Quick

Hp5 400 - 10 secs - f.2.5

Erm i really like this picture but it seems disjointed from everything else so its got its own post,


So night time shooting again, head wasn't all there this time and left the camera on f.42 for half my film so i had to go back and shoot everything again.

The set up for this image was great, very atmospheric. Shame i almost set off the alarm on it as i metered. ah well, next week i have a shoot on Friday and Saturday i'm gonna tr and keep personal projects out of the week this year because i want to nail my uni work.

keep ya updated yoo

alllso alot of people ask me what i use and why i use certain things in post production so maybe i'll do a room tour or somthing? probs have to tidy up first thooough. :]]]

Whats new?

Few updates, new semester at uni has started so I'm geared up with loads of nice ideas that will hopefully come to light very soon,

I found a very good model whos gonna work with me though a fairly over the top shoot so look out for that.

7th of February is another big shoot, got a great make up artist coming down and the model is great, won't give away too much yet but watch this space.

In other news i just got short listed for a commercial photography award, very happy with that was a shot from "The Question Of Junk" collection i did that got me in, all the work shortlisted along with mine is getting a small exhibition throughout April at the light house, i'll post more details when that gets closer.

Also, heres what i do on weekends:

Fine Art

Crude but funny.

Right so i want to be a well respected artist one day, how better to start my journey of knowledge than to attend a high state art affair right in my home town of Wolverhampton!

I don't want to type out the story in full but let say everything that happened up to the exhibition was a mad rush, it started at 5 so i took a nap at one so i could be at my best for the evening.

I woke up at half 5 :(

Mad dash to the sink 5 tins of hair spray im outta there running to the gallery. On the way i pass a cafe and see two of mine uni lecturers in there, so i presume there going to the art gallery too.

Let me just add this was a private viewing of a massively famous painter couple Marianne and Adrian Stokes. They nailed a first class stamp with one of there painting and this was the first ever showing of the work in the UK, the couple died years ago but the work is carried on by the daughters and great daughter ect (we'll get to that later)

So i arrive, the receptionist asks for my coat and instead i give her my massive headphones she laughs and i carry on muttering how i made a good impression.

So now im in a nice flash atrium standing still for about 30 minuets waiting for something to happen when it hits me everyone else here is old. Very old.

Then my decent starts. Wine. i started to drink lots of wine to take my boredom away, 3 glasses in and nothing in my stomach, bad times.

Then my first mistake of the night. I see a woman with a massive necklace, bigger than big. So i cruise over and begin to mingle. My opening line "nice neck chain" went down pretty well and conversations about the youth art culture began to flow. The rest of the dialog is a blur but soon after the wine compelled me to start giggling like a little school girl. Upon that she departed.

4 glasses of wine now and people start gathering around the bottom of the stairs where a mic is set up and the woman with the bling gets up on stage, announces her self as the mayor of Wolverhampton. Gutted.

After a short speech from the mayor and some austrila who reminded me of a bond villian the gallery was open.

blah blah blah art was good ect ect ect go see it ect ect.

5 glasses in and im looking at a painting of some boats and trees when a woman taps me on the sholder. After a few minuets talking she tells me she was related to the artist and she helped put it togeather and she was happy her moms art was reaching out too young people. A few minuets later i slip in the question, so what do ya do when your not helping the work out? she replied "web designer" sadly i was pretty drunk here, rambeling on like a weird old man and then i said the words "let the side down about eh?" she departed and i couldn't believe what i'd just said.

Rest of the night was falling about giggeling going home and eating pizza, lets hope gallery visit number two is better.


disclaimer:
Side note, i made alot of new friends oddly enough, from the disabled motion opening some guys gave me some great ideas and everyone was really nice. Ignore my picture of devil jesus. Great show runs till 31 jan go see!

x

Snap shots

yes even amount the chaos of foam i know my settings
fuji reala 100iso - f.60 - 1/125

I love taking pictures right, its my job my future and totally dominates my life.
if i could replace my penis with a camera i would, and it wold be a massive camera. :]

Right


So sometimes i cant even help my self taking my camera everywhere with me, nights out, shopping trips, everything.

