Reading-based Keith Thompson has become 1997 Fujifilm Wedding Photographer of the Year in the Fujifilm Wedding and Portrait Awards - again! Keith's success in the Fujifilm Awards is well known in the photographic industry. Since 1990, he has won the Wedding title twice, the Portrait title four times and countless other accolades in the quarterly heats. This year, Keith won in three of the four quarterly Wedding heats, netting him £1,500 in Fujifilm professional vouchers. In addition to that, he wins £1,000 cash and a full-colour page in Wedding and Home magazine for the overall title, while the couple featured in his winning portfolio receive £1,000 cash. "We hide the name on our entries, and try to disguise the style so the judges don't know it's us! Everybody has an equal chance - it's all about showing guts", says Debbie, Keith's wife and business partner. "It's still exciting", says Keith. "Entering these awards is like a drug to me. Once you've achieved a certain level of success, you want to keep bettering yourself, both in the work I do for customers and the work entered for the awards. It's a chicken and egg situation - the awards bring in new business, so we keep entering them, and in order to enter them we need to keep doing high quality work for our customers". Keith's winning portfolio featured Kate and Phil, who married in Wokingham. Their choice of venue was Clivedon, a grand stately home which only takes wedding bookings if the couple can guarantee they will fill all the bedrooms with guests overnight. "It's the sort of venue I would actually pay money to shoot in", says Keith. Keith is one of the few social photographers successfully using digital manipulation, a talent he deftly showed off in this portfolio. For example, one shot shows the bride before the wedding, looking dreamily out of a 20ft high window. Keith has added a very faint, low opacity, "slushy" shot of the couple kissing and the word "love" in text with a drop shadow underneath. "I have to admit this shot is a bit gimmicky and over-the-top in terms of digital effects - but they loved it". "Another shot shows the bride getting out of the car, laughing at somebody, looking very pretty and smiley, which is unusual for a nervous bride! The shot is in black and white, but I tinted the car blue and coloured the bouquet for an unusual effect", says Keith. Some may see the use of digital manipulation as "cheating", but Keith disagrees, "If I were to send a print to a Photoshop specialist and say 'Make me an award-winning print' - then that would be cheating. Using digital technology, I can achieve the same result in a couple of hours on my computer that would ordinarily take six or seven hours in the darkroom". Keith's day-to-day work in both wedding and portrait photography aims to provide customers with a very personal experience. "I am a creative photographer, very much dedicated to the individual. I like to show people what I can do, as I think it is quite unusual and contemporary." When Keith covers a wedding he always tries to provide something unique. Debbie says, "We tend not to do traditional smiley pictures as the majority of today's brides prefer that slightly sullen, moody look! I just think, why book Keith if you want the same pictures as everyone else? If someone is recommended by word of mouth, we ensure the two sets of pictures are totally different. We try and keep ahead of the competition, particularly those people who have adopted some of our techniques and styles successfully." Keith's reputation as a wedding photographer has reached such a high level that customers have to book well in advance. Summer 1999 is fully booked and he is not taking bookings for 2000 yet for fear of leaving himself open to cancellations. Although the majority of Keith and Debbie's business comes from producing wedding photographs, they also do portrait work. "We would love to get our portrait business up to the successful level of our wedding business," says Debbie. What portraits we do tend to be modern lifestyle portraits in black and white, usually in people's own environment with informal posing." As Keith prefers to shoot portraits on location, the business moved out of their studio about a year ago. "From a creative point of view, we ended up reproducing similar images time after time. We would rather spend a day with a customer in a natural environment creating something unique," says Keith. As they no longer have a studio, Keith and Debbie have recently bought a gallery in Wargrave which was opened on 12 May. The gallery will give potential customers the opportunity to see Keith's work before deciding what sort of style would best suit them. Keith and Debbie can be contacted on 0118 986 8088. For more information please contact: Rosemary Athawes at Fujifilm Professional on 0171 586 5900.