If you follow PigPog, you’ll have seen a few photos of Lauren recently. We recently did a photoshoot, with Lauren as the model and me as photographer. It all started on Instagram.

Lauren had posted a photo there, and said she was half tempted to hire a photographer for an hour for an ego-boost. I volunteered my services. Not completely random dude-on-the-internet – I’ve known Lauren for years, and she does meet up with Sam and I reasonably often, mostly for playing Pokémon GO.

We got lucky that our best available day was the same as Lauren’s, and was the best day of weather in the week.

We started with coffee and breakfast at Richy’s Diner in Tiverton, and talked a bit about plans, and photographic rights/copyright. It seemed like a good idea to make sure Lauren knew how copyright worked for photos, but also that I’d be quite happy for her to use whatever photos I took for her own purposes. I had a few ideas for locations, and the closest one was across the road from Richy’s, so we figured we might as well start there.

Tiverton Youth Club has an outside wall (several walls, really) covered completely in street art. It gets repainted fairly often, usually with some good work. A set of walls, some with benches against them, all covered in graffiti, was a good setting for some bright colourful photos. And some interesting patterns for black and white stuff too.

It wasn’t anywhere on my list of ideas, but Sam suggested heading for the coast, and Lauren liked the idea, so we headed for Exmouth. We parked up at the sea front, thinking the beach would be a good start. As locations go, it was good, but with one problem. The weather. It hadn’t seemed windy or cold elsewhere, but down on the beach, it really was. Lauren still played along, including balancing on top of the (hilariously named) groynes, and jumping for some shots. We swapped around, with her taking the camera for a few shots of me jumping off a groyne. Rather upsettingly, her shots of me were in better focus than my shots of her, and I’m the one trying to be a photographer.

We used the sea wall for some different height shots, too, with Lauren staying up on top, while I got down on the beach and photographed straight up her nose.

We had a bit of time in the town centre. Exmouth has an excellent book shop with lots of Pokémon plushies at the back, and I couldn’t resist a sleeping Bulbasaur. We had coffee and food in their upstairs cafe.

The sun was getting low as we headed back towards Tiverton, so we stopped off at Stoke Canon Industrial Estate on the way back for a last set. I explored there some time back, when most of the place was abandoned. It seems to be getting back into use these days, with a lot of the units being re-fronted, and more businesses moving in. There’s an old unit near the entrance, though, that’s still wonderfully rusted and old. There’s even a lovely aged sign with the old phone code for the area on it. There are two sets of metal stairs outside, which look nicely rusty, but still feel good and solid – more solid than the ones we have at home!

A couple of old shipping containers added some nice pastel colours that, along with the wall below, were almost the reverse of Lauren’s outfit.

We had fun going up and down the stairs, with me photographing Lauren from above and from below, getting a bunch of different angles.

For a few last shots, we tried shooting into the sun, as it was close to setting.

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