Summer? What summer?

Hello!

It has been a while since I posted anything on here. This is because I've recently set up a Facebook page for my photographic exploits. This is for a number of reasons, it's quick and easy - I can post albums of photos easier than I can on here, and posts can be short and sweet.

It is also a great tool for getting my work across, at the moment it's only friends and family who like the page, but I'm working on that. If you don't already, then please like my page I post links to photographs and videos not just of my own, but others work too! Link to the page here.

This summer has passed by in a blur of working, dissertation research and contemplating my directions for the final year. Getting to grips with our new camera has been a fun time too, so many buttons and settings that have me in awe. Definitely worth the investment.

I've been working with a few people over the summer, mainly on a freelance basis. I'm lucky enough to be working with the charity Cruse in Holyhead, creating a short video explaining what they do. Cruse are a bereavement counselling service for those who have lost someone close to them. I've also had the opportunity to work further with Rhyl FC and hope to start an internship with them soon, working with local children in their football academies. 

A friend of mine, Woody who has been making music for a long time now, asked me if I'd like to begin a collaboration, making a short film with clips and photographs as a music video for one of his tracks. Something that has proved to be quite fun. 

I was asked to photograph Sam's 50th birthday (Sam is my sister's husband's brother!) at the Cheadle Golf Club back in July. I gladly accepted and Chris and I had a lovely time, we were both welcomed and had a great deal of fun filming Sam's birthday messages, as everyone was a little more than tipsy so some of them were actually quite funny. 

The weekend we photographed Sam's birthday was also the weekend we stayed at my sister's house in Cheadle, Chris took me to the Peak District for the day where he showed me many places he used to climb, it is full of beautiful landscape and I especially loved Row Tor, which is said to have been made by the Druids. 

Lastly, today is World Photography Day I hope you'll be photographing something! 

Wildlife, football and gorgeous weather!

Last week was such a wash out I was concerned that this week would be no different. I've been so busy that I've had to buy a diary to keep note of where I'm supposed to be and when, and so it was with a little gulp that I saw I was to be outside a lot this week doing this and that.


Dave and I were due to visit the North East Wales Wildlife sanctuary on Wednesday 19th, but I needn't have worried, the sun was shining and it was a beautiful drive through the countryside with the windows of my car open and music blaring. I reached the sanctuary and was surprised to see a big green gate blocking it off from the public, I parked nearby much to the chargrin of the local curtain-twitching woman across the street. 


I met with Dave and we were warmly welcomed by the security staff who told us we could park in their car park. After moving, Lucy Jones arrived with her friend and the children from a local school who'd been picked after scoring the highest in their writing at school.


We met up with Kate, who's the volunteer coordinator for the wildlife sanctuary. Dave and I had gone into this a little blindly as we'd unfortunately been unable to meet with Kate previously. Luckily she was very clear in what was expected of us. The children were to come up with a script about the sanctuary and then film them speaking their lines. The aim of the video is to help draw in groups, and younger people to the sanctuary to help out and enjoy the various events they hold throughout the year.


We filmed the children coming up with the ideas and writing out their script, after we'd gone for a brief walk about the premises. It used to be a top-secret WWII chemical weapons factory that had just been left to return to nature. And it had! We saw lots of buildings dotted around the sanctuary, which is around a mile and a half long and about a half mile wide. At the moment you have to be a member in order to enjoy the sanctuary, this is due to the site being a previous chemical weapons factory, and the law stating there be a certain amount of time before the land becomes public right of way. Of course all the buildings have declared safe, but there are a few who are closed off for various reasons.


After the walk, and the script was written, we were given a fair amount of creative freedom in terms of filming location and angles. Credit to all those who took part they remembered and delivered their lines like pros! Here are some pictures I took on the day:

 This is a room that lots of different groups use to meet, and make things. It's full of installations and artwork that's created yearly.

 Going for a walk before script writing commences, Kate has been with NEWW since last November and knows her stuff! She's also really passionate about what she does, and was very welcoming on the day :)

 This is a Willow igloo. This are is being built as an outside classroom, the stone circle is in the process of being built (not pictured) it will be lovely for people to be able to sit outside learning about nature.

 This is a bug hotel! I didn't want to get too close, as I can't say I'm a huge fan, but it's nice to see that everyone is catered for here!