?

Ever since i got my holga its been my snap shot camera. siting in a little camera bag by my side. Its a very tricky camera to use as are most range finders when you start using them.

Ok maybe not for this one :/
fuji 400iso - f.60 - 1/60 (b)

Now if you don't know a holga check my other post but its a fat toy camera made out of plastic, used in lo-fi (bad image quality) photography.

So when i heard about a foam party me and my little holga were all over it, after some heavy electric tape work sealing the back onto my camera (after the last night club shoot where it basically fell apart) we were set to go,

fuji reala 100iso - f.60 - 1/125 blue colour flash fired
(sorry about small pictures sizes, light room suddenly hates anything over 10 megs)

wont bore you with the facts but it went well and got some good results, check them out.

After my hang over the next day faded i checked my holga for damage, a sticker fell out, that's it. Strong little camera when fortified with tape.

fuji 400iso - f.60 - 1/80 (b)

Just a few quick fire facts, Holgas are slated by the pro industry for being lo-fi and having unpredictable results YET they take high res studio images on 30k cameras then make them look like they were shot on a holga, see the news skins ad campaign for a good example.

How lame.

Dress Up

Sorry about the mess :[

OK so i had a university project about displaying work blah bla life story ect,

and i love fashion photography so i combined the two and made a dress made out of photographs, very sexy :].

First off let me say that fashion artists have been raping photography for as long as its been out, pictures of black and white grand ma and grand dad or Monroe on a loosely fitted t-shirt aint nothing new. But for a photographer to design and create rather than a fashion designer is newer. Kinda.

Images were taken on a mix of fp4 and hp5 film to level out contrast

Its cool in fashion to not have much respect for other arts your throwing onto your design in an aid to boost the impact of the piece, but with this dress it was always 50% image 50% dress one could not over power the other, the images couldn't be altered to make the dress look better and the dress couldn't be comprehended to make the photos look better.

Concealed zip on the sides lets you get in and out, i have no idea why you'd ever want to get out though :]

Right so i only just got this dress back, so i haven't been able to do a real shoot with it yet but a lot of people were asking how it looked and what not so instead of the dress being on a lady with good legs, they will take place on my messy dorm floor.

sooooo, its about a size 10, was going to be a 12 but after hand washing it 20 times to get all the ink out it shrunk a bit, works for me.

The contact sheet was printed onto ilford pearl rc paper in the lab then scanned in

About the design, if your a real photographer then you've seen a 120 contact sheet, and you'll know there amazing. None of this fiddling around like a 35m sheet you can see your images at a good size and it looks almost like a comic strip.

The Contact sheet was repeated 4 times then digitally printed onto just over a meter of fabric before hitting the sweat shops :]

The images embedded where images i had lying around from a local Christmas market while practicing with the 40m hasselblad lens. W won't bore you will all the details but expect this to be the first of many, the second one is already a twinkle in my eye.

The dress is was designed to show every picture in full at least once on the dress. Never happened though :p

If your nuts enough to want to buy a dress like this get in touch and we'll talk business talk. Like men in suits who have no sex life.

Scene

What is it with scene kids and fish eye lenses?

Soon as a scene kid gets his mom to buy him a top range SLR cos hes feeling expressive n shit the next thing they get is a fish eye.

Now i love fish eye distortion but why do all you bad photographers have to horde it? I cant even look at a fish eye lens now without 12 bad scene photographers faces popping up in my head.

sort ya lives out

rant over.

10 year photo project,

Just a quick one, i finally got round to reading and viewing a good friend of mines 10 year photo project and i reckon if anyone comes on this blog they should head over to Johnny's page and check it out Its still in early stages and its not every day you get to watch a young guys life unfold is it?

http://10yearphoto.blogspot.com/

i even make a few guest appearances how about that :]]


I'm not normally a massive fan of photos of my self but while working on a project with our hasselblads together me and Johnny took some pictures of each other, here's two of mine!

