Valentine's Day Interview - Lucy Hopegood, photographer

After a long absence, I’m delighted to be resurrecting the Musings Friday Interview.

Except that, clearly, this one’s a Saturday Interview, because who wants a Friday 13th Interview?! Not me. And certainly not the subject of this post, photographer Lucy Hopegood.



And anyway, what more appropriate day for a celebration of wedding photography than Valentine’s Day?

Lucy’s love of photography began when she was given her first camera at the age of 17 and more recently this enduring passion has evolved into a dynamic business.

* Lucy, what made you decide to turn your love of photography into a business opportunity?

It was really the frustration which I think a lot of people experience when doing a job which doesn't really suit them, a gradual and growing feeling of being in the wrong place. I had been offered a place to study photography at university but at the last minute switched to law. I suppose I was trying to be sensible.

Of course, law proved to be fascinating and subsequent jobs were stimulating and challenging but deep down all I really longed to do was to take photographs. I would spend hours devouring style magazines, colour supplements, photographic journals ... anything that fed my passion for photography.

Eventually, this slow drip of frustration became an avalanche of dissatisfaction and I jumped ship with my camera to establish Lucy Hopegood Photography. I can honestly say I that I am happy every day to have done this.

* Your portraits and wedding photographs are so much more relaxed than traditional studio shots. And most of them are taken outdoors, aren’t they?

Yes, there are two reasons for this: First, I have always enjoyed the photograph as a whole ... settings, textures and colours are, for me, an integral element of a good portrait. In addition, I dislike the deadening effect of flash photography and virtually never use it. Obviously, it is an essential and effective tool in stylised fashion photography but for most portrait and wedding photography natural light produces the most beautiful results. Shooting outside enables me to harness natural light, in all its varied and dramatic forms.

Second, many people find photographic studios stifling and intimidating. Both the once-fashionable cluttered interior look and its modern equivalent, the stark white background, have no meaning for most of the people plonked inside them. Instead, my clients choose a favourite place that makes them happy. The freedom that flows when the confines of the studio are abandoned is evidenced in the resulting vibrant, joyous images.

* How would you describe ‘lifestyle photography’?

Clients want elements of their portrait to reflect their interests and to tell the observer something about their lifestyle. Interestingly, this has much in common with traditional painted portrait commissions. I have photographed clients with their chickens, horses, on boats, in their classic cars, etc: they want these essential elements incorporated into a beautiful record of a time in their lives.

However, it should be said that despite the relaxed nature and informal impression of lifestyle photography, good results demand a level of direction and structure from the photographer.

* How do you go about creating such a delightful rapport with your subjects?

The most vital aspect is time. There is nothing more likely to cause tension and, as a result, stiff photographs than clients feeling rushed. I never undertake more that one shoot in a day and I take as long as is needed.

Some shoots take three hours, others a lot longer. Clients need time to relax. The vast majority of people (including me) think that they hate being photographed but it's amazing, given time, how often I see the most tense client really start to enjoy striking poses.


Again, I should emphasise the importance of people being happy in their surroundings. The seaside is always a success, there is something very freeing about the combination of water, sunshine and wind and, of course, the easy availability of ice creams doesn't hurt either.

* Presumably, you have to be particularly patient with young children?

Actually it's not just the smallest children who can be demanding. Recalcitrant teenagers aren't always keen to be in front of the lens either. Some love it but others hate the very thought, especially if they have been persuaded to wear something they dislike with grandparents in mind. I always make sure that they call the shots for a proportion of the shoot, wearing what they like etc, as a pay-off for the bits they may dislike. Little children need regular breaks and snacks, so I always factor these in. If they need a nap, we have coffee or lunch and begin again a bit later.

* On which note, have you worked much with animals?

Yes, many of my shoots involve pets of some sort – clients want them included because they feel like members of the family. I once did a shoot with a wonderful family on their yacht with two delightful dogs in nautical t-shirts taking centre stage. It was a fabulous shoot and great fun once I had conquered my landlubber nerves. A more recent shoot included a large, much-loved duck and a few years ago I had to point out to a red-faced husband that he had chosen more photographs of his cat than of his wife!

* How do people choose the shots they wish to purchase?

Once I have edited the results of a shoot, I visit the client at home and we spend time viewing all the images. It helps to decide first who each photograph is for and what format the finished product should be in. It takes some time and I never rush my clients. I would hate them to feel pressurised. At the moment, I am offering a disc option for both portraits and weddings which, of course, removes the need to choose images, since the client keeps them all.

* Do portrait clients generally select just one shot or a whole series?

Most choose a wide selection. Storyboards are enduringly popular, in both frame and album format. This simply means a selection of images which tell the story of the day – detail shots of hands or feet, etc, are really effective in this format when interspersed with other full-frame photographs.