 This isn't a fantastic picture in my opinion. This was the inside of one of the buildings dotted around the site. It was very very dark inside despite it being a lovely bright sunny day outside. I look this on about 25600 ISO. For those of you who don't know about ISO it stands for International Standards Organisation, it alters the sensitivity of the sensor to the light of the image. In other words the higher the ISO, the more light. Most DSLR cameras can go up to 400-1000 ISO before noise starts becoming a problem (noise is another word for grain in your images). It's one of the many reasons I love this camera, it can be used in almost any light condition, and even at 25600 there's very little noise to be seen.

 These bird and bat houses have been places here, and made to look old so they fit in. The site has seen an influx of blue tits this year thanks to hidden and old-looking houses like these ones.

 Up the stairs to the left is a bird viewing box, and feeders. The children were given food to scatter and fat balls to put in the various holders. Strangely, no matter how still we stood while trying to film, only one brave little sparrow came to eat!? The tunnel to the centre of the image is closed off to the public, however we were hold the tunnels above and underground run for miles and miles, and that the site even had its own train platform and evidence of tracks!

 One of the many bird boxes attached to trees around the site.

 This is mother nature. There are many art installations around the site, the trick is to keep an eye open and look up to find them! I like how she is almost camouflaged into the background.

 This tiny baby frog was one of many spotted in the grass near to the man-made wetlands. Apparently there was a lot of frog spawn this year, once we started looking they were everywhere. I really hope there were no casualties with all those feet!

 This made us giggle, but even after I asked I'm still not sure if it was real or a joke, besides they found it amongst lots of other paraphernalia that was uncovered when the site was originally acquired.

Unfortunately my batteries ran out about half an hour before we were due to finish filming, luckily Dave's was ok so he finished (thanks Dave). But I was glad I snapped away during the short walk we went on. All in all it was a lovely day, and it was topped off by the chivalrous gent who served me in the local petrol station. Looking forward to seeing the end result, and it appearing on the NEWW website as well as their YouTube channel. If you would like more information about the sanctuary, please visit their website here.


Just after I got home I looked at my phone to find that my sister Tracey had text to ask if I could pop along on Thursday afternoon to take some promotional shots of the Rhyl FC grounds. That was all I got from the texts, so when I arrived I was lead in by one of her team and told that the two people I was meeting would be here soon and could I just start snapping away until they got there. 


I must have been there for around 10 minutes taking shots and watching a man cutting the grass on the pitch when I met Silv and Mike from a local design business called Brag (website here) who showed me a brochure they were working on for Rhyl FC aimed at local businesses who might want to sponsor the club in one of the many ways available. They wanted a few specific shots, some of which I'd already taken while I was snapping away. 


In the end I was very glad I went and met them both as it looks like more work may come of it! They are always looking for photographers to take shots for their various work projects. Here are some of the shots I took yesterday.

On the left Alix Natris, who is the new ladies development officer on the right is Mike Jones the general manager. 

Despite the fact I know very little about football, I do enjoy visiting the grounds and having the opportunity to photograph something out of the ordinary, yesterday was a great networking opportunity for me too. (Thanks again Tracey). I know I'll be back at the club soon enough, and I'm excited to see what comes of working alongside Brag.

Call Miss Jones Go Wales Project

Summer is in full swing, ok so it's more rainy than sunny but days like today where the sun is shining and you have no work hanging over you, well they make up for the rain. Besides I don't mind the rain :) Anyway, I digress. 


What seems like forever ago, but really just the beginning of April I started out on my second project through university and Go Wales as part of my professional development. It was to film a short commercial and shoot some staff portraits for a local company called Call Miss Jones. As my previous project with Gelicity had gone so smoothly I had mistakenly assumed it'd be pretty much the same for CMJ. Oh boy was I wrong!


When I first met Peter Belton who runs the company I could tell straight away that he runs a tight, but friendly ship and all his staff seemed very happy in their roles. Their office is a lurid green, which really brightens up the place. It was against this background that I shot the staff's portraits. One of which has gone on to be featured on promotional leaflets (of which I have several) and also a rather large banner that is taken along to seminars and conventions to help advertise the company. Here's a photo of the banner that Peter kindly forwarded on to me.

I was very proud to see my work displayed in such a way. 

Here are some examples of the portraits I did for the staff at Call Miss Jones.

