Here is another picture from the studio session a couple of weekends ago. When I was scanning through all the images I captured, this just stood out at me. To me it screamed “FILM NOIR!” and more specifically the third man.
Six pictures of Akiko
May 27th, 2007I’m still going through all the images I took last weekend. So while I continue to wade through them, I thought I would post these six pictures of Akiko. This was not actually part of the shoot, but rather just a spare couple of moments I had whilst waiting for Olga. I especially like the second, fifth and sixth pictures, which I feels shows the fun we were all having 
More memory!
May 25th, 2007
I said earlier this week, that I spent most of Sunday in a small studio taking pictures of my friend Akiko and her son Matt. For the shoot, I had set my camera to save RAW images instead of JPEGs, which require a lot more space (approximately 8MB per image). The advantage of using RAW formats is that it stores all the information rather than compressing and losing some of data. In addition, it becomes easier to tweak images afterwards (if needed). However, I became really annoyed with my two 1GB memory cards since I kept having to stop and swap cards and copy files to my laptop. So yesterday I went on the hunt for a good quality CF memory card, and found an 8GB SanDisk Ultra II for approximately £70 pounds, and it arrived today! Hopefully with 8GB of space I should easily be able to go a day without having to worry 
Bad news
May 25th, 2007A while ago I wrote about landing a project that I was really excited about. Well the project finally got costed out and sent to the company via another department on campus. Apparently the normal process is for this second department to adjust the quote by adding approximately 110% to what ever value was submitted. Now I know this type of thing happens but I’m shocked at the amount they added. I mean 110% is a hell of an addition. So anyway, we finally heard back from the outside company and what a shock, they’ve said no. The reason they cited was that the project was too expensive. It’s times like these that I remember how much I hate paper pushing people who feel they should mess around with someone’s else hard work. Can you tell that I’m a little angry about the whole thing?
So it’s back to the drawing board for me, grrrrrr argh.
Pictures: Kat
May 24th, 2007
A friend of mine asked me to take some pictures of her and the bluebells on campus. So here are a couple of the pictures of Kat in the bluebells. As always click on the images to see a slightly larger version.
Photographic Studio
May 22nd, 2007Yesterday Olga and I created a simple photographic studio. We borrowed a set of studio flashes from the photographic society, and purchased a number of items like backgrounds and umbrellas. As with anything that is new, both Olga and I were full of excitement and inspiration and planned to try out a number of different techniques. The plan was that this would take a couple of hours. Of course this was completely unrealistic and actually spent the best part of day in the studio. Whilst Olga and I didn’t do everything we were planning, a number of other ideas came up during the shoot. I would like to say thanks again to our two models Akiko and Matt. Especially for putting up with us saying move, stop, move, stop, smile, don‚Äôt smile, etc, etc.
I think it would be fair to say that I’ve learnt a lot from this first attempt at using a studio arrangement. This includes thinking more realistically about what you want to get done in a couple of hours/day, manual and automatic focusing techniques under both normal and low light situations. I even picked up a couple of new things about lighting which I didn‚Äôt come across when I did stage lighting at school. I guess that’s not really surprising since even though they both have subjects and light sources, the arrangement is generally different i.e. the light source is not hanging far above the subject.
Hopefully over the next couple of days I’ll be able to put up some of the pictures.
Hardest Decision
May 13th, 2007Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been speaking to company in London about a new job. After travelling up there and taking their technical test, and two rounds of interviews I finally heard from them. They did indeed want me to start working for them, and all I had to say was yes. However, there were a couple of things that were playing on my mind. After the first interview I was pretty excited about the whole prospect, but this completely changed after the second interview. Furthermore, after getting to know more specific information about the type of work involved, I was starting to wondering if this would be the correct move for me. I wrestled with this decision for a number of nights, which of course meant very little sleep for me. Added to all this, there are a number of potential projects in the pipeline at work, which are exactly the type of thing I want to do. After discussing it a couple of times with Jen and some other friends I phoned them up and turned the offer down. I’m sure that working there would have been an amazing experience, but it’s not the right time for me. If it was two years ago, then it might have worked, maybe a year from now it could work, but right now it’s a no.