It really is the case that storyboards have the power to captivate and enthrall – some families come back for a new version when they have another child. At the other end of the spectrum are clients who have a strict budget and will only be buying one or two frames. I always believe that they are entitled to the same service and time in order to produce a treasured image, and of course, I store everything on disc which means that more can be chosen at a later date if desired.

* So lifestyle portraiture isn’t just a financial investment but an emotional one?

Exactly. We spend more money now than ever on transient pleasures like holidays and dining out etc. Whilst such treats are undeniably enjoyable, memories of them fade. Buying innovative, contemporary lifestyle portraiture is an emotional investment. Like Proust's madeleines, meaningful photographs can evoke a lifetime of intense memories.

* You’re holding a special exhibition of wedding photography at Glemham Hall in Suffolk later this month. Tell me more about that.

Yes, it's a very exciting collaboration for me. Glemham Hall is a stunning red brick Elizabethan mansion set on a large country estate between Woodbridge and Saxmundham. It is a beautiful wedding venue and I am thrilled to have been invited to exhibit there between 28 February and 1 March. The hall, grounds and marquee will be open for wedding viewings and I will be exhibiting my work and talking informally to visitors on both days. In addition, there will be a free prize draw to win my wedding services, including pre-wedding shoot, attendance and photography on the wedding day itself and a disc of wedding photographs.

* How do you approach a wedding commission?

My style is unobtrusive, and I aim to be as discreet a presence as possible. It is crucially important not to obstruct the smooth running of the day and I liaise closely with caterers, florists, musicians, etc to ensure that we work together. We all want the same outcome: a happy and successful wedding day.

As I am shooting, I think about the visual story that I am going to create in the finished album and aim to capture the small details as well as the more obvious moments of the day. I love photographing the wedding preparations before the service, and this period of building excitement often yields the most magical pictures.

Some couples ask for the service itself to be photographed and, again, a discreet presence is crucial. At the reception I advise that group photographs are kept to a minimum to enable the bride and groom to enjoy their party without being taken away from their guests for too long. I always work with a trained assistant whose job it is to help organise shots, change lenses, etc, so that I can concentrate on doing what I love most: taking great photographs.

* And you offer a pre-wedding shoot as well. How does that work?

For me, this is an essential element of my wedding services. Some months before the wedding day, I will meet the bride and groom at a place that they choose and spend time photographing them together. It is great for me because I get to know them better before the wedding and the advantage for them is that it inspires confidence. Having seen the pre-wedding shoot images, they start their wedding day knowing that I will take stunning photographs of them and they come away with a lovely record of the special time before they were married.

* And in addition to the Glemham Hall prize draw, you’ve a couple of other special offers on at the moment.

Yes, that's right. Those who book their weddings before 31 March 2009 will enjoy an edited disc of all their wedding photographs in addition to the album included in the price. Lifestyle portrait shoots booked in spring 2009 are priced at £100 shoot fee and £380 for an edited disc of over 50 beautiful photographs. This makes the lifestyle shoot more affordable and removes the need to choose particular photographs over others.

* Finally, Lucy, what, for you, is the essence of making a good photograph?

Good photography is not just about technical ability, though this clearly plays a part. More, it is a love of people, an eye for detail and a keen enjoyment of creating the most beautiful images imaginable.
Thanks Lucy. You can find Lucy’s website here – email her at info[at]lucyhopegood.com for further information about any of her photographic services.



The Glemham Hall website is here and the special wedding exhibition is open from 28 February until 1 March.

Portraits of Lucy by Jonathan Doyle.

(Click on photos to enlarge and see them to best advantage.)

Friday Interview - James and Maggie Weaver of the ArtCafé, West Mersea and Colchester

The subjects of today's Friday Interview are James and Maggie Weaver, proprietors of two local ArtCafés - one on Mersea, the other in Colchester.

I visited the West Mersea ArtCafé earlier today, in order to chat to James and Maggie about their passion for food, art and coffee, while Jonathan took many of the pictures which appear below. And then I made the most of the opportunity to sink into a squishy sofa and drink a latte, while reading the morning's papers and enjoying the artwork on display: a very pleasant way to occupy a Friday morning!

* James and Maggie, the ArtCafés have such a lovely ambiance – which was your principal inspiration when you started out, the art or the coffee?

J&M: When we set up the first ArtCafé we really just wanted to work together, you could say our principal inspiration was combining what we are both interested in (art and food), into one business. To be honest, we also got fed up with James having to stop painting to drive the ten miles to Colchester just to get a decent cappuccino. As for the lovely ambiance, we think it’s probably the result of us enjoying what we do here.