As you can see, there are a combination of 'working' shots and head shots. Peter wanted the photos to show the staff working, but enjoying themselves at the same time. In the end this was achieved through asking the staff to smile as they worked, it was successful for the most part but the work that the staff do here means you have to pay close attention to what you're doing to ensure you don't miss anything. With such a high call volume the agents can't afford to waste time on the phone. With this in mind, some of the photographs are therefore 'staged'.

Peter wanted the head shots, usually taken against a dull, or blue background and looking all formal, to be anything but. The lime-green walls provided a great backdrop, and although it took a few goes to get the settings on the camera right (I'm still learning all the buttons and ins and outs of our new kit) I eventually had it to the point where little to no photoshopping was required later. I had done and finished all the portraits by the second time I visited CMJ. Peter and the staff we happy with them, they're (hopefully) going to make an appearance on the new website. 

Now onto the video, by this point, Chris and I had bought a shiny new PC from PC World, since we both enjoy photography and Chris is now getting into film-making and editing himself we also invested in the student Adobe package including Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Audition, Illustrator and many more we have no idea what they do! We were assured by both the very helpful staff at the Llandudno store, and after careful and meticulous research that our chosen machine was capable of handling the software and so off we went and two hours later we came home laden with shiny new equipment and a lovely matching black desk to put it on. (We also ended up with 3 mice and 2 keyboards by accident! But that's another story). 

Also around this time I was in the early stages of filming my last video of year two, Your Friend, Luke and since Wrexham is now an hours drive for me, I figured being able to edit from the comfort of home would be great. Our machine is as fast and powerful as we all expected, but what we didn't expect was how rubbish and buggy Première Pro would be. Eventually, we figured out that the more clips you import, the more display as 'media pending' and you have to save every time you want to import a clip in case it crashed, which it often did. Eventually I trawled the internet after loosing my temper for the millionth time to find that this is a very common problem for Première. Doesn't make much sense to me to charge so much money for something that doesn't work well with larger projects.

Anyway, something or someone was looking down on me the day I finished editing Your Friend, Luke and not only did all the clips load when I was ready to render and export, but it did it first time! Happy days.

Back to CMJ, I was asked if it would be possible to have the video ready for May 10th, which was over a month away from the first date I went to visit the office. I was certain I could do it, so I said yes. Like most of my friends at university, I really hate letting people down, but when I sent my first draft to CMJ I received a list of changed that they wanted making to the video that meant I would have to revisit once more to get more footage for the video and meaning I'd never complete it by the deadline (which wasn't a deadline really, more a guideline) I got in contact with Lucy Jones at Glyndwr who was extremely understanding and supportive and along with her and Peter, we managed to make a date to get the last bits of filming underway. At this point, I'd neglected my own university work to ensure the video would be completed in time, so needless to say I wasn't exactly happy about the list of changes. 

We also had multiple issues with sound, which is down to a combination of a noisy office and the cameras microphone was not much better than the external mic we had bought when we got our new Canon. So the 4th and final time I visited the office, I took Chris with me to help press buttons and for some moral support. We recorded the audio directly only Audacity on my laptop (which you can see in part of the video) and then later edited it to make it sound clearer and matched it up to the video.

I sent it off to Peter and Lucy last week, and I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders. Admittedly I was worried about the reception it'd receive, but I got a very positive response from Peter, so I aught to be happy. In hindsight, I feel I've learned a fair bit about businesses and the way they are run. Having said that, I think I need to become a little more confident and assertive when dealing with the expectations others have of me. After all, I'm still learning to make film and the editing part is at times infuriatingly confusing and hard, I had to watch a lot of tutorials in order to create the 38 second clip. But in the end I am very proud of what I have done. 

Link to the video here

Charity starts at Manchester House...

So we're a couple of weeks into the holidays, and if it wasn't for the frenzy that is looking for a new home, I'd be at a complete loss of what to do, and be utterly desperate to get back to uni already. 


I've already applied for around thirty jobs this summer with little to no success, and that includes getting any 'thanks, but no thanks' responses. Luckily, I've found The Hunger Games trilogy of books, and along with a few other additions to my collection I've got plenty of material to fill the gaps between sleeping, eating and seeing so many houses online and in reality that they're all blurring into one and I'm forced to differentiate them via unusual means such as 'this is the house with the death shed (looks terrifying!)' and 'this is the house with the out-door spiders breeding ground (aka, outside loo) and I hope no one ever sees our spreadsheet with all the properties on as Chris and I had a little too much to drink one night recently and while adding another batch of finds to the list, one or two little profanities may have found their way into the list.


