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