Castle Park on Film

      Does everyone remember that bank holiday at the beginning of May when the sun actually shone for 3 days straight? I spent 3 lovely days walking around different places in Bristol lying on the grass reading and taking photos. I try and use my film camera more in the summer as I love how brilliant the light looks on film when the sun is shining. I bought 10 rolls of expired Fujicolor ISO 100 film from Ebay and I absolutely love the colours it brings out. I now don't want to use all the other old film I have because I know they won't be as bright...

     These images were all taken around castle park when I was trying to finish a roll before dropping it at Bristol Cameras for developing. I thought it was 24 exp and then turned out to be 36, which meant I had a lot more to use than I thought. 

      These were all shot on my Minolta X-300 with 35mm f1.7 lens - a great combination for walk around/street photography. This camera is pretty lightweight and simple to use, I managed to pick mine up from Ebay for £30 with the lens. Let me know what you think of these, if you have any other recommendations for colourful film let me know. 

My little Box Studio

       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. 

Wild Place Project

      I read a blog post a while ago about photography tips to get you inspired. One of those tips was to make the effort to keep going back to the same place a number of times to get yourself more familiar and to challenge yourself to create new images with the same subject. I went to Wild Place in Bristol at the start of April, it is kind of a cross between a zoo (with much larger enclosures than Bristol zoo in the city) a kids play area and wild gardens. 

      I really enjoyed walking round the area as it is very open and quiet, even if it is just off of the motorway! There are lots of wild flowers all around with lots of different colours and they also have their own gardens which are maintained by staff. The walk round takes you to different animal enclosures - the meerkats and lemurs are the most fun I think. There is also a lot for kids to do including lots of mini playgrounds with tyres and dens and also a barefoot walk with lots of textures and materials, including mud, for kids to run through. 

      I signed up for an annual pass after the end of my first trip and now I have been back twice. I have only been in the week but even though there are lots of kids, the area is so spread out it has felt incredibly quiet and nice to just walk around alone and explore in the woods and gardens. 

      Each time I have visited I have taken a different lense with me which I think has helped get different images each time. With my Nikon D5100 I use:

Sigma 17-50mm f2.8
Nikon 35mm Prime f1.8
Nikon 55-200mm f4-5.6

      Todays shots were with the zoom lense, which was interesting as it helped me get some super close up of animals faces like the meerkat below:

      The lemurs are in an enclosure you can walk around which means I could get really close to them. There have been a few new babies over the past couple of months which has been good to capture. 

      These brown lemurs (feel free to help me out with the species) are very friendly, I got the photo of this one in the tree just before one poo-ed on my arm... not so fun!

      As well as the larger animals I have found this area great for getting up really close to flowers and smaller bugs. I think I may have to get a macro lense or extension tubes at some point so I can get even closer! 

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?

Eden Project Flower Studies

I went for a short break to Cornwall last week with the boyfriend. Since I he has never been to The Eden Project and I haven't been for years, we decided to take a day trip in the hopes we could see some nice wildlife and get away from the great british weather which basically has so far consisted of vast amounts of flooding! 

We were very lucky with the weather, it was cold but dry and quite sunny, when we were in the biomes we sat for a while and pretended we were in another country as it was lovely and warm! Definitely in need of a real holiday I think...

Here are some of the awesome things we saw whilst walking around:

Birds with furry heads

Flowers with furry heads

A hot air balloon

Some epic metal sculptures

And of course many, many flowers! I was feeling a little down the other day having not done any drawing for a good while and looking through these photos motivated me so I sat and had a little sketching session:

I used rotring rapidograph pens with 3 different nibs to create depth in the drawings by varying line thickness. Hoping to edit these and maybe put them together for a print or something when I get motivated to scan some things :)