category
photography
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10.22.08Do photographers need to punctuate?
So, life has been pretty busy these past few weeks for me what with my new course and all in the mean time however the site has been getting quite a lot of hits particularly this this post. I’m glad of this and I’m even more happy to hear that my little recommendation has encouraged some people to take up watching the show, for some of them it will even be their first anime!
However there was a complaint or two about my spelling/punctuation/the way I write which is fine, but I am not a review blog and I have never claimed to be, I don’t want to write for a magazine and I don’t want to win any writing awards I was pretty much done with all of that years ago. I just write as it comes to me hopefully people can put up with that and keep coming back.What I’ve been up to however is trying my hardest not to do the research I’m supposed to be doing for my course, and as usual putting it off until the last minute. I’ve spent most of my time bathing if i’m honest Lush gave me a whole bunch of free stuff at staff training so now I spend most days doing nothing and smelling yummy.
I’ve been contacting local agencies and looking for models for projects however, so that is one useful thing I’ve done, I’ve been getting quite good responses too and have models for at least 7 shoots lined up so it’s all good. I shot Frankie again on my sx-70 a few weeks back at a park near here (mickey mouse ears and all) and I’m pretty in love with the Polaroids. I have 60 shots of Polaroid left and when that is gone it is pretty much gone, which sort of makes me sad. I wish I had the money to buy all the bulk 600 film people are selling on Ebay but sadly I’ll have to make do with what I have.
Hopefully there will be more updates next week.
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10.02.08My year in lists
I’ve been a bad blogger I must admit and this update is way overdue, the main excuse I have for the recent lack of updates however is reasonably valid college started again and since it did everything has been up in the air and all over the place if i’m honest.
The course itself is like a breath of fresh air to someone like me, we’re going to be going over marketing and business plans and all of that other boring stuff that I have been completely putting off learning about despite the fact that to be a successful photographer it is something I really need to know. We’ve been told about twenty times that this year will go incredibly fast, which is incredibly scary when you take into account that I have to have everything sorted by the time it is over. We’re talking websites, business cards, clients everything. All of this whilst also producing various research books, working journals and professional development folders alongside shooting portfolio images, in short it is a lot of work.
We were told to plan out our entire year ‘Where do you want to be in a years time, work backwards from there’ I’ve never needed to plan out my whole year before and I must say it is something that I just cannot do, I don’t even know what I’m doing in two weeks time let alone the end of the year. And of course none of this taken into account the fact that peoples plans are likely to change as well as peoples aspirations.One thing I know I am doing this year is continuing a personal project of mine, the image at the start of this post is from said project and is of a model called Frankie. It’s a studio portraiture project which is a bit of departure from my usual work and is all about addressing gender roles and the weakness of the sexes. I really enjoy shooting the images for it even though it can be a little strange asking people to think about things that make them upset, but due to this there is always some sort of connection between their eyes and the camera and when I am looking through that lens I can almost feel the emotions in the picture before I’ve even taken it. I don’t really get this with some of the more commercial work I shoot.
In other news I bagged myself a job at Lush, which has always been a dream job of mine if I’m honest. The place smells lovely, I use nearly all of their products, and everyone I met that already works there is so friendly.
It wasn’t an easy position to get to be honest, and it is only temporary but hopefully they’ll like me enough to offer me a more permanent position. I had to go through two rounds of interviews, where 150 people were narrowed to 80, then to 14 and then finally to 7. Luckily I’m one of those 7 and I nearly smashed the floor when I got the call because I was jumping up and down so much.
The downside of this however, is fitting it in around everything else I know I have to do for the final year of the course but I’m sure I’ll manage. I bought myself my first Moleskine diary the other day and I’m not entire sure how I managed without out.I can’t help feeling though, even with all of this work ahead of me that this academic year is going to be the best yet. I’m excited
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09.10.08Missing people
This is Debbie in a quick test shot I did of some lighting for a personal project of mine, I love the vintage colors the film gave me and how serene she looks here, she’s a very pretty girl and is a complete rocker at heart.
She was an a friend from my previous course, four years we’d been going to the same building and taking the same lectures, shooting for the same projects. She was one of the few people in my class that I actually enjoyed being around and I think I am going to miss her next year. I’m going to miss complaining about certain lecturers and their inability to mark unbiasedly with her, we shared the same views on a good deal of things when it came to certain aspects of the course and if I’m honest I used to enjoy having a good old moan with her.As the start of the final year of the course gets nearer (5 days away in fact) I find myself realising that there are a lot of people I am going to miss next year if I am honest with myself. Emily isn’t the only person I’m going to find myself without, and I wonder how I’m going to get through the boring lectures without someone to childishly write notes to.
All of this said there are people I am glad I won’t have to put up with next year and there are some that I am not afraid to say I wish weren’t on the course with me, I am not a mean or cold hearted person and it may seem like a mean thing to say but there are people I have come across that have completely opened my eyes to just how catty people can be, these people I could do without. I suspect however that you’ll be hearing more from me about this once the course begins.
I’m following a few of my old classmates through their blogs and I actually wish more of them were bloggers, there are people who’s lives I really want to keep up with and some ups and downs I would really enjoy reading, part of me hopes that there are people I don’t fall out of touch with but life goes so quickly and people come and go, and that has never been something I have handled well.I’m starting to miss college quite a bit, though I can predict that once I go back it will only be a few days before I start complaining about it, however I find myself missing certain aspects of it. I miss having the access to the equipment and the studio itself there have been times this holiday that I have been itching to get into the studio.
