photography is organising a Happy Faces weekend which promises to be a fun event in the Athlone Town Centre, with 100% of proceeds supporting Jack & Jill families. This will be the fourth year that Corin has been involved in the national Happy Faces charity fundraiser and he is hoping to make it bigger and better than before, raising essential funds for the Jack & Jill Foundation. With the support of the people of Athlone and the Midlands, Corin has to date taken over 400 portraits and raised over €12,000 for charity. Nationally the IPPA Happy Faces event has raised almost €280,000 since 2006 through the hard work and enthusiasm of professional photographers nationwide. This year a record number of 110 professional photographers nationwide have already signed up to IPPA Happy Faces which takes place in April 2012.

Simon Casey, Cathy Keighery (Jack & Jill Liason Nurse), Athlone Town Mayor Alan Shaw, Laura Kane (Athlone Town Centre) and Corin Bishop – Launch Picture!

Well known musician Simon Casey and Athlone Mayor Alan Shaw have both given their support to the Happy Faces Event this year.  Athlone Town Centre have been a tremendous support over the last three years, helping to make the event a great success.

Pictured recently at the launch of the IPPA Happy Faces campaign in support of the Jack & Jill Children's Foundation (L-R); Simon Casey, Cathy Keighery (Jack & Jill Liason Nurse), Athlone Town Mayor Alan Shaw, Laura Kane (Athlone Town Centre) and Corin Bishop

Display in the Town Centre of the previous 3 years Happy Faces

To celebrate the fantastic contribution the local people have made over the past years, Corin Bishop Photography will be displaying a collage of 400+ portraits taken over the last three years. The display will be up in the Athlone Town Centre shortly after St. Patricks Day weekend.

How can you get involved?

For a €25 donation to The Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation you receive the gift of an individual portrait mini-session and a desk-size portrait. 100% of every donation will be paid directly to The Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation. All costs for this charity event are being donated by participating photographers. No appointment is necessary although please bear in mind that it could get quite busy around midday. Anyone can have their portrait taken, young and old!

FAQ:

• Q. Who can have their portrait taken? – A. Anyone! Young and not quite as young, although please bear in mind that newborns or babies who can’t hold their own heads up might be a little tricky in the time allocated.
• Q. Can I get more than one person in a portrait, e.g. two children together? A. Sorry, but not for this event. Single portraits only. If  you have three children then it would be three portraits at €25 donation each. We understand that you might like to do some of the kids/family together so Corin Bishop Photography will be giving each participant of Happy Faces a voucher for a free portraits session at the studio where you can photograph all the family!
• Q. Do I get to choose the picture or will you choose it for me? A. You will be booked in to view the portraits so you can choose the one you want. We’ll also be doing offers on framed portraits for the other images too.

Further information can be found at

www.happyfacesday.ie

www.jackandjill.ie/

Happy Faces 2012 - Corin Bishop Photography

Well, have a meal with at Grogans of Glasson between 16th and 30th of  March and you could be in with a chance.

Corin Bishop Photography and Grogans of Glasson have teamed up to celebrate Mothers Day 2012 by offering every family who have a meal at Grogans between the 16th-30th March a chance to enter a draw to win a €500 Family Portrait Voucher for Corin Bishop Photography. If you don’t win the main prize then you are still in with a chance of winning one of  TEN €100 vouchers as well!

Corin is one of the countries leading portrait and wedding photographers and this is a fantastic opportunity to get a gorgeous framed family portrait up on the wall.

When you sit down for your meal you’ll be given a card to enter the draw. Just fill it in and return it to the staff when they take your order. Simple as that!

Winners will be announced on the 14th April.

Mothers Day Competition with Corin Bishop Photography and Grogans of Glasson

I’m just back from Dublin where I was awarded the Best Contemporary Wedding Portfolio 2012 at the Irish Professional Photographers Association (IPPA) awards at the Burlington. Obviously I’m totally chuffed to win, there was a lot of stiff competition.

I’ve talked about my New York wedding before. You can read all about it here. So I won’t go over again too much.

It was a bit of a risk to enter images all from the SAME wedding but I thought they worked really well together.

So all the images together, one wedding, one panel.

Winner of the Best Contemporary Wedding Portfolio 2012 - Photographer, Corin Bishop.

If you’re a wedding client of ours you can have an engagement session in our studio in Athlone. Not only do you get the session but you get a framed portrait too…

This isn’t a limited ‘one-time’ offer. It’s there for every wedding client to avail of.

So not only do you get great wedding photography you also get a fantastic portrait!

Engagement Portrait

Don’t forget, book me for your wedding before the end of February and you also get a large framed image from your wedding worth €450!

So get in touch!!

January is now out of the way (phew!) and we’re heading rapidly towards Spring and First Holy Communion season!

At Corin Bishop Photography we have always done a great portrait package offer for first Holy Communion and we’ll be doing the same this year. However if you read to the end of this blog post you’ll find details of a little gift that can save you a little bit more!

• Our First Holy Communion Package is a mini-portrait session taking portraits of the family, godparents, siblings and the Communion child.
• You get one 10″x8″ Print and two 8″x6″ Prints. 
• There are further offers on framed portraits and montages.

