Adult Glamour Photography

About PJA Media and what we offer

Hi, I'm Paul A, photographer behind PJA Media. I have been involved in photography since I was a boy. I used to shoot B&W 120 roll film on second hand bellows type cameras, sneaking into school in the evening to process the film in the school dark room. I bought my first 35mm SLR camera at the age of 16 (second hand Olympus OM10) with my very first wage packet, costing £90, and collected a selection of lenses and accessories over the years, which I used to cart around cities to photograph the sights. I was mainly interested in beautiful architecture, and pieces of engineering, such as bridges, cranes, ships etc. I was also interested in night time photography, capturing the cars driving through a busy city, or the lights along the banks of a river.

Fast forward to 2005 - I was asked by a friend if I would be willing to shoot some pole dance students and their teachers at the Pole Physique pole dancing academy, based in Glasgow. I said, "Let me have a think about it for a while and I'll let you know .. Yes, when is it? ;o)" This opportunity led me to expand my interest into the world of glamour photography, shooting beautiful women for a living.

I love working with people and the modelling community specifically are quite an eclectic bunch, so the work can be quite interesting and varied (and sometimes quite demanding). There is nothing more satisfying than capturing natural female beauty in a picture, especially if that beauty is placed in a naturally beautiful environment - I love outdoor work. I feel very privileged to have worked with some fantastic models along the way, for whom I have a great respect, and from whom hopefully I have earned mutual respect - a great foundation for the creative process - so instead of shooting images, we create photographs! Besides mutual respect and a professional attitude, having fun and building a rapport with the model is equally important for the creative process - it's nice to think that a model would be willing to come back if future work is offered - a good reputation in this business is key to success!

Fast forward to 2009 - I am joined by my new assistant Natasha, who is studying photography in Glasgow. She is a great deal of help, organising shoots, finding models, and during shoots she helps the model get organised, and with makeup and styling etc. She is a great addition to the team.

We specialise in several lines of work including:

Commissioned (web content) shoots - This is our main line of work and this involves finding suitable models and putting them forward (with their agreement) for review by my clients, who consist of several popular adult glamour member websites. Models are sought nation-wide on a continual basis, either through advertising on the internet ,Model/photographer websites, in local papers, or through responses to the Jobs detailed on the Model Search page of this website. Once a model's images and some basic details have been submitted to clients, the model is assessed for suitability, and the client will get back to us to either approve the model for a shoot, or advise otherwise. Models are well paid for their part in any shoot (in cash on the day of the shoot) upon signing a model release form, which grants permission to the client to use the content on their websites. Shoots are carried out either in the PJA Media studio in Glasgow, or in one of our other UK locations (hired/borrowed specifically for shoots several times a year).

Private glamour shoots - This is where more adventurous individuals hire us to photograph them privately and discretely - producing photos for their own personal consumption. Shoots are either in a local studio, in our own studio in Glasgow, or any location suggested by the model in question (including their own home if preferred). The customer/model will receive all the images on CD/DVD, and this includes a privacy pledge honouring our commitment to discretion. Rates for this kind of work are available on request.

If you are interested in modeling for PJA Media then please check out the 'Modelling Opportunities/Work' link on the menu above.

If you are a company checking out my portfolio and like what you see, please drop me a line as I am always willing to discuss any project you have in mind. Some of the areas we are very interested in are: pay sites/web content, calendars, advertisements, or magazine content.

Portfolio (TFCD) shoots - This is how I started off building my portfolio, but unfortunately I rarely have the time to offer TFCD shoots any more. I do offer test shoots to models on a TFCD basis if I believe that the model has the potential and may be of interest to clients for future work offers- using the images from the shoot to seek client approval.

