Digital Imaging

Been a little while since I last posted, sorry about that. Things are coming on nicely with just under a month of uni left and just over 2 until the baby is born!! busy times :-).

For the most part I have been working on uni stuff including the projects you will find on my unit 110 page HERE

By far the image I am most pleased with recently though is this one

We were tasked with replicating an iconic image and I am pleased with my results so please do check out the rest of the tasks and see what you think :-)

Advertising Project

We we're given an advertising project in which we got to choose 1 of several briefs all for well known businesses but each of which had an extra consideration to take into account.
The one I chose to do was for the makeup company 'Urban Decay' but I had to somehow incorporate their lack of animal testing while keeping my design consistent with their current advertising.  
The first thing I noticed whilst researching the product was their love for the colour purple, the second was that they seem to have two strings of advertising, the first was to show their products and the second to show models wearing it. I decided to go along the model rout as although my photography is based a lot in portraiture I have little experience with fashion so I thought this would be not only good practice but a bit of fun as well
I also noticed that most of their advertising has extreme landscape cropping so trying to include this, some sort of purple and to show the bright colours that their eyeshadows come in this is what I have come up with so far, this is a very rough idea and by no means the finished piece but here's to hoping i'm on the right track!

new advertisement for urban decay.

Flowers

I decided to do a little playing with some photos I took of flowers. I wanted to have some fun and be a little more artistic and here are the results :-)

Here I cropped the photo, changed the levels and changed the hue slightly to make it seem as though the flower was in a spotlight.

 In this one I changed the levels on the colours almost completely eliminating any red from the photo to create an almost x-ray like image. I like this one particularly as originally the flowers behind the white one were all red or pink. I enjoy taking photos and changing them completely and seeing the difference.

 For this one I wanted to try something a bit different, I have always wanted to be able to paint. My sister is an amazing artist and if i could draw to the standard of her "crappy doodles" I would be happy but alas that skill is not mine. It does amuse me that she struggles to use a camera set on auto so I guess we all have our strong points :-).
Anyway while browsing photoshops filters I have discovered that I can now apparently turn my photos into lovely paintings, I believe this to be some what of a cheat but not one that I am going to argue with!
This is a photo I took many years ago but thought it looked absolutely beautiful as a watercolour painting.

The Loss Of A Great

Good morning

I haven't written a blog now for a couple of weeks for which i appologise. At the beginning of January my Grandad passed away suddenly which hit me very hard. My Grandad was the biggest inspiration in my life and if it weren't for him I never would have followed my dream into photography. Whenever I bought new equipment for my camera I would run it past him first to see what he thought and usually he would know somewhere I could get something better and cheaper!

Grandad was the sort of man who would have words of wisdom for everyone and every situation, his advice was often given to you in the form of a joke but the points he made were clear and always of sound advice. He spent his younger days in the RAF fixing helicopters in Borneo from which came many stories of adventure and fun.

Fun and games, playing concas...

 When I was younger I remember many trips to flower shows and various museums in london. This is where my love of photography started. I would run off with his camera and start shooting away. He taught me to use the camera and all the lenses, the light metre and even how the film would be developed when we sent it off. I was fascinated by all of it and after he and Nanna bought me a camera of my own we were off!
I remember one trip to a garden particularly as there were several large hot houses there with tropical plants in. Grandad told me to watch my lens and make sure I didn't let it get cold between the rooms (it was around march some time and quite chill outside) the next greenhouse we entered the lens on his camera cracked but he didn't get mad he just laughed and said "this is why". That is what he was like, everything was a lesson to learn from.
I still have many of the photographs taken on those trips and like to look back on them, some of them are even fairly good photos!!
I will miss him dearly not only because he was my grandad but also because he was the biggest single influence in my life.
I feel sad knowing that he will not be here to see me graduate and will not be there to influence and advise all of my children but also i feel privileged that he was there for me and for a short time there for my daughter and I know that he has left a lasting impression on both our lives.
River refers to him as "gurt Grandad". he had so much patience with her and she always loved to see him and my Nan, despite being just 3 she saw him at the hospital just before he passed and will be attending the funeral next week with me, she understands what has happened and although she is obviously sad she has taken it upon herself to make sure Nanna is ok and to be there for her. This I attribute to the great teaching and influence that grandad passed to her even in their short time together, she reminds me a lot of him, always full of curiosity and quick wit.

Rest In Peace Grandad, wherever you may now be <3 xXx

Putting Plans On Hold

Happy ne year everyone!!

