It has been a long time since I have been this frustrated with myself and my camera.

I had four shoots in mind over this weekend and non of them have gone to plan. This is possibly because the shoots themselves were just tests for a bigger idea. Still, it is very frustrating because I now need to find time to do them over the coming week, by which point I will possibly have more on the to do list.

My idea yesterday was to go out with the camera simply for fun and to accumulate some ideas. I very rarely take my camera out to aimlessly photograph things and I think this is why I found myself getting frustrated. I got home and didn't feel like I had anything, I didn't have a single photograph I liked.

Today I had some time and had a subject matter in mind. Drove to the location and within 10 minutes I was back in the car and driving home. I couldn't even bring myself to get the camera out of my bag.

I wonder if other photographers have this problem? It really dents your confidence when it happens, I imagine it to be like the photographers version of writers block.

Think I will be writing this weekend off as a lesson learnt.

Slipstream

It's official, slipstream is a little addictive!

This was my first attempt at capturing a slipstream by projecting it and filming using my phone. The film is made up of two photographs that I chopped up using the slipstream software and then as I played the collections I kept chopping up the sequences.

Apologies for the poor film quality and the slow processing of the computer, as a result the slipstream is a bit slower than it should be.

www.thesnibstonpalimpsest.com

Food Glorious Food

During a chat with Lance the other week he was telling me about a cook book that IKEA have produced called Homemade is best. Carl Kleiner is the photographer who created these amazing pieces of work.

While working on food photography skills I decided to try out this style of image. This is a real game of patience and a steady hand. The camera was set up on a tripod above the A4 size space I was working with, one mistake with any of the ingredients and you need to start the whole process again!

I tried to work out which ingredient would effect the paper the most, so as to put that on last. Working with cream, butter and blackberry juice was not as easy as Kleiner makes it look.

To make this better it would be more ideal to work on coloured perspex so that mistakes could be wiped up. Plus spacing and precision can be better executed. 

An infectious process, I want to try more.

The food photography that I was working on at the time also went well except I'd like to do some more shoots with a reflector to try and eliminate the shadows that appear in some of the photographs. Thankfully I don't think they effect this shoot too bad but I would like to work on manipulating natural light.

Self Promotional

Inspired by Chris Doyle's Identity guidelines booklet I have been given an assignment to produce my own version of this by next week. When I first saw the brief I was a little unsure about it but since I have been thinking about it and coming up with ideas I'm looking forward to getting started on it.

http://brandtao.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/personal-brand-identity-guidelines/

Capturing Kate

Fashion Photography

Not my strong point. It's going to be interesting being put out side of my comfort zone for this new assignment set by Julien. To create a fashion photograph that is clearly inspired by an iconic fashion image.

The assignment needs to be planned and completed in just over 2 weeks and yesterday I was given a few hours to create a photograph inspired by a well known artist to give a better insight into what I need to take into consideration for the final photograph.

I knew exactly what I was going to do before going into the studio, that scared me a little, it wouldn't be this simple, surely. No it wasn't, looking at the photos on the computer I had not taken inspiration from Avedon I had simply copied it. Stark white background, high contrast image. 

There is a fine line between taking inspiration and just copying what a photographer does. 

Looking at the other photographs I had taken I began to be lead more by personal preference...I have some research to do!

 The final photograph presented to the class.

17

Final year is very much underway, been back for the first week and have plenty to think about and get working on. Have a feeling this year is going to be slightly insane!


To get people interacting and back into photography mode we were given a quick turn around exercise to photograph 17 items. 


I think we all thought it would be easy, until we got outside in the rain and our brains went to mush.


However, we got there:

*Photos to come soon*

About half way through the exercise I thought maybe we were being a little too literal. I had the ideas of wanting to take every photograph as a portrait, with a 1.8mm lens, making sure the background was out of focus but still coherent throughout so that they all looked regimented except for the subtle changes of the points we were photographing from the list.


Working in groups, going out with no initial plan and aware of short deadlines can sometimes mean that ideas get lost. I'm glad I've reminded myself early on that planning what to photograph before going out to look for it is always a good idea!


Seeing everyones slide show at the end of the day, it was interesting how others interpreted on the words. Good start.