Treasures Of The Sea - Part 2
Behind the scenes images from the Seahorse Shoot
Treasures Of The Sea
Behind the scenes images from the Seahorse Shoot - Part 1
Throughout our career we’ve been privileged to be part of many amazing projects. Without a doubt Treasures Of The Sea was one such project, and remains one of our all time favourite shoots. We adored the little seahorses and spent hours watching them whilst they were in our studio. They are fascinating creatures, each had its own personality and there was a hierarchy in the chain of command. Certain members of the group were always more curious and the first to come forward whenever there was any activity. We gave all of them names, Redi Lee and Scampie being two of our favourites.
The finished project is beautifully presented on our website in - Projects. However, we thought you’d like to see some of the behind the scenes images from the shoot, which include the 20 x 24” Polaroid Camera images and other photographic formats used. There are also a few shots of myself (Christine) taken at a later date, working on the Polaroid Emulsion Lift images.
We've promised ourselves that at some point we’ll have to do something with all the images from this shoot, which are not part of Treasures Of The Sea. Possibly an exhibition, who knows!
Images From The Archives
Natures Jewels
A collection of exquisitely dried tulip and iris petals, photographed on a velum background. As the petals dried they metamorphosed into fascinating and beautiful shapes making them ideal subject matter for a series of photographs.
The shoot was quite complex. First of all the petals were extremely small and like all petals by their very nature, delicate. However, this is magnified to a greater degree when they are dried, if not handled with the greatest care they will simply crumble to dust. Another issue is the lightness of dried petals, once the water content has evaporated the petals become almost weightless, placing them into sets and making sure they don’t move during shooting was a very exacting procedure. We had become very attached to these little jewels of nature and wanted to keep each one intake, so we weren’t able to glue them down and re-touch out in post-pro, as that would have caused damaged.
Although the shoot took place over 20 years ago we still have each petal. As time has passed their colours have changed and they’ve dried and shrunk even further, but in essence they've remained as fascinating and beautiful as ever.
Images From The Archives 1st Selection
Fond Memories and An Ode To Film
Here are a small selection of images showing personal and commissioned work, taken at various times during our career. Some of these are copies of original prints, others are scans from original film transparencies - many over 25 years old - beautifully preserved. It’s a wonderful comfort to know that when film is stored properly and remains intake, the images are undiminished by time and retain the same qualities and lustre as they had on the day they were processed. Happy memories, please enjoy.
Highland Times.
Hello and welcome to our first post. We’d like to introduce ourselves with a brief description of our home and life style. It’s an extremely wet and rather cold September day, here in the Highlands of Scotland. In the last hour we’ve just been placed on a ‘Met Office Yellow Warning’ for rain.
As you’ll know from reading our story/bio we re-located to the Highlands in 2001 and have been here ever since. Our home was originally an ordinary bungalow with a very large roof area. We then converted the downstairs into a more open plan living area and extended up into the roof creating a wonderful first floor studio/living space with a rather large window looking out onto the Great Glen. With plenty of natural light and wonderful views this space instantly become a splendid environment for working and relaxing.
Our garden is a natural haven (a nice way of saying neither of us is that keen on gardening) for lots of wildlife. We have many birds, in particular song thrushes, great tits, blue tits, robins, goldfinches, blackbirds, chaffinches, starlings, goldcrests, pheasants, grouse, hens and on the odd occasion a sparrow hawk has been known to pay us a visit. Souring overhead we see eagles, owls and just recently cormorants. Two red squirrels also frequent our garden, along with a few pine martins, the odd fox, small deer, lots of rabbits and hares and even the local, feral cat occasionally has a wander about. Up here nobody has gates, so it’s easy for most animals to roam about freely.
Unfortunately we haven’t had a good summer, this year. Too much rain and lots of wind. Large mushrooms/fungi started growing in our garden at the end of July and now we’ve got numerous varieties growing everywhere. The berries have already been on the trees for quite some time, supposedly this is a sign that a bad winter will follow, who knows, we’ll have to wait and see.
Welcome To The House Of Laidlaw Marsden
Hello! A big welcome to The House of Laidlaw Marsden. This new web site has been launched to celebrate the collaboration of ourselves - Alastair Laidlaw and Christine Marsden - and allows us the opportunity to showcase our expanding careers and new projects to the world. We look forward to sharing our adventures with you.