Stills camera gear we are currently using consists of the following (for you techies out there!):
Canon eos 5d MkII with BG-E6 vertical battery grip. 21.2MPix, full frame digital SLR, with 2 Canon batteries
Canon eos 5d with BG-E4 vertical battery grip. 12.7MPix, full frame digital SLR, with loads of spare batteries
Canon EF 24-105 f/4.0L IS USM Lens (for most indoor work)
Canon EF 28-105 f3.5-4.5 USM (for behind the scenes shots)
CanonEF 70-200 f/2.8L IS USM Lens (mostly for outdoors - this is one hell of a lens)
Canon eos 20d with BG-E2 vertical battery grip (spare body), 8.3MPix, APS-C frame-size digital SLR (now Natasha's camera), with Canon 28-105 f4 lens
Canon Speedlite 580ex flash gun (great for fill flash when working outdoors)
2x2GB Sandisk Ultra II Compact Flash Memory cards
3x4GB Sandisk Ultra II Compact Flash Memory cards
1x4GB 20MB/s Sandisk Extreme III Compact Flash Memory card
1x4GB 30MB/s Sandisk Extreme III Compact Flash Memory card
2x8GB 30MB/s Sandisk Extreme III Compact Flash Memory cards

Video equipment:
Panasonic NV-GS500 3CCD MiniDV Camcorder (old SD camcorder)
Canon HV30 HDV camcorder (for those more discrete moments)
Sony HVR-Z7 (multi-standard) HDV/DVCAM/DV Camcorder(for broadcast-quality HD footage)
Sony HVR-MRC1 CF Card recorder (allows HD footage to be shot directly to memory card instead of/and/or tape)
2x16GB 60MB/s Sandisk Extreme UDMA Compact Flash Memory cards

Studio Lighting/modifiers/electronics/grip etc:
3 x Bowens Esprit Gemini GM500 flash monoblocks
1 x Bowens Esprit Gemini GM250 flash monoblock
2 x Elinchrom d-lite 4 flash monoblocks (lightweight units for travel/flights etc)
3 x PocketWizard Plus II digital radio trancievers
Sekonic L358 Flashmaster Flash Meter (with Sekonic/PocketWizard radio module)
1 x Bowens 60x60 softbox
2 x 120x80 softboxes
1 x Elinchrom 65x65 softbox
1 x Elinchrom 53x53 softbox
2 x Interfit 1000W Halogen hot lights - for video
2 x Interfit 60x60 soft boxes for hot lights
3 x redhead 800w halogen video lights with barndoors
Various Bowens/interfit (S type) reflectors, umbrellas etc.
Various lighting stands, booms, grip etc.
Several reflectors/shoot thru's/sunshades etc.
WiBal warm white balance cards - for white balance
Gretag MacBeth colour card - for camera profiling/white balance
Velbon tripod with Manfrotto head, Slik baby tripod - although neither are used much!
Manfrotto/Hague suction camera mount - for in-car video
Background support system with various different coloured backgrounds (used hardly ever)

Other misc stuff:
Masses of props
Model wardrobe containing hundreds of items, plus hair hardware etc.
Tamrac cyberpack 9 rucksack - for carying the camera equipment and laptop.
Tamrac Pro digital zoom 7 - holster pack for one camera with lens and vertical grip (used occasionally)
Plus loads of cables,
2 x wheelie bags
3 x explorer flight cases - allowing kit to be taken as hand luggage

Portable computer equipment used for location shoots:
HP Pavillion DV1448ea Laptop with Sandisk CF card reader
Samsung NC10 Netbook
Canon Scanner (for paperwork/ID scanning)
HP portable printer
3 3G Mobile broadband dongle
Seagate Freeagent 500GB portable USB hard drive (for lightweight location shoot travel)
Lacie Two Big USB/eSATA 1TB external hard drive setup as RAID1 array (which connects to laptop)
USB Card reader

