Becoming a Pentaxian and Why I Love My New Camera

      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. 

Zen lemur! Sunning itself this morning at Wild Place in Bristol this morning #wildplacebristol #wildplaceproject #lemur #ringtailedlemur #pentaxk70 #pentaxians

A photo posted by Josie Maskell (@josiethejump) on Dec 1, 2016 at 9:18am PST

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...

Our end of #hurricanehermine nothing too serious just lots of wind and rain! #timelapse #video #weather #florida

A video posted by Josie Maskell (@josiethejump) on Sep 2, 2016 at 10:26am PDT

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.

Saal Digital Photo Book Review

      I recently had the chance to create my own Photo Book from Saal Digital in exchange for an honest review. I was really excited for this chance, as a photographer I have a huge backlog of photos which may end up on Flickr or Facebook but never usually make it into print! I did recently get some 6x4" prints from Snapfish on an offer but the quality was just not comparable to what I see on screen! 

      I used this as an excuse to make a kind of portfolio for the images I have taken over the past year. I have been taking some online Photography courses which you can read about in previous posts, this has really improved the quality of my recent work and I wanted to see that in print. I decided to go for a wraparound cover in matte padded finish. This image taken of a lake near the hoover dam is one of my favourites with all the colours and clouds and I think it worked well.

       You don't have to have the padded cover, it is an extra, but it gives the book a nice, luxury feel. 

       For the inside I chose matte lustre finish on the paper as I tend to prefer this over gloss. The book also has flat binding so it lies perfectly flat as you turn the pages, this is another nice touch which allows your prints to not get lost in the gutter in the centre.

       The possibilities for layouts are endless in these books! They have all sorts of collage templates with the option to have many photos per page. I kept it simple with each double spread having 2-4 photos, the flat binding meant I could have photos across the centre still perfectly viewable as shown below. 

      The colour representation is really beautiful. I have a retina screen on my mac which can show every flaw in an image, but also gives great definition for sharpness versus my old screen, these prints definitely do the images justice!

       A couple of things to be careful of:

Check image size - The book creator does tell you if your images are big enough, the cover image was "good" rather than "great" in their terms which meant it wasn't pixellated but also wasn't quite as crisp as the others due to it being stretched to cover the front and back! 

Check print proofs - The below images of jewellery are both meant to be on black slate, the right image is somehow a really pale grey which wasn't how the file looked when I saved it! No idea still how that happened but make sure you double check everything before sending to print.

       Overall I would absolutely recommend Saal Digital for Photo Books, I may even try them for art prints too as they have a lot of other services on their website! I have bought photo books before as gifts, and while the printing is generally ok, they don't get even close to this one! The above book in A4 is around £44 with postage for I think a 29 page book. These are great for portfolios, wedding photos, really nice family albums and would make a very special gift for someone. 

Introduction to Visual Merchandising Review

      So many of you who know me personally know I do visual merchandising as part of my job. Working for an electronics retailer means the scope of this is fairly limited as it mostly comes down to tidying phone accessories and speakers and fixing cables on a daily basis! Last year I decided I wanted to see if I could expand my creative eye into something down the fashion/homeware route. I did a lot of research into short courses and I stumbled upon a 3 day course on "Introduction To Visual Merchandising" at the Fashion Retail Academy in London. 
      I chose this course because the website blurb said it was a very practical course which involved you learning lots of skills before putting them together on the last day and creating your own window display from scratch. I loved the idea of building something from nothing and was interested to see how much we could actually learn in such a short space of time!

Day 1 - 

      For the duration of this course I stayed with my sister in Mile End as she was working in London over the summer. I would recommend staying in or close to London if you are doing a course like this as I was exhausted each day and the thought of getting a long train would not have been good! Safestay in Elephant and Castle is a place I have stayed 3-4 times and can recommend it as the premier Inn of hostels! Everything is purple and very cosy and you get a surprisingly decent breakfast included. 
      The Academy is around 10 minutes walk from Oxford Street tube, 2 minutes from Tottenham Court Road. We arrived and all sat down in a classroom full of undressed mannequins - an interesting start to the day! There was a small group of around 8 of us, we all introduced ourselves and said a bit about what we do and what experience we have. There was a huge range of backgrounds, one girl worked in John Lewis, another in a football club and another had her own company selling products across Europe. 
      We had a short powerpoint with some history of visual merchandising and window displays. We got to see some interesting examples and find out some merchandising techniques. The rest of the day was spent getting involved and merchandising a wall which had magnetic shelves and clothes rails which we could move around to our hearts content! This was pretty fun if hard work.