Night

fp4 125- 30" - f.5.6

Somtimes when one o' clock in the morning rears its ugly head and your still on lolcats there's something wrong with your life,

But that happens a lot with me so i curb my insomnia by night shooting, tag teamed with my hasselbald i just kinda walk around shooting ya know, nothing planned guess it helps me sleep, heres couple of tip for night time shooting that i've picked up and thought i'd share :)

fp4 125- 3 minuet 38 seconds - f.5.6

1. Focusing is very hard, as most of your subjects will have no light on them what so ever you'll need to spend a good long time working on your focus, look out for lights, signs or even gravel depending on how sharp your lens is. Also your big flashy auto focus has almost no chance unless your camera uses a assisted flash focus so always be ready and willing to turn the dials manually

2. When a shutter fires the mirror inside flips, if your shooting a 2 minuet exposure a minor shake such as a mirror flip will create camera shake, cameras will have a mirror up function sometimes witch will allow you to lessen shake before you fire the shutter, keep in mind you wont be able to focus or see our image any more when the mirror is up until you wind back down.

3. You know to always use a tripod right? well that's good only a lot of photographers don't realize a tripod is only half the game when it comes to night time shooting. You can spend an hour setting up and metering a shot to perfection but as soon as you press the button you'll knock the camera crating shake and motion blur, it wont be a lot but just enough to ruin your image, use a screw in cable release to avoid this.

fp4 125- 2 minuet - f.5.6

4. A decent light meter, the more auto a light meter is the less helpful it is in the dark. A good light meter will help you towards figuring out the best exposure time for your image, always have a wide open aperture and work towards shutter times. Night time photographys lowest shutter i've ever seen is around 30 seconds, thats with street light illumination. Never trust deicated inbuilt meters in darkness and always zero your meter before you set out.

5. As soon as you start using external lights its not night time photography any more its just street. Night photography is the art of using very low light to create a different feel to your images. Flashing kills atmosphere unless used professionally so just try and use natural light.

6. Use the empty streets to your advantage, its very easy to create a cold scary feel at night if your creative mind is in gear. Be creative and try to add tension as well as beauty to your images. Its all about atmosphere, be cinematic and use the darkness to your creative advantage.

fp4 125- 45" - f.5.6

7. Photography likes simple, in fact its always on the phone to simple telling it about its day. Isometric shapes, repeat patterns, simple ideas all work the best in most forms of photography that stays true in night time. Shoot your images one idea at a time, you might have 2 shots right next to each other and getting them both in the same shot is not always the right thing to do, space it out and take your time.

8. My final point is be safe, your carrying a lot of gear on your back when you do any type of photography right, i go out solo because its how i work if your happy to have a friend who's always having trouble sleeping take them, always check your not too far from help and take a phone, don't want your nice camera stolen do we! :[

fp4 125- 30" - f.5.6

Holga :o

Holga's are great cameras, i wont bore you with why or the history of them but look it up!

So a holga is a medium format plastic camera, medium format relates to 6x6 or 6x4.5 sized negs.

f.10 3 seconds 125iso fp4

So i'm basically practicing with the holga on a night out with some fp4 film loaded in when i see some fire swingers bla bla bla theirs the picture.

Anyways the following night i load some colour film in at a night club and start shooting! All is going well and i charge the flash to take another image and the back drops off! Now i expected this, the back of a holga is held togeather by cheap clips and when you buy a holga they even ship it with electric tape to hold it togeather!

Right so that was abit rubbish so i'm looking of better ways to hold my holga together when i stumble upon a camera hacking community known as Go Holga and they suggested Velcro!

Right so thats all set and done, but alot of people i speak to are compaling about how much it costs to develop film, well it costs alot less if you develop your own (black and white anyway). All you need is a developing tank a sink and 3 chemicals that wont cost over 20 pound for a few devs.
The 3 chemicals you'll need is stop fix and developer. After that check on the net for mesusurments and times and your well away! You'll also need a dark room to load your film but thats easy enough!

