So if you have me on Facebook or Instagram you might have noticed a little series of photos going up every week! In January I knew i would be changing jobs into a position less focused on photography, but which would give me better work/life balance and freedom to do more with my spare time. 5 weeks I am really enjoying it and being able to use my evenings and weekends to take photos has been great! I wanted to keep motivated in the new year, I am into week 8 of this challenge and I have tried to do something new and different each week. The theme changes every week but on top of that I want to push myself and try new techniques and ideas. If anyone wants to join the challenge there is a group here to submit your photos and hashtags to share on social media.
Week 1 - 52 steps from your front door. 3 exposures in and out of focus at the end of my road!
Week 2 - Sun. There was not a lot of sun in January, I shot some film but my local developers was out of action so this was what I had!
Week 3 - Black and white. Shot on my film camera on Ilford HP5, Stokes Croft graffiti makes for great high contrast photos.
Week 4 - Landscape. My new job in Avonmouth has a nice walk I can go on on my lunch break with views of the boats!
Week 5 - A childs laughter. This is my cousins little boy Jack who has the greatest big blue eyes and who is very hard to keep still!
Week 6 - Animals. I went to Wild Place in Bristol and caught this cheeky lemur having his lunch.
Week 7 - The colour red. Valentines week, I was so so busy and ended up having no good ideas, this experiment with ink droplets came out rather well though.
Week 8 - Water and Ice. I froze some flowers and had fun smashing them open and playing around with composition.
Week 9 - Macro. I had a plan for this which looked horrible so in the end I just explored my living room and found this great cracked candle holder to photograph.
Week 10 - Transport. Rather uninspired by this theme so I went to the village of Lacock and took photos of vintage bikes and lovely street stalls.
I have loosely started a 52 week photography project. I say loosely because I am not sure how long it will stick, I have tried these things before and it doesn't usually stick! This seemed like a good one to do though because it is one photo a week, with very loose themes, and a week is probably long enough for me to get something in rather than daily. Anyone looking to perhaps join in on this the group I am part of is here and the different themes for each week are below:
Week 1 is titled 52 steps from your front door, I spent my new years day feeling very lazy with a bit of a cold. I finally left my house to go for a walk and stretch my legs around 8.30pm. I took my Pentax K70 with 50mm f1.8 lens to see what I could get wandering around in the evening.
I started with some fairly mundane photos of the streets, the shadows on the walls lit by street lights really intrigued me.
I live near an army reserve centre which is well lit. I thought all the shadows were very interesting so I wanted to have a play around with the multi-exposure feature on my camera. You can blend a huge number of photos but I stuck with 2/3. I have found it works very well with high contrast subjects and strong shapes.
Playing around more with combining different subjects, pavements and houses!
I love the depth you get in these images, but they were all quite abstract, seeing the bokeh effect from the street lights and car headlights I wanted to see what I could do with it.
Switching to manual focus I was able to overlay shots with in focus cars and lights with out of focus bokeh patterns. These also had quite a dreamy misty effect.
These two are my favourite but the above didn't quite make the cut because the trees looked very soft where I had overlain the same scene defocused. My chosen image below seemed to have the nicest composition of those I took, the road leads you into the image into a sea of bokeh lights with some sharp elements poking through behind.
I am quite happy with how this set of photos developed, next weeks theme is "sun" so I imagine I will end up with something completely different. Still, I like looking back on my process and seeing an idea develop. Is anyone else starting new projects in the new year? Feel free to share in the comments! I love to see these things!
As someone who had been interested in Photography for a long time, around a year ago I decided to focus on learning more and improving my skills. As far as buying cameras goes, my research and choices were pretty ill informed... I started out with an Olympus E-500 twin lens kit which just happened to be on a good offer at the time when my parents treated me around GCSE time. We were taking a trip to africa to go on safari and they wanted me to get some good photos. This camera lasted me for 5 years, it was pretty abysmal in anything resembling low light but otherwise gave some great colourful images. I managed to extend its life and usage using it with OM film lenses and an £11 adapter from Ebay.
At the start of my final year at uni I was asked to photograph my cousin's wedding, in hindsight I should have upgraded before the wedding, but I decided to put the money gained from that towards upgrading after the event! At that time I hadn't paid much attention to any of the new cameras around. After being completely overwhelmed I figured out two cameras within my budget, one by Canon one by Nikon. I chose the one edging slightly in reviews and which had a half decent deal with freebies, the Nikon D5100.
This camera took me through the last year of university, lots of photos for this blog, and all of my holidays and days out over the past 3 years. The D5100 is a great camera, and it did well for my needs for a long time. As an aerialist and performer, I have started photographing shows more and more in the past year, and that it where it started to let me down! Low light is always going to be a killer when it comes to photography, and as much as I could do, I wanted something a little better!
Around 6 months ago I started working in a camera shop, and this was where the itching started! Working for a large technology company for 2 1/2 years I tend to nerd out over things a fair amount a lot more than I did before... Being able to play around with cameras all day I was like a kid in a candy shop, it was great, but actually terribly more confusing. There is definitely no such thing as the perfect camera, and I spent a huge chunk of time being indecisive and discounting models for various reasons. Too big, too heavy, don't like the viewfinder, too expensive, horrible menu system etc. etc.