At the office I have a PC equipment for editing and storing the pics/video:
Main PC:
Dual-screen setup - 1 x Viewsonic 2030b monitor connected with DVI-D (excellent monitor), 1 x Viewsonic VP2650wb monitor connected with DVI-D (crap monitor - used as second), to twin Gforce 7600GS 512MB PCIe x16 graphics adaptors
Asus P5WDG2-WS Professional workstation motherboard with PCI-X
Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 processor
8GB Crucial PC2-5300 RAM
C: = 120GB Western Digital SATAII hard drive
D: = RAID1 Array containing 2 x 460GB Seagate SATAII hard drives - Connected to Intel Matrix RAID integrated controller
L: = 280GB Maxtor SATAII hard drive - temp files, PS scratch disk, Lightroom Catalog
NEC/Optiarc 7200A Dual-Layer DVD Writer
Epson Stylus Photo PX800FW printer/scanner/fax (for general office stuff)
ColorVision Spyder 2 Pro Screen Calibrator
Contour Shuttle Pro 2 controller - awesome bit of kit which makes using Lightroom and Vegas so much easier
The next addition will be a Wacom Intuos3 Graphics tablet!
Software I use on this PC:
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 - the x64 version allows more RAM to be used by apps (even 32bit apps)
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 - for my website editing
Adobe Photoshop CS4 - for photo re-touching
Adobe Bridge CS4 - I use this now as a general file browser as all photo selection/markup is now done in Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom v2.6 (64bit) - My tool of choice for workflow and Digital Asset Management
Adobe Acrobat Professional v9 - Used for legal paperwork, invoicing etc. My Scanner also scans to PDF so very useful to have!
Downloader Pro v2.2.3 - from www.breezesys.com - excellent app - it's important to have a file copier you can trust with your source images when moving these from CF card to storage.
Breeze Browser Pro v1.9.3 - also from www.breezesys.com - a nifty file browser which works well with Downloader pro - small footprint also on the laptop.
Nero Burning ROM v9 - To burn DVDs for clients/models etc
Nero Cover designer - for printing onto DVDs
Mozilla Thunderbird 3, with: Lightening calendar, BirdieSync (PocketPC sync software), Google Calendar connector
Mozilla Firefox 3.6 - the best web browser there is!
Loxley ROES - from www.loxleycolour.com - Pro Colour labs in Glasgow, for sending pics for printing
Sony Vegas Pro v9.0c, for video production
CuteFTP Professional - for website uploads
MS Office 2007 (just word and Excel)
avast! Anti-Virus, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ, plus other bits n pieces!
FreeMind - Mind map software (for jotting down plans/ideas)

File server/NAS Device:
Thecus 5200b Pro NAS Device - containing 5 x 750GB Western Digital SATA2 Drives - provides 3TB of storage presented as iSCSI SAN Storage to server (below)

Windows 2008 Server Std Ed SP2:
Asus P5WDG2-WS Professional based workstation motherboard
Intel Core2 Duo E6600 processor
4GB Corsair RAM
C: D: = RAID1 Array containing 2 x 300GB Western Digital SATAII hard drives (C: 60GB, D: 240GB)
I: = RAID5 Array containing 4 x 1.5TB Western Digital SATAII Hard drives (presented to OS as 3 volumes which are striped in a dynamic volume)
L: = iSCSI SAN Storage presented by Thecus 5200b NAS box (detailed above) - used for backup storage.
LSI Logic PCI-X 300x8 SATAII hardware RAID controller
Asus 8600GS PCIe 512MB graphics adaptor with PCI-e x16
Panasonic 111 Dual-Layer DVD Writer
Software I use on this Server:
Windows Server 2008 Std Edition SP2
DHCP Server
DNS Server
Active Directory
VMWare Server v2.0.0 hosting: Centos v5 (Linux) 64bit - Development web server running Apache, MySQL, PHP
StarPort iSCSI Initiator - allows the presentataion of >2TB iSCSI storage volume to Windows.

Networking:
Orange LiveBox - freebie from Orange!
Netgear 8 port Gigabit switch
Netgear 5 port Gigabit Switch
Netgear Wireless Access Point

Internet/Webspace:
1and1 shared hosting Linux package - 4GB storage, Apache, MySQL, PHP
PHPMyAdmin - for SQL Administration
Gallery2 v2.2.4 - for hosting images and current model database
New custom-build Model/Shoot/Location/Client database is currently being developed

Unless otherwise stated all images shown on this website are produced by and the Copyright of PJA Media 2005-2010. All rights reserved.