We had a winter collection and a more summery set of clothing to hang, it took a good amount of adjusting to get these to a point where everyone was happy. 

      After doing the larger merchandising we moved onto accessories and jewellery. The rest of the afternoon focused on us picking a set of things and using pyramid merchandising to arrange the objects in an interesting way. My attempts are below, we had a very short space of time to pick our products and arrange them and I would have liked to have spent a little longer. 

      One thing I will say about day 1 is that I was surprised how much we fitted in. It was a huge amount of information and I felt we did a lot in a short 10-4pm day. The only slight negative to the college is that it is a bit rough around the edges! Do not wear fancy clothes to this type of course, it will only make you uncomfortable and worried about getting messy. The shelves we were merchandising were pretty covered in dirt and dust which I wasn't expecting, maybe because it was the summer and they hadn't been in use for a few weeks... The clothes we had were pretty good but the accessories and jewellery varied in wear and tear and nice-ness. There was a lot of trashy stuff which you had to sift through, though our tutor made the point that in a job you don't choose what you merchandise and you should be able to make anything look good!

Day 2 - 

      Our second day was centered around mannequin grouping and styling. We started off talking about different types of mannequins, ranging from very abstract to the more realistic with facial expressions and makeup. We each got to pick a mannequin to dress and were shown how to move them the proper way and how to remove limbs and re-attach them (such a strange thing to learn!). This is my first mannequin dressing, I chose her because of her funky festival hair! 

We then got put into pairs and we were given a space to fill with a group of 3 mannequins. We had to arrange them at different levels and then gather lots of different clothes to create a group with similar styles and colours. Ours went a little bit H&M/New Look folksy with lots of 70's suede and fur in browns and beiges!

Here is one by another pair which I really liked - this one was very pop art punk rock, I loved the attitude of the mannequins they chose!

      One of the last things we learnt about that day was dressing bust forms, we learnt about making tissue paper arms - something I never knew was a thing! We each had to use some layering of a jumper and a jersey top so we could style the arms and give the models some life. 

Day 3 - 

      The final day was by far the most fun, and the most knackering! All this lugging around of mannequins and running around hunting for good clothes is super hard work by the way so if you do take one of these course wear good shoes and comfy clothes. 

      We had a room full of props to have some fun with and everyone was being a little cheeky trying to get the best stuff. There was definitely a little bit of competitive spirit that day even though it wasn't a competition for the best window, we all wanted to do something impressive! We worked in pairs again, me and my partner found a bag full of sparkly black artificial vines with leaves on. I liked the idea of using these to make shadowy shapes in our background. We also had lots of small pink flowers to add to the edges to bring some colour to the display.

      Our models were naked for a lot of the day! Picking matching clothes was the hardest part for some reason... We spent half the day staple gunning flowers to the walls and getting bits of glitter and flower petals everywhere.

      The finishing touches to the display were adding some artificial coloured birds and a bird cage before getting some spotlights to add to the shadows. 

      So above is our completed window, which I was pretty happy with for  first attempt. Below we have the other two groups. I loved the very different concepts we all ended up with, though we did all fight over the pink flowers as you may be able to tell!

      I finished this course feeling happy with the huge amount we achieved in 3 days, I think it is a great introduction to a lot of different skills. For me I knew I would then need to find ways of expanding and practising what I have learnt which I have found hard over the past 6 months! Still, I hope this can give a good overview of the course for anyone who is looking into it and maybe help you see if it is for you or not.

20 Ways To Draw A Tree

I got this book for christmas and rediscovered it recently when clearing out my book shelf. It is a sketchbook with a difference, combining space for drawing with a huge number of drawings for inspiration. 

The front cover is made of matte texturised paper which makes me feel artsy for a start.

Each page consists of a different "thing" to be drawn from nature, there is a huge range from acorns to snowflakes, stars, mushrooms and feathers. 

They are all laid out slightly differently but the pages always have around 20 drawings of each thing, and space for you to add your own drawings. 

This is a great book for people who like drawing nature. I especially like it as pattern designers like me can use these small drawings as the basis for repeat patterns. 

Here are some ferns I drew on one page - it does feel strange being "allowed" to draw in this book.

The illustrator Eloise Renouf has put some truly beautiful artwork in this book with a wide variety of different colours, textures and styles to really get you inspired and motivated to draw. Even if you aren't into drawing it is a gorgeous book to own and have a flick through.

You can check out Eloise's website here and this book can be purchases from amazon here along with a number of other "20 ways to draw" books by different artists. What do you guys think of this book? Any other sketchbooks you can recommend?