This meant I had to find something to do with my time, and mercifully an opportunity cropped up that would fill my Tuesday afternoons and help a good cause at the same time. To cut a long story short, I'm volunteering for a charity shop. My own personal experiences of these places isn't that big really, I've ventured into several to wander around and see if anything catches my eye, the one time that really stands out is the time I found Woody in the local Tenovus charity shop. I used that wooden drawing mannequin in one of my uni videos, for those of you who have not seen Woody's Time Lapse Adventure, please click here to watch.


I don't want this post to be all preachy, that anyone should be purposefully shopping in charity shops, or volunteering themselves, but just to raise an awareness that I did not have before and share my feelings about what I'm doing. It's a mutual beneficial endeavour for both myself, and Manchester House, in Conwy that raises money on behalf of the local charity, Carers Outreach, that support adult carers, link to their website here. I'm going to be volunteering every Tuesday afternoon until the end of September, and I imagine it wont be the last time I'll be posting about it on here.


Sorry about the lack of funnies and pretty pictures though...

This is it! Final work of year two.

The summer holidays are upon us already, and I'm not really sure how to feel really. I do feel like I've spent A LOT of time doing written work this year, which I felt distracted me from my practical work. This means I've also spent a fair bit of time working from home which has its advantages and disadvantages. 


Instead of so much writing, I feel like we might have benefited from more practical lessons. Lighting, and sound for both film and photography for example. However, I do feel that this year has seen a huge change in both my skill and professional development through work experience and tasters, and even though they haven't all gone exactly to plan, it has shown me that I am perfectly capable, and can adapt to almost every situation.


So what were we asked to do? Well we were given the option of choosing a direction. Personally I started out with the intention of concentrating on my photography. Then I decided I'd concentrate on both aspects of our course, and finally I decided I didn't want to pigeon-hole myself, or limit my experiences and went down the route of both. We had the option of doing a narrative film and two photography assignments, or a non-narrative and three photography assignments. When I read the list of the photography, there were three projects that stood out to me straight away. I knew I was going to do a narrative film straight away, purely because I do much better at coming up with stories than the idea of the non-narrative.


I close 'modern master' as my first project, choosing a painting wasn't as hard as I thought. Honestly, there was no real method to my choice, I simply typed 'well known paintings' into Google and came up with this.

 American Gothic by Grant Wood

    Whistler's Mother - James McNeill

 The Son of Man - Rene Magrittees

The first two paintings I've seen before even if I don't know the names of the artists or the titles. When I saw the man with the apple I knew straight away that'd be the picture I'd choose. With living right by the sea, there is a number of places that would be suitable to take the picture, and luckily between us, Chris and I had the suit and the bowler hat and the rest was down to photoshop.

 Beginning with the obvious I recreated the painting using a red apple photograph.

Then, taking into consideration the part of the brief that asked us use the painting to advertise something I began with a suggestion from my friend Dave, by using the Apple logo, it worked very well. I took it a step further again.

Starting with the Financial Times, one of my initial ideas was a pound coin, to demonstrate the importance of money in the current financial climate. With the recession making itself felt in almost every household, there's little more current than that. For the advert, I used the slogan for the Financial Times, as well as using an image of an FT cover with a low opacity behind the figure. 

Part of the brief was to bring the painting up to date, I've always been a fan of the Guinness adverts, although not so much the drink really. Initially I had the idea of using a pint of generic beer, but it was too non-descript, and so I chose a pint of Guinness instead as it fitted in quite nicely with the feel of the adverts. Apparently the slogan is 'good things come to those who wait' so I would change that, but really I'm happy with the whole idea.


Next up was the 'elegance in decay/broken grandeur' project. This appeals to me on a personal basis because Urban Exploration is something I've been doing for years, where you find out about, or discover places left to rot/abandoned and photograph the eeriness, which can often turn out some really beautiful pictures. So I was lucky enough to already have a plethora of places I could visit, but what better excuse than this to take to the road and look for new places, here are some of my favourite shots.

This tree is near an abandoned factory in Beaumaris.

The same factory, which consists of several separate buildings, this one looked like some kind of developing room as there was a big Kodak deveoping chest, possibly for X-Rays judging by the signs knocking around. This was a pendulum of sorts that we set swinging and used the flash to get a ghostly shot of the pendulum mid-swing.

