week 39: View in the city

I love going outdoors and taking pictures of nature, but I am and always will be a city girl. And since I don't much like taking pictures of people that means quite often I'm finding my memory card full of images of buildings. Fortunately I'm fond of architecture so that's quite all right. And I really love how, in London, you have the the old and the new side by side.

This photo is a bit more of a graphical type thing - I was struck by the curve leading to the glass building. Now I've tried to do something like this many times before, but the light was never quite right to show it all off and then on my way home on evening, everything was the way I wanted. I still want to find a way of taking a nice photo of the yellow building by itself, but in this shot I think it works because the colour draws your eye into the photo and the glass building itself then draws the eye up, or something like that. I thought about cloning the lamp post out, but in the end I decided to leave it as it is very much part of what the city looks like in that bit.

week 38: Swan lake

Ok, maybe another misleading title as this is not a photo of ballet dancers.... This photo was taken on the same walk as the Early morning by the pond post. I did not adjust the colour at all - it really was a sort of
pinky-orangy colour as the mist evaporated in the early sun.

I went to the Columbia road flower market this morning in the hopes of some nice photos to use as I don't really like any of the stuff I took earlier in the week that much. The flower market was a bit of a disappointment only about 20-25 stalls and most of them sold exactly the same stuff - either cut flowers (which were very beautiful - tulips in October!) or winter plants which seems to be variations of cyclamen, winter pansies and some berried bushes. Hence the photo taken last weekend.

I also got a shot of some gulls a little earlier than this one. Here in England for the first time I saw swans and gulls on the same body of water and it seems quite a common thing. But I'm glad the swan was by itself here as gulls just don't imply the same tranquillity to me.

Only 14 weeks to go, though I am quite enjoying this so I may very well just keep putting photos on the blog after the 52 weeks are done.

week 37: Early haloween

Yes I know its not been a week since the last one, but I figured I've missed out on enough weeks that I can "make one up" while I've got a photo I want to share.

This was my entry for a photo-manipulation weekly "contest" on flickr. Its the first time I've entered, though not the first one I've started doing, but I managed to complete this entry before time run out (I made it by about 4 hours!) Still I was very pleasantly surprised to be awarded the winner of the week which means I got to choose the starting photo for the next week's contest.

I had a lot of fun with it. Just for comparison sake, here's the original photo I started from

 So as you can see I had to make several changes, but I used much less photos than I did in the previous photo manipulation that I put on my blog. Just the pumpkin, the moon and a brush for the bats. For those of you who don't know programs like photoshop or gimp, a brush is an image that you can use over and over - it comes from the round brushes you get in all such programs to start with, think of ms paint's pencil tool where you could choose how thick a line you draw. Esentially all you're doing is drawing one dot after another and so brushes specially modified images that you can drag around, or as I did if you click only once you get a single instance of the image. Offcourse you can use any colour with your brush, but I figured black would be best for bats.

So sure its too early for haloween, but I think the making of this picture will replace this year's pumpkin carving attempt.

week 36: Early morning at the pond

I originally intended to go on a "Fungi foray" today, which was held by the Epping Forest Visitor Centre, but when I phoned on Monday to book I was told its full up. So not to be outdone I decided to read up about mushrooms and do it myself. Got up at 5am to make sure I catch the early light (sun rise was just after 6, but I still had to get there) and set off. I forgot that sunrise at 6:12 means it won't get light till after that. Hmm, I also forgot that if you're going to walk in the Epping Forest (which is filled with Holly!) you need to wear jeans not some other thin pants (not to mention that it is cold early in the morning and jeans would no doubt have been warmer)

You may have noticed that this week's picture is not a mushroom, in fact I don't think there's any sort of fungus in this photo. The thing is, I've discovered that I'm not really that good at finding fungi at all, in fact the only one I found was after I've given up the search and I literally stumbled over it (well over the rock close to it) while looking for something else.

Meanwhile the sun did rise and it was a beautiful morning, and seeing as I was right by the pond, I found this beautiful scene. 7 Different exposures and some fiddling with Photomatrix and here we are. Still not quite as spectacular as what I saw, but my tree/forest type photos is getting better I think.

