14/6/10: Day 165

I needed to take a photo again today and Rick had left his alien model on my desk at work. So I took a few shots. The contrast has been changed to draw out the highlights and keeping the detail to a minimal.

13/6/10: Day 164

Katie kindly modelled for me once again. Well, I say modelled, she just took a walk with me into the field behind the house. I snapped away.

I really like the finished article, there is plenty in the foreground and background, but the focus is drawn to Kat.

12/6/10: Day 163

It's season ticket relocation day. We're moving from our seats on Level 2 of the East Stand at Eastlands to Level 1 due to the upcoming changes at the stadium. Although these wouldn't affect us until next season, we wanted the chance to claim the best seats available to us.

We did a lap of the stadium afterwards, so I managed to get some shot. I have tried to keep the alignment of the wires here. The overall effect works nicely, in my opinion.

11/6/10: Day 162

Today, I drove back to Northwich and came through a village called 'Toft'. We had driven through it recently and seen some strange people standing about. I took a ride back through and stopped off for some quick photos.

10/6/10: Day 161

Myk and I headed into Wakefield this lunchtime. I took my camera out to do some shots of the cathedral.

I really like the concept of this photo. It has two different methods of telling the time. It is something that I have never seen on the catherdral before and just goes to show, that I am starting to observe things differently.

It would be interesting if we could get permission to do some shots inside the catherdral.

9/6/10: Day 160

I got home from work and decided to have a go at some portrait lighting. I have used my camera flash unit and natural light in the past, but I wanted to have a look at lighting the side of my face and some back lighting.

I had to use what was at hand, so I ended up with a desk lamp to light the front of my face and then an upright lamp, layed on it's side as a means of backlighting.

I think I shall need to experiement with this some more.

8/6/10: Day 159

I think I am pushing through this difficult patch alright. I have looked at my work and it has fallen in quality on the whole, but I think I have managed to capture some good shots in these few weeks. I need to step up my research into different events and things to shoot over the coming months. Snowdon is still on my list of things to do and I would love to get a portrait of myself on top of it as part of my 365 project.

Today I had another quiet one in work. I decided to take my guitar out and take some shots of that. This sort of thing needs to be incorporated into my gig shots. Something that I am planning on doing is enquiring about doing a rehersal shoot with This is Turin. It may allow me to do some experimental shots.

7/6/10: Day 158

After the successful photo earlier in the year of the red phone box near our house, I decided to do the follow on from this and shoot the mail box on the opposite side of the road.

I enjoy the red against the greens, it's got a christmas feel to it.

6/6/10: Day 157 - BTCC, Oulton Park

This soon comes around each year. It's British Touring Car time again at Oulton Park!

Kat and I headed down to Oulton early in the morning so that we could get a good spot down near the Knickerbrook. After parking up and having a brew and a read, we headed over to the Paddock to view the cars while they are being worked on. At 10:30, the pit lane is opened up so that people can meet the touring car drivers and they can get an autograph or a photograph. I managed to get some decent shots of a few of the drivers - Gordon Sheddon, Matt Neal, Stephen Kane, Mat Jackson and Jason Plato.

I was stuck between using an action shot and a portrait image for today. The project so far has allowed me to get a lot of portrait shots and while not all of them are natural shots, I do have a wide selection of them. With this in mind, I have picked a racing shot for the day.

After the first race, we headed down to the exit of the Hislops Chicane. I stood amongst a crown of photographers, stood there with lens envy. I think one of the things that I really need to invest in, is a good quick telephoto lens. The f stop on my 210mm doesn't really allow for action shots in a poor light. As such a number of my photos from the day, had a slight blur to them.

This is one of the best from the day though. It shows race leader Tom Chilton leading out of Hislops Chicane, Jason Plato is close behind and Mat Jackson is following in third. At this point Plato had moved up from 10th on the grid and was soon to pass Chilton and take the race win for race number 2.

5/6/10: Day 156 - Classic Car Show

Deryn, Sarah and Evie were over for the Friday evening and on the Saturday, we all headed to Tatton Park to the Classic Car Show.