* You have two choice locations – just opposite the Parish Church in West Mersea and in Colchester’s Trinity Square – was this sheer chance or did you have to wait ages for exactly the right premises to become available?

J&M: Our first location at Mersea was a real piece of good fortune, but we’d had our eye on the Colchester premises in Trinity Street for a few years. The café/gallery came about as the result of a chance meeting, at an exhibition of James’s paintings, with Simon Butcher and Annette Bell, in which we’d discussed our idea to find a waterfront studio/gallery. Briggs Art and Bookshop (as it was called at the time) became available and so we decided to put our search for a waterfront location for a gallery on the back burner and put all our energy into this new venture. We’ve been delighted with the success of this first business and it’s reassuring to us that people like our real homemade food and original art formula.

After four years we felt brave enough to take on the Trinity Street premises in the centre of Colchester when it became available, having been an antiques business for some twenty years. We laboured for three really cold winter months on this ancient building to make it ours and at Easter 2007 we opened the second ArtCafé.

* You seem to be constantly busy, serving breakfasts from 9.00 in the morning, then lunches, and then teas until 5.00pm, seven days a week.

J&M: Yes, constantly busy, that’s us! We’re open seven days a week in West Mersea and six days a week in Colchester, doing breakfast 9-11am, lunch 11am-3pm, and afternoon teas 3-5pm.

* Maggie, has cooking has been a lifelong passion?

M: I have been in the catering/hospitality business for thirty years now, starting out in North Cornwall ant the age of 21, with no previous experience or training. I worked with my sister in the hotel we had bought, figuring that, even with no experience, we had to be able to do better than the offered menu of tinned ravioli on toast amongst other ‘delights’ … it was a very steep and at times disastrous learning curve. It was called ‘The Trebarwith Strand Hotel’ and, with our restaurant ‘The House on the Strand’, was after a few years a very successful business.

Upon moving to Essex, I was chef at The Whalebone in Fingringhoe for seven years where, with my boss and friend Viv Steed, we created a great and popular place to eat. Now with the ArtCafés I’ve discovered that my passion is giving people real, not ‘mass-produced’, food in a relaxed atmosphere’ - definitely café not ‘caff’ but not quite a restaurant … yet!

* What are the top favourite items on your current menu?

M: My favourite thing on the menu at the moment is Toasted Chili Bread, spicy and delicious and so very simple.

J: My favourite is Liver and Bacon on Crispy Bubble and Squeak with a Rich Gravy and Seasonal Vegetables.

J&M: As for our customers, our Fry-Up is a perennial favourite, with local butcher Arthur Cock’s sausage, free-range egg, bacon, bubble and squeak, mushrooms and tomato.


We do our best to use local suppliers wherever possible and really do make almost everything on the menu ourselves.

* Are your famously delicious cakes baked to secret recipes or are you prepared to share one of them with us here?

M: When asked this question by customers, as we often are for our recipes, we’re usually guarded and will reply 'if we tell you we’ll have to shoot you!'. However, we’d like to share just one with Musings readers. So, here is Maggie’s Victoria Sponge Recipe:

This is the easiest recipe ever, and makes either one stonking great sponge or, if you split each layer, it makes two.

Grease two 9-inch, deep-ish round tins

Oven 180C / G4 10oz Butter (softened)

10oz Caster sugar

10oz Self-raising flour

2 tsp Baking powder

5 Eggs

1 tsp Vanilla essence

1. Put all the ingredients in a bowl together and, using an electric mixer, beat the living daylights out of it until it is nice and loose.

2. Divide between the two tins.

3. Pop into the oven for about 35-40 minutes.

4. Do not open the oven (even for a peek) during this time or it will sink.

5. Fill with whipped double cream and strawberry jam.

* Tell us about some of the artists whose work is featured in the ArtCafés at the moment

J: We have lots of interesting artists exhibiting worth a mention here, most are local to us, but not all. We have quite a stock of lovely etchings by Elizabeth Morris, a fellow Mersea artist and printmaker, whose work beautifully reflects the environments of both Mersea Island and Heir Island in West Cork.

We have another Mersea artist, Audrey Davy, whose atmospheric pastel seascapes, saltmarsh, and east coast sailing boats paintings are proving very popular.

There’s David Britton’s oil paintings too,

and prints and cards by Leafy Dumas, two more artists who live and work on the island.

There’s myself of course!

And from farther afield we have some etchings and woodcuts by Anita Klein, whose work is now becoming very collectible indeed,

and Melanie Wickham from Bristol, whose lino-cut prints and designs made us both smile the moment we saw them.

* But it’s not only paintings that you sell, is it?

J: From the outset we wanted to sell a wide variety of work with a strong emphasis on the hand made and local. This currently includes jewellery, glass, ceramics, driftwood sculpture and some photography as well as painting, of course.