As for my mushrooms, well I did take a photo of the one I found, but it wasn't a really exciting mushroom so it'll probably get relegated to my taken-but-ignored photos.

week 35 : Lost in the garden

I fully admit that the real art in this picture is the making of a ceramic garden snail that cute.  My mom has a lovely collection of garden critters - this one, seen from the front is actually quite a happy smiley fellow, but I really liked how in the wild strawberry patch, from this angle, he suddenly starts looking scared and lost. I think its the darkness of the shadows, and the eyes off course :-) Don't worry he's safely (and happily) back in his usual spot by now.

Not a hugely exciting post this week and not a lot to say about the photo either, but I have found a building with amazing magenta light which I have taken test photos of and will try for a proper shoot tomorrow after work, so hopefully next week will be a bit better.

week 34: Story of Adoption

This week is a bit photo intensive, but it is a blog about photography after all, so I think its ok :-)

This set has been a work in progress for 2-3 months. That's quite a long time to work on only 5 photos, I hear you say, and its true, but I have learned a lot from it, not the least of which is, getting the right props for your photo is not always as easy as you might think.

The original idea came to me when I was going through a stage where I just wasn't inspire to take photos and none of the sites that has great photos which usually inspire me had any effect on me. This was quite worrying as I've bought a new dslr only a couple of months before. But I came across a flickr group which focuses on story telling through photography, specifically they want stories told in 5 frames and so the challenge began.

I had a ton of soft toys in my house and some of them will probably find their way into my photography at some point, but these 5 puppies were just what was prescribed, now all I needed to do is think of a story that contains 5 puppies. That wasn't all that hard to do either because I am a supporter of animal charities in general (and I would recommend that anyone looking for a new pet adopt from one of the shelters rather than buying from a pet store - its better for the animal and in the long run works out cheaper for you too)

Oh, by now I hope you've worked out what the story is here.... I think the title should give it away, but if not, its all about a puppy (I call all dogs puppies and all cats kittens)  who gets hit by a car, gets rescued and taken to a shelter and then finally gets adopted into a new loving home.

Ok, photo wise I have tried to do as little editing to these as possible.

The first one was probably the most challenging, I bought a toy car from the local pound store, but getting the setup done just the way I wanted took quite a bit of planning. And though the "headlights" (and the numberplate) are edited in, the actual lighting on the puppy and the ground was done in camera with the help of my very patient mom-in-law and a torch.

The second one,which was actually the one I did first, was another one which required quite a lot of retakes and adjustments to get it to look the way I wanted. The window was cut out of a cereal box, but then getting it to stand where I wanted without any supports showing in the photos was my first difficulty. Next I had to get the light at exactly the right place to get the length of "moonlight" to shine in without shining over the to of said cardboard box. I would have liked the window itself not to be quite so on the edge of the photo, but I do like how the negative space focuses the eye on our lonely puppy.

My husband suggested the newspapers for the third and fourth one as being cuttings from a real newspaper, but only selecting the bits with the smallest print so it looks more believe-able, which I think worked quite well. The food bowls was made from the tops of Berrocca tubes (the "food" is the stuff in the top that's supposed to absorb moisture).

The fourth photo is the reason this set took so long, not because it was that difficult, but because I could not find a doll's hand anywhere that I liked and eventually had to wait until I went to visit my folks again to get my Sindy doll from when I was little. Flying all the way from London to South Africa for a prop may seem a bit of overkill, but I promise that was not the only (or indeed the main) reason for my visit.

And the final photo was taken with the use of sosatie (skewer) sticks which I used to put the "ball" in place and have the puppy in the background look like he was landing from a jump. The sticks off course was edited out, but nothing was edited in. I'm a little in two minds about whether the ball is too bright, but since it was that bright when I took the actual photo I decided to leave it as it is.

Whee - very long post this time, next week should be back to only one photo though. I'd love to hear if you thought the set worked and the story came through.