Where I live - January

It's strange how the first month of the year has gone. Usually January is a gentle start, this year it seems more like it's the second half of the year than the beginning, and we're all playing catch-up already.

Ok so to the pictures for the personal where i live challenge....

I liked this picture as it was one I pre-visualised even before visiting the location, and when it came to getting the image it only took me four pictures to get the shot I eventually chose. Despite my initial writing and indeed thoughts about the night shot in the alley I decided that since this is the start of my project it needed some element that signified growth or journey. The low angle also was key, one of the other of the shots was taken from a higher viewpoint and looked like a simple snap. I processed the image twice, once for the black and white and once for the boots then layered them with a mask in photoshop.

Just two days after this shot above I was at my local camera club for a studio lighting course session. Despite some initial concerns with the available space and a conflict with the local allotment association annual meeting, the inspired choice of flash out in the car park made for some unexpectedly good set of pictures. Also a great set of willing models prepared to brave the cold weather in the improvised outdoor studio. I've also found that the Canon Studio Portrait picture style is actually rather good on this kind of picture. I used the P-STUDIO picture style in DPP when I did the RAW conversion.

I was using the EOS 50D, it's an amazing camera producing great results in low light as this portrait was taken at ISO 1600. There's been a lot about videos and low light coverage for the EOS 5D Mark II but the EOS 50D is also a pretty good camera. I am thinking that the RAW files from these DIGIC 4 cameras are a bit tougher for the computers and Canon DPP to process. My computers seem to struggle more with EOS 50D and EOS 5D Mark II images than they do with EOS-1Ds Mark III RAW images.

After my initial enthusiasm for the challenge there was a period of concern that this was going to be a dismal failure at the first step, but I'm now happy that I can go in to February having cleared the first step.

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CRM revenge

Previously I've written about the delights of telephone sales calls and some fun methods of dealing with such calls. I've just been sent this fantastic story of an elderly woman who writes a letter to her bank advising it of new processes for dealing with her as a customer - in essence turning the automated systems used by so many companies on their head.

http://finlandsfinest.blogspot.com/2008/10/forward-that-cracked-me-up.html

I can't wait for the first chance to put this one to use....!

I'm already thinking to follow the current ideas and request that they send me the company address so that I can write to them to inform them of the procedure to follow to contact me with appropriate security processes.

Still not made the picture for January where I live yet, and only 12 days to go.

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Lesson for all - capture the moment

Ahh the decisive moment, that point when it all comes together in a perfect frame. Sometimes we forget or don't take the pictures we see, thinking to come back later. Once again nature has reminded me that the moment is fleeting.

As I typed away at last evenings post I made the throwaway comment about warm weather and the loss of the pretty frozen landscape. Surprise..... it's bright sunshine, warm winds and the only frozen patches are few and far between in the morning. So remember in the case of hope and particularly, hope it stays like that until I'm ready to come and shoot it, there's two hopes; no hope and Bob Hope (he's dead). My perfect frozen picture landscape is gone today and I don't know when it will be back, maybe a year or more.

Lesson learnt, take your camera with you, it only gathers dust at home!

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Where i live update

Since I posted about the where i live project it's been nothing short of polar bear weather here. I had shot this picture on the way out to meet some friends for a pre-Christmas meal. I needed to walk this way and as I had a camera thought I'd snap the scene to remind me to come back to it. My thinking is some hard light exists under those street lamps and maybe that can be the tone for the picture. Alternative bring in an extra flash and use this as a background to a shot with a model in light with hard lighting. All seems quite sensible really. However back to the polar bear weather, my car showed -11 celsius on Tuesday night and the fields and trees round this area still have a pretty kind of permafrost on them. I think it comes from the consistent sub-zero temperatures and the combination with quite regular freezing fog in the evenings. I was driving this afternnon and I couldn't help but think that maybe the alleyway shot is not the one for January, but instead a super cool - landscape in the deep freeze - shot would be better. I'm still thinking to put the model in and maybe try to cool the background by using a half or even full CTO gel on a flash to light the model and then set the camera to tungsten to make the landscape more blue.