Now that that's out of the way I have come to the conclusion that I am going to have to put my plans on hold for a while. My intention was to open my studio come the end of January, I had everything ready, however with the news that I am pregnant with number 2 my plans are now on hold for a while.
I will still be working on my photo book and setting up a website to sell prints etc of my other photography but I feel that it is not realistic to try and go ahead with opening a studio whilst expecting a baby and would only end badly if I tried to run a studio with a newborn.

Although I am disappointed that my plans will not be working to the timeline I had planned I know that it is only a timeline revisal and not a complete ending of the whole thing so it's ok, and besides in the next few months I'll have another tiny person to take up all my time and energy :-)

uni has become a bit of a struggle. I have been in a lot of pain and absolutely exhausted! My pregnancy with River was a dream compared to this one. At this time in my last pregnancy I would have still been working, this time around I can barely stay awake for a whole day!
Still by the time baby arrives I will have finished uni and have a little time to relax and enjoy the beautiful new life we have created. In the mean time keep an eye out for my upcoming page documenting everything we have done so far in our "digital imaging" project and in a couple of months I will also post up my critical studies essay for you all to see.

May this year bring you all that you wish for :-)

Confidence Knock

Today I have to say that my confidence is a bit low, starting a business is the hardest thing I have had to do.
To say that I am not very popular is an understatement, I have always been a bit of a loner and a geek and this is fine by me. I would rather sit and play with my camera than go out drinking with people and until now this has never been a problem for me however I have noticed that between me and my classmates my progress is very slow in comparison. My class is populated, for the most part, by young, pretty girls with lots of friends and contacts to people who can help spread their name and volunteer to model for them and help them practice. I on the other hand have myself and my beautiful daughter. If I were still with my husband I expect I would have many people to help but splitting up with him apparently meant losing everyone I thought was my friend as well. So now I am in a quandry, I don't know how to go about advertising myself and getting help with practice shoots. I know I still have a lot to learn before opening my studio in the summer of next year but with nobody to help how am I supposed to do this? I need to fail a few times with people that wont mind the odd wobble before I try to do this as a profession with people that expect perfect customer service and results.
I have booked a studio and have asked several people if they would like to come and have their photo taken with their children. I am hoping that at least a couple of people will take me up on the offer so that I can at least get a few nice shots to add to my portfolio, hopefully after that things will start picking up and head in the right direction.
I know that in the grand scheme of things I have only been working on this for a couple of weeks but I am very aware of how important it is for me to be at least ready to start by the time I finish uni. This is where I want to go and what I want to do. It's likely that if I don't get off the ground next year then I never will and I'm back to square 1 in another dead end job somewhere trying to make ends meet and never doing what I love :-(

Hopefully this is just a little confidence wobble and I'll be back to my usual self in no time. I expect this is just because I am full of cold and rather tired

Wish me luck everyone...........

Macro Adventures

I have recently been thinking about macro photography, It's something I've always loved but never really got in to, so I went out with my macro lens and had a go. The initial results were good, but not for why you would think...

Although I am very pleased with these photos and I like them a lot none of them were actually taken with my macro lens. I found that a small shake I have always had in my hands is magnified when using the lens (as I suppose it would be) but despite that I was as pleased as I always am at the results from my kit lens.
At this point I started looking for a macro lens with Vibration Reduction on it like my kit lens does.
After fainting at the price I went in search of alternatives. What I found was something called extension rings, these are basically hollow tubes that force the lens to focus closer to the object you are photographing. It was also at this point that my lovely partner got me a gorillapod for our anniversary. usually I don't take my tripod out and about as I'm generally photographing things that are either moving or in the middle of undergrowth next to the ground so it has no use. This one however can get pretty much anywhere I can and is small enough that I can just lift it up if something else suddenly catches my view so it's perfect!
After a bit of messing around at home I went out for a test run.
Here are some of the results of that.

I am very pleased with the outcome and will be continuing along these lines for a little while. I am hoping to eventually put together a book containing images like these throughout the year to encourage people to take a closer look at their surroundings.

I am also tieing this in with a landscape project we have been given at uni and this will add to the image selection for both that and my book, 

The idea behind it connects my love of macro photography with something else that is close to me, sight, people see but they do not observe, I am quite observant despite not being able to see that well, being almost totally blind in one eye I have struggled with sight all my life, I find reading quite hard and suffer from headaches constantly due to eye strain. This also makes me very nervous of the future. I am a very visual person and without my sight I don't know what I would do so I really want to encourage people to take the time to see what they are looking at as opposed to just taking everything for granted.

If you like what you see then don't forget you can visit my facebook page Here, why not give me a like and stay up to date with how my book is going and other things i'm up to :-)