A little Gift for you courtesy of Burgess of Athlone

In conjunction with Burgess of Athlone you can get a gift voucher worth €50 to be used against our Communion Package. All you need to do is buy your child’s outfit in Burgess to receive the voucher. Burgess Facebook page is here and their website is here

Terms and conditions apply, visit Burgess for further details. Voucher is only available in Burgess and not from Corin Bishop Photography.

I’ve just been going over previous weddings that I didn’t blog about and realised I didn’t blog this one.. and it was one of my favourites from the year.

Th Walled Garden Japanese Bridge

For the photography geeks among reading I’ll tell you that one of the reasons I remember this wedding is because it was the first wedding where I used a lot of ‘live-view’ on the camera. It allowed me to get more unusual angles while being absolutely sure of the focus, exposure and composition. I found it a very refreshing way to work.

The church was Ballaghadereen, County Roscommon. Actually it was a Cathedral and quite a nice one too.. The reception was in the excellent Lough Rynn Hotel. I’m a huge fan of Lough Rynn. It has everything going for it. As well as gorgeous grounds and the walled garden the hotel itself is wonderful. The old part of the buildings date back to some time a long time ago (!!) and they’ve extended it to add more rooms and function room. The way the new parts have been integrated from the old to the new has been done very well. There are loads of places for photographs in good weather and bad. The staff are fantastic and helpful. Well, you get the idea! Check them out on www.loughrynn.ie

On to the pictures…. Laura and Conor were brill to work with. Very relaxed and good fun. Conor had joked before the wedding that while the pictures were being done he would be in the bar. So just in case that happened Laura made up a life size cardboard cut-out of Conor!

Anyway, enjoy the rest of the pictures.

Lots of couples have got engaged over Christmas or are now getting down the nitty-gritty of planning their wedding.  We’ve got a special giveaway to celebrate the New Year.

For all weddings that book their photography with us in the month of January and February 2012 we are throwing in a large  framed image from your wedding worth €450!

Our framed images look stunning and will look fab hanging on the wall in your house!

You must book before the end of February so get in touch to check availability and to request more information.

Don’t forget that all wedding clients get a free engagement shoot and framed portrait too! Click here for more.

Corin

I got to meet Christine and Neil through another photographer, Darren Purcell. He was friends with them but was unable to do their wedding. So he kindly passed them on to me. We met up and they were happy to book me as their photographer!

The wedding was in Kilkenny, the Lyrath Hotel and they wanted to visit Kilkenny Castle too. So great couple, great location and all that was needed was for the weather to be good.. It was!!!

Everyone had a great day. They were getting ready in the Lyrath so I was able to take pictures of the bride and groom getting ready (a rare thing for a lone photographer!).

I have to say that not only are they a really lovely couple but they are mad. In a nice way of course. All of the guests were great fun. It was a long day (14 hours round trip!) but I enjoyed it.

Hope you like the pics.

Ok, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a bit of a soppy git… sometimes…

When I’ve done the wedding previews and shown the client, I get to go home and show my wife the pictures. It’s the only time I actually sit down and go through the wedding without my ‘photographer’ head on. I’ve done all the editing, I can finally see the images together as a set without analysing exposure, contrast, colour, BW, vignetting, cropping, processing, sharpening, blurring, dodging/burning etc. This is where the soppy mush head bit comes in. I have been known to get a bit emotional when looking back through the pictures… A bit sad, I know. Now, let’s get something clear, I’m not talking a blubbering mess on the floor. Just a bit of that tingly nose, maybe a slight bit more water in the eyes than I did a few minutes ago (only slight mind you, not visible to anyone else). Nothing major, honest. I mentioned this to the wife who obviously totally took the p**s out of me and told me to “man up”. But then she said that the day I don’t get emotional looking at the wedding pics is the day you don’t care. That’s the day to give it up. So, it’s not that I’m a bit of pansy. I just care about the weddings I photograph and the people at them.

That said… let’s talk about this wedding. I was quite apprehensive about this wedding and mainly because of the venue. The Radisson Blue in Athlone is a lovely hotel.. on a fine day. There is a great deck on the side of the River Shannon but it’s feck all use when it’s raining. Inside the hotel there are very few places for photo’s. The weather forecast was not looking good. We checked a few other locations for possible stop-off on the way but all of them were busy/had weddings of their own. The main plan was to use inside the church for the family photo’s, not ideal but after seeing the church I wasn’t too worried as there was a good bit of light in there. Anyway, the day itself was fab! The forecasted rain/storm didn’t turn up! Just blazing sunshine! Blue sky!

We were able to get the family shots done in the garden of the church. We stopped off for a few photo’s in Burgess Park. We were able to use the deck out the back too! Phew, phew, phew…. So I was lucky, no stress… except the start of the day when we took the wedding dress out of the bag and it was badly creased! I said to steam it but no-one was brave enough to do it so I spent 20 minutes with a steam iron taking out creases! No-one thought to take a photo, that would have been cool!

Eoghan is in the Army so there was military element to the wedding. The groom was in uniform. There was a guard of honour who also participated in the mass (swords n’all). The light in the church was really good and made for some lovely natural light shots.

My Favourite shot of the day? Loads actually.. all the ones in the slideshow below anyway but I think you’ll enjoy the one below. The pageboy and his sister thought it would be good to do a bit of dancing during mass… I love mum’s disapproving glance in the background!

Enjoy the few pics…