Three photos a day!

This morning I decided to spend a little time looking round my garden and taking some photos for my "Photo-A-Day" project. I couldn't decide what photo to post out of these three, so I posted all three! 

Meet my ferret buster:

And a very pretty cobweb:

A Photo a Day.

So, I'm going to be taking a photograph every day... the photograph will be of anything! It may be a portrait, still life, nature, street... it's just a project which I thought would challenge myself and keep me developing as a photographer! I shall post my results in this blog (maybe not daily due to internet access!) so watch out!

Story Time

McCurry and Pinhole Cameras.

I was in London yesterday and I had the opportunity to visit a Steve McCurry exhibition, I am very glad that I took the time to view the exhibition! I know his work quite well and have seen various pieces online and in magazines, but viewing them as large framed prints added a whole new dynamic to the photographs. I loved all of his photographs and I think it would be very hard to choose a favourite, but I'll post some that overly stood out to me:

In other news I have made a pinhole camera out of a matchbox! I am also going to try a few other ways of making a pinhole camera... so I'll be shooting some pinhole photographs and posting the results soon, so keep your eyes open!!!

Good old film!

So, I went to wales and I took my recently aquired Centon SLR with 50mm f1.7 lens along with a few rolls of film! I only ended up using 1 roll... but I am quite happy with the shots I got. I used Kodacolour 200 film which I actually found in Poundland, and I really like the film despite it's cheapness!

I don't usually shoot film, but I do love shooting film. Many people have the opinion that film is outdated and pointless.... but I dissagree with them! 

First reason: You have to really consider your shot as you only have limited exposures on the film and then you have to pay for the film to be developed... so you don't want to waste the film! 

Second reason: The fact you can't see the photos you've taken straight away makes you really excited about seeing the developed film & prints!

Third reason: The colours and aesthetics are so much more beautiful!

Fourth reason: You can experiment with different cameras/films/processes.... and it's so much better than just adding effects in photoshop.

Fifth reason: You get to understand how the camera/lighting/exposure works.

I could keep adding reasons!!!!

I was very happy with the prints and the 5 day wait for boots to process them was agonising! I do have to say that I prefer shooting portraits with the centon & 1.7 50mm lens than landscapes, but that is probably because the lens is naturally made for portraits. 

Here's a few shots:

I currently have some ISO 400 HP5 in the camera so keep your eyes open for a blog on that in the future!

New (old) flash = Experimenting with Still Life!

Okay, So I have just gained a nice new-to-me flash! It's an old Philips P536 Thyristor CLS-X flash (if you know what that means!)... but I didn't think it would be that good because it's old, but actually I am rather impressed with it!

So whenever someone gets new camera equipment... they always have to test it out! So I had a little go with food colouring and water! 

I'm no Still Life expert... but it was quite fun taking these photos.. and really easy! And it's also a little bit addictive, because you always want to see how the food colouring takes to the water and what interesting photo you can get! 

Great fun! :)

Creating Landscapes.

Everytime I see this photograph I fall in love with photography. It is a woven bamboo art installation, it was made and then photographed by Andy Goldsworthy... he doesn't just photograph landscapes, but he creates them too... pretty amazing stuff! Goldsworthy is definatley up there alongside Michael Kenna with some of my favourite photographers!

Rain in Wales.

In the last week I have been away in Wales for a holiday. I love Wales, it is such a beautiful country and there is always so much to photograph... but the only downside is, it rains..quite a bit!

So pretty much the whole week it rained, I had a go at photographing landscapes in the rain.. but this happened:

On the last day of the holiday it brightened up for a few hours, so I grabbed my camera and went on a little walk to capture a little bit of Wales! I was quite sad about the fact it rained so much during the week as there were many places I would've loved to capture and a few projects that I could have worked on during my time in Wales, but I am grateful that it did dry up for a short time because I did take some photographs that I am quite happy with! Here are a couple:

And I also submitted one photograph from wales to Vogue Italia and it was accepted! I am quite happy about that: http://www.vogue.it/en/photovogue/Portfolio/3990a6e2-7124-4188-8c38-c3940ac99537/Image

Life is starting to get crazy again because I'm back at college in 11 days and there is a lot I want to fit into that short space of time!

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