This is an abandoned theatre in Dolgarrog, I've visited this place multiple times, and it's always very quiet and eerie inside even though its just set back from the main road through Dolgarrog by some trees. There's rubbish everywhere but you can still see the left over feelings of grandeur inside the main hall, along with dressing rooms, toilets, box office and upstairs where there's a hatch that presumably held some kind of projectors or lights.

 This boat is moored on Conwy Quay, right next to a very well known boat called the Gray Lady, both of which are in need of some serious TLC. Sadly the very next day after this shot was taken some stupid people came along and set the Gray Lady on fire, and it has since been taken away.

 This door belongs to a greenhouse on a huge estate that has been left to nature. It consists of a large house with a caravan outside (there was a way in, but it looked as if someone had recently been squatting there, and so I lost my nerve), several acres of land with ponds, and verandas, and across the estate is another large property that looked as if it may have been a residential home once. It has several out buildings, and sprawling gardens that would have looked stunning once, now like the greenhouses, they've been taken over by weeds and nature.

 Part of the large estate in Caernarfon, this property was borded up on the lower floor, however to the right of this shot was a broken window where one could walk right in. 

This is the Duke of Lancaster. A ship that has been landlocked in place near Mostyn ever since I can remember. You can see it from the coast road, and it holds a lot of mystery to most who spy it for the first time. We took an amble to the ship and got some great shots of it, we wanted to attempt to get onto the side of the dock that the ship is moored in. Sadly there was a very unpleasant guard who had few words for us. 


Lastly for the photography projects was portraits. It's the very first type of photography I was trained to do and worked photographing people for years. It still holds a lot of appeal, and whether I'm in the studio or at location I'm in my element. My very first idea was to photography my dad, but because he isn't very mobile along with my idea no longer being original, I chose to photograph Chris instead. I feel like I know him pretty well, so choosing the shots that best describe him as a person came easily, here are some of the shots I used and my favourite pictures.

Finally for the project was my narrative film. Sadly, I wasn't able to film my initial idea, which was a horror film due to my being unable to source a decent location and also I needed a number of actors, as well as a lot of props that are sadly necessary to aid with the overall feel of the film. So I had to come up with something else, and fast as time was beginning to run out and I knew I'd need lots of time to edit as this was the first film I've edited alone.


Eventually, with Chris' help an idea formed into something I came to be quite proud of. It became pretty clear early on that most of my ideas have an element of darkness to them, and this was no exception. Although, it isn't all doom and gloom! The main issues I came across with making this film was Premiere Pro, we recently installed a new, and very fast desktop PC and the Adobe package, this meant I could edit at home, as travelling between Conwy and Wrexham has been proving quite expensive. However, it turns out that the more clips you upload into your sequence in Premiere, the slower it runs. This became infuriating after a short time as it kept crashing and not loading all the media clips. The day before I was due to hand in all my work at assessment, it miraculously loaded ALL the clips and so very gingerly, I made the last few changes, added the music and end credits and crossed everything and clicked export. It took about seven minutes. All the days of anger, and tears and frustration and worrying that I'd never finish it, and all it took was seven minutes.


Anyway, I don't want to give away too much about the film, and it's taken an age to upload to youtube so I'm just going to put the link to it here.


That's it, year two over and done with. What have I learned? Well, firstly that Premiere pro isn't worth the CD its printed on, or the space it takes up on our shiny new computer, I've learned that I can adapt well to new and unknown situations. Also, I would have liked my assessment to last a little longer, although I got some positive feedback, I was hoping it would have been a little more detailed than last time. Personally, I can't understand how fair marks can be awarded unless the work is taken away and looked at at least twice. In July, we'll receive our marks on Moodle and we'll find out how we've done in terms of a grade, but there will be no feedback and no way of telling what we need to improve and where we're doing well. This can get a little frustrating. 


I'm looking towards my final year with a mixture of emotions, a combination of trepidation, and fear that it's my last and most important year and that I've still no clear idea about what direction I want to be heading in, and excitement at the unknown. Where will I be this time next year? I can't believe how fast my time at university is going, and I do worry that when I leave that although I can say I've met some wonderful people, and had some wonderful opportunities and experiences, but I really haven't learned an awful lot. But I remain open-minded and I'm still extremely grateful to be living this life-long dream. :)