52 Weeks - Hitting The Ground Running

       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.

Bristol on Film

      I have a stack of out of date film under my bed which included an Ilford HP5 ASA 400. I haven't shot black and white for many years and I wanted to try this film out with my Minolta X-300 and 50mm lens. It was nice to wander round a few areas of Bristol and get some grainy, contrasty images! 

Stokes Croft - Famous for it's street art, Stokes Croft has graffiti around every corner which changes on a regular basis!

The Bear Pit - The portal between Stokes Croft and the main shopping centres, this area has more street art, a fair few homeless often playing music in the tunnels and skaters making the most of the open space. I especially like the Donne Darko like messages sprayed on the walls and floor. 

Horfield - Perhaps not an "exciting" place but these few are on the 2nd January when the buses were running bank holiday schedule so I walked halfway to save sitting in the freezing cold! A very crisp icy morning!

Park Street/Bristol Museum/College Green - Park street area has such a huge amount to offer. The Museum is free to enter with a huge amount to see. Park street has many independent shops, restaurants and cafes with college green at the bottom where you can sit on a bench and watch the world go by, or pretend you are in Skins (if anyone reading remembers back that far!). 

The final frame - this is just a happy accident from the end of the film. One of the things I love about film is when things like this happen and you get an interesting graphic image which you would never get digitally. Let me know what you guys think!

52 Steps From My Front Door

      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!

The Ever Changing Malvern Hills

      So here is a short little blog post to bring in the new year! I spent my christmas with family and old friends up in their lovely house looking over the Malvern hills. I took a lot of really lovely photos but their view was one of my favourite things to look at. The light was constantly changing, on the final day before we left there was so much mist you couldn't even see the hills!
     

      It was nice to be able to photograph the same view in many different ways. It was a nice little challenge dealing with the different light. I am starting the new year excited and nervous for change. This year has made me learn that I have great friends and family, it has been a long year with a lot of change and we are all just trundling along on the same confusing journey. 
      I wonder if anyone remembers this Honda ad, very silly but it has become a little motto for me recently so I hope you can all watch this and hum it to yourself if you ever need a little motivation! Happy New Year to all!