I’ve had a model I shot a few months back email me letting me know that she is going full time as a model and wants to set up a shoot, i told her that I’d love to help her with her portfolio but I’m going to have to wait a few weeks sadly, it’s a busy time right now and college will be starting again soon however I am really glad she got in touch it is fashion which is something I haven’t shot in a while but its something I can’t wait to get my teeth into. My style has defiantly grown since the last time I shot any fashion based work and I think the deliberate break I took from shooting anything fashion related may have paid off, it has allowed me to get myself together think about my style and where it is going and even enabled me to asses little things like what I shoot on and what kind of film I shoot which I think is are important things to reassess for any photographer. -
08.26.08An empty room
This is Emily, she’s been my flatmate for two years and we’ve been attending the same art college for four, this last year I’ll be by myself. There will be no random shopping trips after lectures finish (or sometimes while they’re still going on), there will be no funny nicknames for the new people on the course who’s real names we can’t remember, and there will be no going to the Chinese supermarket and buying lots of Pocky then attempting to eat it without freaking out our lecturer. I’m not sure how I’ll cope without that really.
I’ve been incredibly busy these past few days so you will have to excuse my lack of a blog post. I’m absolutely exhausted right now, to be honest my sleeping pattern really hasn’t gotten any better but either way I am forcing myself to post this.
I have been putting the final touches to the mammoth bedroom de-cluttering which basically involved me pretty much throwing almost everything I own out because I hadn’t seen it in two years under piles of other stuff I owned. Needless to say I didn’t accidentally throw anything important out like I usually do in the whole process.
All of this needed to be done of course because I am moving out, something I’ve been fully prepared for for a while but still sort of rushes up on you at the last minute. It’s my last week in my current residence and I’ve been here for two years the place sort of feels like mine and it will be hard to leave it behind even if it wasn’t worth the rent I’ve been paying.
Everything that managed to avoid the intense de-clutter however has ended up in suitcases (I had no cardboard boxes and figured I’d save a few trees) and holdalls, quite a lot of them I’m still shocked at how much stuff I have and how on earth I managed to fit it all into this tiny tiny space I’ve been calling home for the past two years. It is odd to sit and look at it all and then look around my now pretty empty room, all of your stuff ends up in boxes or cases or storage at some point. It’s like you accumulate things, some things you can throw out but some things you know you have to take wherever you reside from now on, I have too many of the latter it would seem even after filling 25 bin bags.
Have you ever needed to de-clutter your room and been shocked by how much stuff you have? I’m sure we all realize it sometime like it dawns on us that you have things you don’t even remember buying, it’s a weird feeling.I’m going to London on Sunday with Jon and it will be a much needed break from the usual if I am honest, this summer has been the dullest one ever filled with an incredible lack of money. I’m not sure how I’m going to pay for anything while I’m in London but the break will be fun.
I’m probably going to end up seeing a lot of things I really want but can’t afford, I wanted to go to China town originally and try and find some cute pointless things I don’t need but I think given my current financial situation I should probably stay well away from any store selling cute things, however this train of thought will most likely go out of the window. Oh well. -
08.08.08Model needs & Bento boxes
This is Jon, he is the one person I never get tired of photographing. I have rolls and rolls of really old film with him on it, and I will probably end up with a lot more by the end of my lifetime. He understands the me behind the camera more than he understands the camera being pointed at him if that makes any sense at all, he is is just one of those people that completely understands me and knows exactly what I want and he always seems to be looking at me through the camera though all that glass and metal the eyes find me.
Mostly shooting portraits though is annoying sometimes I constantly find yourself at strange hours of the night wanting to take photographs, with obviously no person to shoot. This summer has seen an incredible lack of people for me to photograph, but I’m really trying to get out of that loop and get back on form again. I wouldn’t call it a creative block but it is something like that, my creative juices are still very much flowing I’m just lacking in the materials, in this case the models to put them onto film.
I shot self portraits the other week, which is something I do rarely it is something that interests me greatly but I don’t find myself terribly photogenic and usually can’t bare to look at the negatives. However I was so sick of not shooting anything in so long last week that I just did it, the film has been sitting in the fridge (it’s outdated) since then. I intend to process it when I get some money, but really what I want to be doing is shooting more people I feel like putting out some kind of distress signal for models.I’ve been spending a lot of time on eBay this week mostly looking at cute Japanese things, I just can’t help myself. I am now watching a multitude of things all of which I don’t need and do not have the money to but this is despite the fact that I already have a box full of Japanese letter sets and memo pads that I barely use through both the lack of people to write too and because of me not wanting to ruin them with my horrid scrawling penmanship.
Also, I don’t know if this is linked at all but I have been having a terrible craving for japanese food, ones that I didn’t even eat while I was in Tokyo. I’m going to try and get Jon to get me some cucumber maki tomorrow but he will probably be too busy but i’m craving some to a ridiculous level right now.
I actually would like to make my own one time, I used to have a bento box that I’d sometimes put fruit and things in - me being a fussy eater and a vegetarian on top of that their isn’t much I can actually put in a bento box and then look forward to eating, but I wouldn’t mind having a go at making my own maki and doing a little bento lunchbox now and again for myself maybe when I start college I might give that a go.