Lots of thoughts and still no picture though. Maybe tomorrow it will turn warm and the landscape deep freeze picture will be lost, I hope not.

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2009 photo project: Where I live..

I've been thinking over the nice Christmas break that I need to stop eating mince pies... errr nope, actually I've been thinking of my own personal challenge for 2009 and this is what I've come up with;

Where I live

All too often we make grand plans but this is one that's really possible to achieve and will make me plan shoots better and more regularly. I'm planning on a picture each month that I have to pre-visualise and execute in the month, and repeat for each month of this year. Follow along if you like I'll be putting pictures in my flickr stream with the tag where_i_live and the only real restriction I'm placing is that the shots all have to be taken in the area I live. It's a chance for me to get out and shoot in the local area and also find or use some new locations and subjects. You the readers of this can follow on and make your own where_i_live pictures. Think of it as a acheivable and learning goal rather than a weak attempt at a 365 that fails with only 1 picture per month.

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Resolution

Guess what; I wrote this last year. I'm hoping to still be in the nice dreamland considering all the options and experiences to be revealed to me in 2009.

Too often we start the year with grand plans, picture a day on flickr, give up the day job and become a professional photographer, take better photos, loose the excess weight gained over Christmas, post more often on the blog etc. Perhaps the only rule of resolutions is that you need to make some so that there is something to have broken by the time February comes round, but that would be the pessimist talking, more on that later.

1. My first 2009 resolution is to take a lot more people shots and develop my skills in engaging with models as a result.

Switches on the Austin Powers voice: Yeah, baby, yeah

Thank you for the tip Mr. Strobist

When I've looked back at previous five or six years photos there's been lots of animals landscapes and sport shots, but I've severely under shot the human race. There was a great peice on mega photographer Chase Jarvis' site earlier in the month of December where he talked about what it takes. The reference to 10,000 hours of trying made some sense to me. In the past - dim and distant - I shot film, a lot of film. As a self funded amateur photographer with a day job, I routinely shot 150 rolls of film for a couple of years straight. I shot mainly motor racing and some glamour stuff in a studio. I shot a lot of pictures, and looking back I realise now that experience really honed my skills. I could pan with cars at all speeds with all kinds of lenses almost as if it was second nature. I could do the old glamour two light setup really easy but never went too far beyond it except by accident. I was a lot younger and single: cars and girls and photography floated my boat so I put in the hours.
Fast forward a bunch of years and now I can still pick up a camera and pan with all kinds of stuff, but I've looked for more use of the skill. I found that I could pan with horse drawn carriages in Florence Italy in the rain. The technique is still there.
Glamour models; not done much in the recent years and I'm now more looking to people pictures that have more appeal than the same stock poses of the same girls week in week out.

Call for models... photographer needs you to collaborate on photo projects - leave me some messages in the comments if you're interested. I get chance to practise and improve my photography and some great pictures to demonstrate what I can do, you get the pictures from the shoot to do what you like with.

2. The next resolution for 2009 will be the megapixel driven one, I think that this could be the year my ReadyNAS needs some bigger hard disks, as the current crop of cameras sure fill up memory cards and the ReadyNAS at a heck of a rate. I also need to get out of the iVIEW/Expression Media hole. No progress on this software lately that convinces me to keep on putting in time with it. But what else would work for me? Aperture, Lightroom, PhotoStation, Extensis Portfolio? It's a big task there's around 20K images in my library, but solving it will make picture finding simpler again.

3. With some more chance to think I've decided the final resolution for 2009 should be a little less technical and more related to approach. So for 2009 I'm going to really try the positive side. By this I mean look for the chance or opportunity first, not the barriers or the reasons not to do something. Mentally I need to embed the following question in my brain;

What can this project, or opportunity, help me to acheive?

Happy 2009 and let's see how much progress I've made on these three resolutions in February.


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Happy New Year

Following tradition I've spent the evening with family and a good bottle of wine watching Jools Hollands Hootenany on BBC2. Jools mentioned leap seconds in the programme and it got me thinking... or more likely googling.

search this on google to find out more 2008 extra second leap

Happy 2009 time for some zzzz

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