Pru Green, a Wivenhoe ceramicist has her colourful and sought-after pots, mugs, cups, bowls and jugs on sale with us.

Julie Pettitt from Colchester designs and makes quirky and unique pieces in porcelain.

In addition, we stock a wide range of greetings cards and quite a few local interest books.

Those worthy of special mention are the range we have from Jardine Press in Wivenhoe.

I also have to plug my Mum’s book here - From When I Can Remember, her memoir of growing up on Mersea Island.

Something we’d really like to do in the future at the ArtCafé is hold exhibitions highlighting the work of just one or two artists at a time, with a preview evening with all the trimmings.

Ever since we first opened our doors, we’ve wanted to showcase artists who both live and work on Mersea Island (in fact we think there’s potential to start some sort of guild or group around this idea).

Another strand we’ve begun to work on is an online gallery/shop as part of our website, where a lot of the work we exhibit will soon be available to view and purchase online.

* And of course, as you've mentioned, you are an artist in your own right, James. How long have you been painting?

J: I’ve loved painting and drawing since childhood and after leaving school I went to the Colchester School of Art for four years. I actually studied graphic design and not painting, gaining membership to the (then) Society of Industrial Artists and Designers, and I worked in graphic design for about ten years.

When we moved back to Essex, I decided to paint seriously full time, supplementing this with other part-time work which afforded me the time to experiment and develop. Our children were small then and I had no studio, so after breakfast and the ‘school run’, I’d clear the breakfast things and the kitchen table became my studio until home time.

* Beach huts seem to be a recurring theme!

J: I had no idea at the outset that I’d be using beach huts as a subject for so much of my work. I was drawing and painting a lot of the boats and saltmarsh around our island at the time and the beach and beach huts (of which we have hundreds) increasingly began to fascinate me.

These modest pieces of seaside architecture are so very colourful and quintessentially British, and from the waterline here seem to stretch for miles and miles. The foreshore is littered with colourful shells and shingle which I find visually stimulating, and dissected by groynes at intervals that naturally lead the eye up the beach … all of which I find a joy to paint, especially in watercolour.

* Do you have a studio now?

J: Yes, I’m now fortunate enough to have a lovely little studio at the end of our garden. It’s separate from the house, which I feel is important, as well as being warm and dry.

It’s actually a ‘fancy shed' bought from the proceeds of an exhibition a few years ago, with larger windows than your average garden shed and also has electricity to it, so it’s quite cosy in the winter months and, unlike the kitchen table, allows me to work on several pieces simultaneously.

* James, you were born and brought up on Mersea, weren't you?

J: Yes, I was born on the island, at home, in Victory Road, probably one of the last few, and can trace my ancestors back here several hundred years. I had a very happy childhood, with summers mucking around the muddy creeks in boats and playing on the beach. When referring to Mersea, I can genuinely use the old cliché: 'I remember when all this was fields'!

During my late teens and early twenties, like many young people living in small communities, I became a bit disenchanted with the place and took myself off to Cornwall and there Maggie and I met and married at Trebarwith Strand, on the rugged north coast. We lived there for about five years before returning to live in Langenhoe in 1991 and then in 1999 I brought my family back home to Mersea Island.

* So, Maggie, how do you enjoy living on Mersea Island? - it's a far cry from the Cornish coast!

M: When we moved from Cornwall with our three young children I felt quite unable to appreciate that there was anything attractive about Mersea Island. Where we’d moved from was either rough seas and wild weather or a beautiful tranquil mile long sandy beach. In contrast, the tide here seemed to just slide in and then slide away again.

Then we moved onto the island and I gradually noticed the beauty of the birds, huge skies, sunsets and even the mud, having its own shiny charm! Since opening the ArtCafé I have really started to feel at home here and love the community life. It’s quite different for me to live in a place where everyone knows each other.

* Finally, what are your future plans for the ArtCafés?

J&M: There are things we’d really like to do to expand the ArtCafés, but for the immediate future we are going to get our online gallery/shop up and running, organise our Winter and Spring menus and, for 2009, plan some exhibitions of selected artists.

Most important for us will be maintaining our homemade, handmade, local-as-possible ethos.

My thanks to James and Maggie for taking time out from their busy ArtCafé lives to talk to me, and to staff-members Jess, Will and Lee, for so cheerfully putting up with having a camera pointed at them while they were getting on with their work.

You can find the Mersea ArtCafé here and the Colchester ArtCafé here.

Keep an eye on the ArtCafé website for the forthcoming online gallery (I'll post an update here on Musings when it goes live).

Meanwhile, do visit James and Maggie's regularly updated arty/foody/Merseacentric blog, The Artist and the Tartist.

(Thanks also to Jonathan for the fab photos!)