I have added some more recent work to my wedding portfolio. There were thousands of shots to look through, but the wedding gallery now contains some of my favourite shots taken in 2009, as well as older photos.

Looking back through all the weddings I've photographed this year, I realise how lucky I have been. I have had a very privileged view into some of the most private and important moments in peoples' lives and recorded the emotion.

All of my clients have been wonderful, I've been to some fabulous places and been made to feel as welcome as any guest. I've also been quite lucky with the weather too, with only one really wet wedding this year.

When a wedding goes well, it feels great because I feel like I'm getting paid to do what I love most and I'm just photographing a really wonderful party.

This shot was one that I love. Some days everything just seems to go right, and that's how it was at this wedding. I quickly got all the shots I needed, which left me lots of time to play around and work on getting the shots I wanted.

I only have two more weddings lined up for 2009. I need a break from it all, but am excited about all the bookings I have for 2010 already.

8th Nov 2009. Fenerbahçe, Istanbul, Turkey. A refugee camp for people who fled the conflict with Russia in Chechnya. The people are denied Turkish state benefits and also the right to work, leaving them in abject poverty.

The camp is by the sea, where cold winters and damp has affected the refugees' health, many of the children suffer asthma and other breathing ailments.

Although born in Turkey, the children are effectively state-less and fall between the cracks of international law. There is little or no provision for education or healthcare. 

4-10th November. Istanbul, Turkey. Photos taken for the iStockphoto and Getty Images editorial iStockalypse. These are just a few personal favourites, although I have a lot more still to edit.

I was trying to document modern life in one of the worlds oldest and biggest cities. It's a city of contrasts and I took photos in the rich Nişantaşı district, which could easily be Madrid or Milan.

I also took photos in the older and poorer parts of the city. Istanbul will be the city of culture for 2010, so it will be interesting to see what they do next year to showcase this wonderful place.

I've just added a new editorial photo section to the website. These are not pretty pictures, but simply a record of events and life around us. I'll add new shoots as and when I get time to update it.

The city of Leeds is currently in the fifth week of a strike by the bin men. I took a walk around one of the areas mainly populated by students to see how things were.

Oddly enough, these images seemed more real and grittier in colour than black and white. It stank pretty badly in many of these streets, despite it being a cool autumn day. I feel sorry for those who are affected by this dispute.

Great news. I have been invited to shoot editorial photos for Getty Images. I can't tell you how exciting this is.

From hudreds of applicants, thirty people at iStockphoto have been invited to join Getty as editorial photographers. To kick things off there's a five day event in Istanbul in November.

Loads of great photographers will be there and lots of shooting, crit sessions and Q&A sessions with some of my favourite photo journalists.

I'm truly amazed and inspired.

I've finished editing the photos for another wedding and am about to start working on the next one. It's non-stop work at the moment but I must get round to updating my portfolio when I get a chance. I'd like to add this one. Sweet shot.

We're nearly at the end of August and I'm working like mad to get all my work done. I have only one wedding to photograph this week, but there are plenty to edit still. And then there are prints to order, albums to create, photo books to design. Busy, busy, busy.

Just thought I'd quickly post this image from one of my favourite weddings this year and also it's the most recent one to be completed. It was a great day, with wonderful people and a great venue.

After some annoying computer glitches last week, I am now back in demon editing mode and working my way through 8000 shots. I've actually spent so long editing shots that I now have a slight ghost image from Photoshop Lightroom on my screen!

Looking back over this summer's images, I'm really pleased with the work I've produced. I have been very lucky with the weather with only one really wet wedding, which is pretty good out of three months of solid bookings.

Fortunately, September is quieter for wedding bookings and I can hopefully  catch up on all the things I haven't had chance to do all summer.

Right, time to get back to it...

It's great to be busy with work. I've got so many weddings to photograph at the moment, it's getting rather hectic. As well as shooting more weddings than ever, I seem to be taking more shots at each wedding too. I always thought I was a fairly conservative,  but recently I have realised that I'm shooting an average 600-800 shots per wedding.

Many of these images are duplicates of group shots, taken to ensure that one of them will have nobody blinking. But even so, that's a lot of shots to look through and edit. And when shooting two weddings a week, it's incredible how much extra work this generates.

My Canon 5D mkII is creating a bit of a storage nightmare. Each wedding is creating about 20GB of new RAW images. Everything else about the camera is great. The 21 megapixels mean that I can always crop a good vertical shot out of a horizontal composition and still get a massive image to work with for print. The custom functions have also been life savers when it comes to capturing that critical, unmissable moment.

Only another 2800 photos to work through before bed.

I spent a wonderful day in the Yorkshire Dales with a very talented artist called Piers Browne. Piers creates brilliant landscape paintings but also produces fantastic etchings too. He was being filmed for a documentary about his life and work, so I tagged along to try an capture some of his personality and passion for landscapes. Click on the image above or link below to see the photo gallery.

http://www.kelvinjay.co.uk/editorial/piers-browne/