And then one day we had a Pentax K-70 arrive in store. Having only been announced in June, we were expected to have a play around with it and get used to its features. And so, I did the ridiculous thing and I switched systems! I traded in everything Nikon I owned and I bought K-70 with an 18-135mm and a DA 50mm prime lens. I thought for all you camera lovers out there I should explain why I went for a camera system that for most people is a bit of a curveball:
Weather Sealing - Almost all of Pentax bodies are weather sealed, and not just a little bit.. Combined with a WR lens these cameras survive a crazy amount, in Florida I was doing a timelapse of rain falling in my parents swimming pool in a tropical storm - no worries! The build quality on this camera is mad, it feels solid in your hand yet is as small as my old entry level Nikon body.
In Camera Stabilisation - No more VR vs Non VR lenses, put any lens on this camera and it is stabilised. Everything is done in body, and it works really well. I have noticed myself taking photos and assuming they will be shaky hearing a slow shutter speed only to find they are sharp, it is like magic.
K Mount Compatibility - Pentax have not changed their mount since their film camera days, this means you can find any old K mount film lens (of which there are hundreds) and you can stick it on your digital body. This has two advantages. One - you have access to a huge range of lenses at a lower price, you just use manual focus. Two - because of the in body stabilisation these lenses are also fully stabilised! My camera also has focus confirmation so it will beep/flash when your subject is in focus which is handy.
The gorgeous Sunny taken on a 135mm f2.8 film lens.
Wifi & In Camera Processing - Ok so pretty much any new camera now has Wifi but combined with the fact that I can process images in camera this has been a godsend. I can now take a RAW image, choose filters, image style, cropping etc. and save a new version directly on my camera before sending it to my phone via Wifi. My Instagram feed is now much more heavily filled with Pentax K70 images rather than low quality iphone pictures and it makes me happy how easy it is.
A photo posted by Josie Maskell (@josiethejump) on
In Built Intervalometer - This is something I have yet to utilise enough, but if you are into timelapse photography you will love it. I can set up my camera to take a number of photos, pick the interval, file size, file type etc. to then create timelapse videos or image sequences. Below is a very basic attempt to show the storm weather we had in Florida - don't judge I haven't spent too much time on this...
A video posted by Josie Maskell (@josiethejump) on
Multi Exposure - Harking back to anyone who used film photography this is a mode that is great fun to play around with. You can combine 2-2000 images with 3 different blending modes to create unique and interesting photos. I believe this is also designed for creating star trail or astro images which require a large number of exposures if your camera were on a tripod - as someone who has never tried this I wouldn't know where to start.
RAW File Image Quality - Now I cannot vouch for all the new cameras, but the recovery and quality from RAW files on this camera has been incredible. I put it to test a lot on my trip to Florida in September and here are some before and after shots when recovering shadows and detail in tricky sunset/low light situations.
Now obviously everyone has very specific tastes when it comes to cameras! And no camera is perfect, lens wise, the 50mm is probably my favourite for images though the screw drive autofocus is comical levels of noisy! Pentax please, please please make a budget friendly and quiet 50mm lens, the 55mm f1.4 is £650 which I can't really stretch to... Noisy lenses aside, here are a few of my favourite images from the past few months since owning this camera.
So a few months ago I took some product photos for my friend Ellie of Eleanor Jane Jewellery. I wanted to set up some kind of mini studio to get nicely lit images at home and I wasn't sure of the best way to go about it. After speaking to people at work about the merits of soft boxes and box studios, one of them suggested I just build my own studio with a box and some white paper! I had quite a large box from a delivery which I managed to open out. I fully lined this with white paper as well as cutting a window from the bottom of the box and a section out of one side. The window on the bottom I covered with 3 sheets of tracing paper and then flipped the whole thing over for the lamp to diffuse light through.
Now you are at this point all you need is a daylight temperature lamp, I just added this bulb to my angle poise desk lamp. And lastly a good background, whether it be pastel coloured paper or a long sheet of white pinned to the top back panel to make an infinity background. I have had a pretty stressful few weeks so I decided to buy myself some flowers, though as a photographer rather than just stick them in a vase I pulled out a select few to photograph.
The daylight lamp works perfectly to get the right white balance, and you can move it forwards and backwards to get an even illumination on your subject. It isn't the most elaborate of studios but it works well for a lot of different subjects!!
If you already have a lamp and a box like me this cost less than £10 to make, all i needed was paper and a bulb :). Worth a try and the results you get are great.
Last week on my day off I decided to get out of Bristol and go for a bit of an explore. My parents house is near Grittleton in Wiltshire, and there are many villages in the area which I used to frequent, whether on my bike or driving over for an explore! Lacock is one of my favourites, it has kept very traditional with its cobbled streets and quaint houses with decorated windows! Lacock is also famous for being featured in TV shows and films including Harry Potter, Cranford, Downton Abbey and Pride & Prejudice. The lighting on this day was very flat and subdued, the skies were overcast and gray meaning a lot of the buildings I photographed needed a bit of a boost in the contrast. I have been using Lightroom more and more recently to experiment with adding my own levels of vintage style filter. I tend to do an initial lighting and colour correction edit before making a virtual copy which I then edit more heavily! *Quick tip - Creating virtual copies in Lightroom is great to make different versions of the same photo without losing or overriding your initial edits. Click Command+' (mac) or Control+' (windows) to create another copy of that image before adding your edits! Great for creating a colour version and then one in Black and white or sepia, or for trying a few crop variations. I have been using lens correction tools to create vignetting and also playing around with split toning and camera calibration to add different tones to the images.
This raspberry bush really came out with this filter! I loved the subtle colours it creates.
The two above images both needed some contrast to bring out the patterns in the bricks and the shadows from the vines.
Just a few of my favourites from the day! Let me know what you think, what are your favourite photography/drawing locations?!
