Shaw Solution

Once again acompanying the Jacket as his Photographer for Fatea Magazine for a performance of Anais Mitchell at 12 Bar near Tottenham Court Road.

There were two warm acts, one, Clarence Bucaro gave me a complimentary CD of his music and were very good, smooth.

Sunday 23rd at Westbourne Park was a Giants Photoshoot, playing with perspective and wide angle lenses. There were three models, two girls and a guy. The day was beautiful, incredibly sunny which has its own problems. Dark, harsh shadows everywhere, especially on the face.

Saturday, despite the amazing sun, I spent my day in a darkened studio with the undead.... It was a shoot organized by the Alternative Photographers & Models Meetup Group and based at Studio Seventeen in Balham.

There were four models:

Thomas Jefferson wrote the above, almost 220 years ago. To me, it still rings true, but then we hear about things like this....

Weeks after being told that their use of the Terrorism (and removal of freedoms) Act was incorrect and after having been told to pay a pair of photographers £30,000 in damages for the unlawful stop, another photographer, one who had just been speaking on the subject, was stopped by police, not even using a dSLR, but a compact camera!

This is the main-page for the 365 day photo challenge It is designed to give an overview of the challenge and for me to record the progress and other information.

June

London For the first month in my shoot, I will be doing London. I will be taking a shot, each day, which shows some recognisable part of London. This might be something trivial like the Metro newspaper, or something more 'on the nose' like Big Ben.

July

Entropy
Images of the decay and change inherent in things.

I attended the Nigel Wilson Photography Night Course yesterday evening, it was an excellent event, a talk followed by a guided walk around the waterloo area. It was a really useful event and it gave me a lot of ideas about how I can improve my evening photography. Its a very different approach than what I'm used to doing with low light work, which has been gigs,

There were about nine of us on the course, with a wide selection of cameras. Nigel took us through a series of tips, tricks and advice. The core things that I learned were

I'm thinking about setting myself a photography challenge. It is not an uncommon one, called 365. You take a photo every day for a year. Often people do a single theme, such as self-portraits, or they do something very generic of just anything they see when they go about their day. I'm thinking something in-between. Each month gets a theme, means it won't get quite so stale for me and shouldn't get quite so dull and I can expand my creativity, but but having a theme means I do need to think more, and not just take random candids.

Current thoughts are:

A selection of images from 2009, complete with information on why the image was chosen and what I learned from doing it. Its now for sale at Blurb.com and you can see the preview below!

I've just picked up a second hand Canon 17-40mm f4.0 L series lens and taken it out into the new forest an to my sister's house as a trial run of the images it can take.

My first impressions are of just how different the L series lenses are to ones aimed at the amature market. The focusing on this lens is faster and quieter than the Canon 50mm I've been using, much faster and much quieter.

I can see why people say once you've used an L series you won't go back.

Interestingly, the zoom mechanism is backwards to the Sony lenses I have used, which will take some getting used to.

Spent the afternoon being shown the tricks and tips of using a professional camera by the talented Esper. There is a great deal of customization which can be done and alot of functionality which I'd not have found for months, if at all.

One of the things I'm most interested in trying is using the seven levels of bracketing to take some HDR images! Typcically, cameras only do a 3 level bracket.

I've been given advice on kit I should be considering, I've gone through it and made the following decisions.