Each year I cover a number of Weddings, providing full photographic services and taking anything up to 1000 photos during the wedding day.  If you are getting married and haven't yet booked a photographer please check out my wedding pages.  You'll find my rates very reasonable for the services offered. 

You'll find some examples of my portrait work in the Portrait section. I don't run a home studio, and prefer to carry out all portrait assignments on location or at your home, places you will be more comfortable, enabling me to capture more genuine expressions of enjoyment. Please note that this section is under development and will be updated with more recent portrait sessions soon.

As a long time fan of rock music and a veteran of thousands of concerts, I like good music and appreciate the importance of good visuals.  I offer photography based around both live action and commercial publicity shots, suitable for websites, posters, flyers, press articles… or pictures to hang on your wall. Check out my Rock Music section for galleries and slideshows of whole concerts from a selection of bands I've worked with.

On my Gallery pages you will find a collection of some of my favourite pictures in areas other than social photography.   Most of the pictures shown here were taken for my own enjoyment   -   I just love snapping away with a camera.   They are mostly landscapes and travel oriented shots. 

For more details of any of these services, please go to the appropriate page. Alternatively you can email me here.

Marty Moffatt Profile

A little bit about me......

Weddings

I love to shoot weddings.  My photography is all about capturing expressions and inspirational moments in time, and weddings represent some of the best occasions for doing that.  However, they are also hard work – sometimes up to 12 hours shooting time on the day and then several days of editing afterwards.  It is also quite pressurized.  Under ever changing lighting – indoors, outdoors, with flash, without flash etc – you have to get the shot right at the first time of asking.  There are no second chances, and that’s why many professional photographers I know will not even attempt to photograph a wedding.

For these reasons I deliberately set myself a limit of about 8 – 10 weddings in any given year.  Any more and it would feel to me like a production line and my enjoyment of photographing weddings would wane.

I’ve been photographing weddings for about eight years.  In that time I believe I’ve learned an awful lot about what works and what doesn’t.  I certainly don’t have all the answers yet but I do have lots and lots of very satisfied clients.  Virtually all my wedding bookings come to me from word of mouth recommendations and I really appreciate that.  It means that most of my promotion has already been done for me, and by somebody with personal experience of my photography.  It also presents me with a challenge to at least equal and hopefully exceed everything I’ve done before.  With weddings, as with every other form of photography, as soon as you rest on your laurels and treat the task as routine, that spark you are looking to capture has already gone.  I don’t ever want to feel that way.

Rock Music

As a long time fan of rock music and a veteran of thousands of concerts, I like good music and appreciate the importance of good visuals.  I like to build relationships with the bands I photograph, to provide images both they and I will be proud to display.

My first experience of concert photography was in 2004 when I managed to blag a photo pass for a show by Soul SirkUS and posted the photos on an internet forum.  Lead singer in the band, Jeff Scott Soto, emailed me personally to say how much he enjoyed the photos and that sparked off a desire to do more and an ambition to become one of the best concert photographers around.  I have a long way to go but I still have that ambition and every day I feel I’m a little bit closer.

Since then, a lot of my photo opportunities with bands have resulted from that initial occasion. Artists do talk to each other and if you’re good enough and they like you they’ll put in a good word with their colleagues and acquaintances, resulting in more opportunities. Sometimes that opens doors directly, but at worst it at least stops the door being slammed in your face by promoters who don’t know you.

I photograph concerts all over the UK, and sometimes abroad.  Being based in the South West of England (Swindon) that usually entails a lot of travel to most gigs.  But hey, that’s rock’n’roll, and the buzz I get at the end of the journey is worth it.

I do get commissioned to photograph specific shows by various magazines now, and I also photograph shows in the Midlands on behalf of Midlands Rocks *, an online concert review site, but most of the time I’m working directly with bands, promoters and venues as a freelancer photographer.

I like all kinds of rock music, from Rammstein to Fleetwood Mac, but I suppose my favourite bands fall into the classic rock and melodic rock categories.  I’ve worked extensively with artists like Journey, Thunder, Jeff Scott Soto, the Illegal Eagles, Tyketto etc, producing concert images used in programmes, posters, album and DVD covers, and magazine articles, as well as all over the internet.  Where possible I try to shoot a whole show and then put slideshows of the resulting images online for viewers to re-experience the show.  To date, I have well over a hundred concert slideshows online.

I’ve also been commissioned to carry out many formal photoshoots with bands and individual artists.  I’m currently working with new band The Union (including ex-Thunder’s Luke Morley), providing all of their images for all media outlets.

However, like many photographers in the classic and melodic rock genres, I’m not in this for the money. Most gigs actually end up costing me money, for merchandise, travel etc (although I rarely have to pay for tickets any more) but I continue because … a) I love the music of the bands I photograph and … b) I love to take photos. If I wasn’t at the concert taking pictures I’d still be at the concert but I’d be wondering what to do with my hands and getting frustrated about the lost photo opportunities. 

* Midlands Rocks is an organization I’m pleased to be associated with.  Not only does it have many talented photographers and reviewers working for it, but it promotes a lot of the music I like to listen to and demonstrates just how much exciting live entertainment is out there. 

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Email:  marty@martymoffatt.com