Kat and I had visited the show about 3 years ago now and I had wanted to go back since. With us living in Yorkshire, it has been difficult to get down to, but now we are back in Cheshire, we shouldn't have an issue getting to things like this.
The one big disappointment in getting a full car shot here is the fact that the cars are so tightly packed, that it is impossible to get a shot without something else being in shot behind it. With this being the case, I wanted to get low to the ground so that the rows behind weren't visible.

So here is the shot of the Buick which I decided to use. The chrome front stands out against the sky and the grass to draw the users focus to it.

4/6/10: Day 155

Myk and I headed down to Newmillerdam today, we were looking for the poppy fields which are flowering during the month of June.

However, Myk didn't really know where it was. He can't be trusted to do anything :)

We ended up going into the woods there. The sun was out, but the trees covered the light really well. With that in mind, I thought a shot of the sun coming through the trees would work nicely.

3/6/10: Day 154

I have been wanting to try some light painting for a while now. I think that I will need to head out of an evening to do some more before the year is over. The idea with light painting is that you use a really slow shutter speed in a dark room and then while the shutter is open, use a low light source to draw lines.

The photo for the today was achieved by setting the camera down in a darkened room. The shutter speed was set to 3 seconds and then using Myks new lights from his model, I could scribble using the lights.

It has a pinstripe element to this, the pulse lights also add to the image by breaking the lines up to a dashed line.

2/6/10: Day 153

This was my most uninspiring day for a long long time. Rick has found out that he is one of the people selected for redundancy and I'm pretty devestated by this.

This is just in the back garden at home. It's got to pick up soon.

1/6/10: Day 152

I had booked the tuesday off work, just for a chance to put my feet up and chill out. This was kind of destroyed by the threat of losing my job, so being sat at home with my thoughts wasn't much good.

I went for a drive to Jodrell Bank in Cheshire. I've never actually been in there, but it is quite an amazing structure. I had hoped that it would've been angled to one side, but unfortunatly, it was facing straight up. The final shot is achieved with a fast exposure and some contrast editting later on.

31/5/10: Day 151

I dragged Kat out with me today. We went upto Over Alderley for a bit of a walk. It's a really nice area up there, the view out over Cheshire is amazing.

This is the sign that greets you as you walk from the road to the footpath to the cliffside.

30/5/10: Day 150

Kat was at a first aid course today, so I decided to head out to take a photo before enjoying a nice relax at home.

I took a drive to Nether Alderley Mill, it is a national trust site but you have to arrange to view the place prior to going. This I wasn't aware of, so I managed to get some external shots only.

29/5/10: Day 149

So, we had a nice day at home today. We went to let the chickens out, so I thought I'd take advantage.

28/5/10: Day 148

I decided to take advantage of the bank holiday and make the weekend that bit longer by taking the Friday and Tuesday off. It was quite nice spending some more time at home, but would've been a lot more enjoyable had I been down in Cornwall and/or not had possible redundancy to worry about.

I took the scenic route back from Northwich and ended up getting stuck behind this scene. Perfect opportunity for a photo and an excellent reason to keep the camera at reach when I am travelling.

27/5/10: Day 147

It was a late kickoff this week for football, so I took DJ Hero into work. Rick kindly allowed me to take a photo of him playing it for the project.

In our offices the light is pretty bad unless we have the big over heads on. With this, the shutter speed required for this shot without a flash would've been too slow with the movement of the subject. This shot was taken with with the standard flash on, but I used my hand to block the majority of the light. The subsequent bouncing of the flash has helped to bring out the detail without really burning the light colours.

It's done the job, but I am going to have to invest in some new tools before long.

26/5/10: Day 146

Once again, struggling for any sort of inspiration at the minute. I have decided to play around with some slow shutter speed shots. The newly aquired DJ Hero turntable should make for interesting pictures.

This is shot on a 15 second shutter. The turntable was held in position to really focus the exposure on the 3 statis buttons. This was done for 5 seconds before the turntable was slowly rotated anti-clockwise for a further 10 seconds. The end result appears to show the turntable moving quickly in a clockwise direction.

25/5/10: Day 145

I headed into Ossett with Myk again today. It's been a pretty miserable week at work with these jobs at risk.

We were just going to grab something to eat, but I took my camera out, just in case. It's not a great shot, by any means, but I liked the content.