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‘Portraits’ Category

  1. love bird at the armouries

    August 6, 2008 by cat

    A couple of weeks ago I was chaperoning Kian’s younger brother with his Dutch girlfriend while she was visiting.

    128/365 (BTW)

    This was taken after a day out at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. It just so happens to be Kian’s youngest brother’s favourite place to spend an afternoon/whole summer holiday and there’s a Weta exhibition on atm.

    This photo started life as a shot out of my Canon 10D. It had a large dirty white door in the centre that has at somepoint been kicked and looked rather unsightly. So I chopped it together.

    Now the question is reader – can you see the chop?

    Category Portraits | Tags: | 1 Comment

  2. Project 365 – Day 50-56

    May 15, 2008 by cat

    Here’s a week’s worth. It’s been a very heavy week getting stuff done and sorted (including two day at Chez Parents). Hope you enjoy.


    13th May 2008


    12th May 2008



    11th May 2008


    10th May 2008


    9th May 2008


    8th May 2008


    7th May 2008

    Category Animals, Project 365 | Tags: | No Comments

  3. Project 365 – Day 27

    April 15, 2008 by cat

    April 14th 2008

    Pretty sunlight 🙂

    I’m still rather ill. At least got some photos.

    Category Animals, Project 365 | Tags: | No Comments

  4. Day 19 of Project 365

    April 6, 2008 by cat

    6th April 2008

    I’ve worked out at what distance I can use my on board camera flash – 5 feet! Isn’t my baby boy (yes, that’s Apollo) a cutie pie?

    Category Animals, Project 365 | Tags: | No Comments

  5. I should really introduce myself

    January 19, 2008 by cat

    So yes, this is the first photograph of myself on this site.

    I’ve been promising some people that I would show what colour my hair has changed to for months. So I finally got around to it.

    For this I had the main room lights on (3 gang in the centre of the room and 2 in the alcoves) and a lighting stand with a ‘brolly and Vivitar 285HV behind the camera to the right pointed to the right side of face (when looking from behind the camera) set to 1/4 power (manual) directed straight into the ‘brolly.

    I took the ones of myself with the self-timer function. While I had it set up I thought I should get the shots Kian wants for his own site done.

    Category DIY Lighting, Lighting Experiments, Portraits, Self-Portraits | Tags: | No Comments

  6. Christmas project

    January 19, 2008 by cat

    For Christmas I was set a project to “capture” moments of meal times over the Christmas period. We were restricted to using only disposable cameras. Instead of leaving it to someone else to process and develop my films/prints I decided to use and abuse the machines at uni. This did, however, have one drawback – the deadline! I was meant to present this to my class on the first Monday back rather than a week later like I thought…

    On the Monday morning I processed the films and took the book I had been making to keep my Polaroids of the family. I was going to keep that to myself, but I needed to present something! I’ve still to finish making that book – the housing is built and the pages are all together, but the stuff I want to write in it hasn’t made its way onto the pages.

    By Wednesday I had colour paper so I could do prints from my films. My friend, Nat, showed me how to start making prints and I managed in 2 hours to produce a contact print and a final print that were colour balanced and ready to be shown to people!!

    I even managed to focus the negative myself!! (I sometimes struggle with it if I do it myself – at home I get Kian to check it for me!!)

    So this next week I’ll be printing up to 6 more prints from this one roll (Christmas Day at my parents’ house).

    Category Book Binding, Portraits, Projects, University | Tags: | No Comments

  7. The elephants went in two by two

    September 15, 2007 by cat

    Chester Zoo Gallery

    Today I went to Chester Zoo. The day started later than I was intending. I got to the train station in time to watch my first train disappearing and then there was a 20 minute wait to get a train that got me into Manchester in time for my second train to just be leaving too and the next one wasn’t for an hour!

    Thankfully I was travelling with Kian and Nikki G (and Jenni), so we went for coffee (well they had coffee I had Orange Juice).

    Eventually we got the train to Chester, eat on the way to save time and tackled a few buses to get to the Zoo.

    At the zoo we headed straight for the “Twilight Zone – Bat Cave”. Sadly none of the photos turned out well (above the size of my LCD on camera), which is a shame, but expected.

    This is a rough order of what we saw: deer, rhino, peacock, bats, tapirs, llamas, Common Rheas, llamas, bear, zebra, deer, small monkeys, peacock, monkey house, camel, donkey, lions, tigers (though we couldn’t see any!), penguins, flamingos, jaguar, ants, snake, giraffe & elephants.

    All today’s photos have been shot with a Canon 10D Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 (throughout) in P mode (with various ISOs). Hit rate has been 1:~2.6 (used to unused photos).

    Kian was also shooting today. His work will be up in due course.

    Category Animals | Tags: | 1 Comment

  8. Knitted Monkey

    August 2, 2007 by cat

    ISO 400, 62mm, f5.6, 1/60th, flash at 1/4 strength. All taken with Canon 10D and a Tamron Di IF 28-75mm f2.8.

    This is my latest knitting project, a long armed and legged monkey. Put the finishing touches to him today so I could try out my new lighting stand/umbrella, flash gun and light metre.

    The final layout of lighting stand/umbrella was off to the left of frame, pointed down towards the subject, with a plain white reflector off to the right of frame bouncing in some fill lighting to the shadow area on that side of the face and body.

    Light metre is a *wonderful* toy, made the shoot 20 minutes (a few different shots/lighting rigs) rather than hours (OK, slight exaggeration!).

    Monkey Gallery

    CC is always welcome. And thanks to my wonderful assistant, Kian.

    Category Animals, Portraits, Product Shots, Projects | Tags: | 1 Comment

  9. What a waste of space

    July 19, 2007 by cat

    Final Major Project Gallery

    This is my latest offering to the art world in the form of ten black and white prints. The collection was the summery of work for my Foundation Diploma at the University of Bolton in May 2007, my Final Major Project. With this project I achieved a double Merit and has gained me my degree place at Manchester Metropolitan University starting in September 2007.

    This piece started to take shape in February when I have to submit my Statement of Intent to my lecturers, and then to my external examiner. I eventually had my finished piece on the wall by mid-may, in time for the internal examiners to view and mark it and then the external examiner to “verify” the marks a week later. The final show was opened to the public on the 30th May 2007 and the show ran until the 4th June. Four of the pieces are now displayed around my house, while the others are in storage.

    The ten photographs alone did not achieve this, I also wrote a book from interviews taken in the context of the subject matter. The text from the book is in the description of each of the images and the introduction is with the front page of the book.

    For this project I use my ever handy Minolta X300 with 24mm (f2.8) & 50mm (f1.7) lenses. I used Kodak Tri-X 400, developed in Kodak TMAX (1:4 6 minutes, 10seconds/minute agitation, 20oC). I did want to use XTOL with the film, but couldn’t source any in time for this project.

    All of the final prints were produced using split grade printing. This is a process in the darkroom where one exposes a negative at filter 0 (preferably at 00 if possibly) and find the best timing for highlights, then doing a second exposure on top at filter 5 where you are trying to find the best exposure for the shadow detail, which together make up the overall best exposure for the negative, without the hassle of dodging, burning, farmers solution, etc.

    Any comments, crit or praise is welcome and encouraged, so please do speak your mind.

    Category Exhibition, Portraits, Projects, Self-Portraits, University | Tags: | No Comments

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