It'll only take an 30 minuets max to develop a film and then you can wash it for as long as you want. Colour film is very tricky to work and uses different and more chemicals so still take those to your lab!

Some Old Stuff,

Art is all about its progression right? So heres a few of my old images to show you where i kinda started. Dotted from all over!

More to come when i got time!

x

Skirts

200 iso - 1/125 - f.11

Skirts are a mans best friends, a mans other best friend is a corset, but when both turn up at your shoot uninvited is gotta be a Brucie bonus right?

Well i was shooting some up and coming fashion designers work and the shoot was great! all the designers were there and everything went smoothly. The problem was more people than i thought showed up so it was a little tight on time!

200 iso - 1/125 - f.11

I don't tend to shoot much in the way of other peoples work but the quality of the dresses were so high how can i say no!

200 iso - 1/125 - f.16

I look forward to working with those guys again!

Next Project

:o...

:)

Right so the next big project is some urban Gothic thing, not the Gothic your thinking (as in my images wont smell of old meat) very sexy and oddball Gothic in a collection called "Checking In" I'm still finding the right model and my concept art has been drawn and the location was the one i spoke on in my snow post, the house that i have yet to find but when its all done and dusted the project will be amazing (i hope).

Also model mayhem just accepted me finally, took them like a week! now i can cast a team for the shoot!

x

Junk

I'm quickly filling in the blog at the moment with projects i have just started before i opened the blog.

Me and my good friend the director Andy Rutter found our selves getting some press a few months ago about a combined project we were doing "A question of Junk", an open exhibition where anyone could send in there work to us and show it.

We got a good response but in the end we were torn away from it with our personal projects taking command of our lives. But at the top of this blog is one of the images from a set i was doing for the show, they will have some use one day. The project might still bust back into life we never know :].

Big thanks to Ami (the model who posed in the set for me)

x

Snow Day

fp4 - 125 iso - 15sec - f45

A few days ago it was snowing here in the west midlands and I'd been waiting to do a location shoot for sometime for a fashion project I'm working on at a house in a local forest (I won't disclose the details yet)

But anyway i grabbed my gear and traveled head first into this forest to find this house. After 2 hours of walking it hit me that this forest was pretty big and i had no map. As it was only a test shoot to get some good angels on the house i only packed one roll of 125 fp4 film for my Hasselblad camera and a 180m telephoto lens, which is not a landscape lens by any means which was ashame because the views at the top of some of the cliffs i was on were amazing.

fp4 - 125 iso - 1/8 - f11
(i know the borders suck a little :])

So i keep walking to find this house, atleast 3 and a half hours have passed now and i've found nothing at all so to break the monotmy i took some frames. Nothing fancy had i of known i was almost embrassingly bad at finding things i'd of packed more landscape gear but i'll know for next time.

fp4 - 125 iso - 1/2 - f16
(yup they still suck)

When your lost, cold and its getting dark you start feeling pretty scared. If your a photographer and your lost, cold and its stating to get dark and you have no lighting what so ever you start to relise you cant even take good pictures any more meaning the whole missions been a failure.

4 hours had gone now and my original plan to drop my 120 film off to dev at some shop have been totally dashed and its fookin freezing.

All i could do was walk and i eventaully came out onto some street in stupid town found out i was 2 hours away from where i wanted to be and had to walk though some gorilla industrial estate just as the local "blokes" got out of work. gutted.

Never found that house either :[

PinHole

This is a work in progress, a camera made out of a matchbox held together by electric tape.

How does it work? the basis of the camera is known as "pinhole aperture photography" and uses a slot of aluminum or foil with a pin hole in it to control light flow to the film which is threaded though the back of the matchbox.

The film is rolled into another empty canister from the back so when you take a picture and you wind the film n it goes into a light proof chamber.

The camera has about an F. 90 and exposure times are still being worked on but i'll post some results soon.

Till then chomp will guard the camera.

Edit:

FujiFilm colour - 200iso - 2 seconds - f.90
Needs work :]

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