Van photo for fish and chips........................

This is a van belonging to my neighbour, he's a tiler and recently qualified plumber. The vinyl was applied a couple of weeks ago and my neighbour asked if I could do a quick shot for some flyers he's going to get printed. So where do the fish and chips come in I hear you ask, well my neighbour also has a very good fish and chip shop, has the penny dropped yet? We have come to an arrangement over payment for the image, it'll come with salt and vinegar, curry sauce too if that takes my fancy.

The van was shot on his driveway, using the wonderful sunshine we experienced here today and a Bowens 750 Pro flash head with a beauty dish set at full power, a small canon speedlite was used to light the tyres and help fill in some of the darker areas, the resulting 6 images were dropped onto each other in layers in Photoshop and the unwanted portions of the image were erased. Then the layers were merged and in Selective Colours the red, blue, green were adjusted to bring out the colours of the vinyls. I used a cut-out to drop the background of the driveway and put some shadow effect around the bottom of the vehicle and around the tyres so it didn't look like it was floating on a white background.

That'll be cod and chips twice, two sausage and chips for the boys, now do I want curry sauce?

Rolleicord.........................................................2

Finally got around to playing with the old Rolleicord again, again my eldest lad was the subject of the photographs (my youngest was having a nap at the time). It was out with the skateboards, helmets, a light-meter, two rolls of Fuji Neopan 400 and of course the Rolleicord. I knew I wasn't going to get the best action shots in the world from the camera, but that wasn't really what I was after. If I'd wanted action shots then the Canon 1Ds MkII would have made an appearance. I like this set of pictures, one, because my son is in them, two, because we had a lot of fun doing them and three because you can slowly see the energy draining out of my son, he had a good old rest after these were shot, it gave him a good appetite for his dinner to.

DJ head shots............................................

This is Arwyn Hughes, he's a DJ, spends most of the year travelling around the Mediterranean and Greek Islands, living the life and playing the music he loves. Brief, simple head shots.....

So I know you're stumbling........................

...... onto this blog from far and wide. Now don't deny it I've seen the stats, it can't just be my family and friends checking out the blog, pretty sure I haven't got relatives or friends in half the places that are popping up in the audience stats. So if you see this whilst you're flicking through your blog list, or are just bored and are surfing through any old junk you find out in the www, come say hi, comment, good or bad, I can take criticism (probably), tell me what you want to see, what you don't, whether the blog bores the pants off you and you'll never view it again in a million years. It wont hurt you, you don't know me from Adam.

Go on give it a shot.

Project Skateboarding off and running.........

So what's else am I going to be working on? Well I'm looking at fitness images, training, weight work, that sort of thing, funky angles and lighting. Just need to start setting it all in motion. Watch this space.

Skateboarding project................................

Finally started my skateboarding project, these images are really just tests to check that my Bowens 500 and 750 Pro heads will freeze the action, they were taken at Ramp City skatepark in Blackpool last Saturday evening. I've got to thank the guys for putting up with me, I think the sentence 'Okay but can you do that trick again' will be ringing around the ramp area even now.

I also took some images with Canon speedlights, these were shot on the highest halfpipe in the country, I've been skateboarding for over 30 years and just looking down from the top was a little scary, but I'm getting old so that's my excuse.

Focus-On-Imaging 2011..............................

Well I think I'll be giving Focus-on-imaging a miss this year, there isn't any gear that I'm desperate to look at , I'll be in Blackpool photographing skateboarders till midnight on Saturday and wont get home till nearly 2 am, so wont feel like a trip down to Birmingham on Sunday morning. I'm tied up with work and meetings Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so I think I'll start looking forward to Focus-on-imaging 2012, Canon and Nikon might have released their new pro model cameras by then, they do seem to be dragging their collective feet as far as pro models are concerned, they are probably both working on a competitor to Fuji's X100 which seems to be in a class of it's own at the moment. I'm not the only one giving the show a miss this year, Canon have cancelled their space at the show, so there will probably be Canon roadshows all over the country this year so we can get to play with all the toys.

You will have mail......................................

So I'm working on some A5 mailers to go out to local business, it's designed to be a bit in your face with the torn newspaper demand note hopefully getting the full attention of whoever opens the envelope. It will also include a selection of two or three additional pages with some images. Fingers crossed I will get some work out of this as it's gone a wee bit quiet of late.

A face in the clouds....................................

Some times when you play to long in photoshop you end up with something weird, this was very weird to start with, its a mirror image of a cloud taken on a very thundery day. Can you see a face in the clouds?

This is what happens when you spend a bit more time on it, I'm calling it The Turin Cloud! I can feel the thunder bolts brewing now!

New website............................. Well no, but!

So the realisation was I needed an iPad to really make my site iPad friendly. Popping down to the nearest Apple store to check if I'd made the correct adjustment to make the width of the site fit was a bit impractical. In the end all I needed to do was drop an empty box below the main page in Dreamweaver to make the page deeper, a simple adjustment and with an iPad next to my Mac a quick one. Still working on a new site but can take my time now.

Monday morning dilemma..........................

Okay the dilemma is about which magazine to read first, PDN and Professional Photographer (UK) have both dropped through the letterbox this morning. It's trivial I know but it's monday morning and for a change I've nothing better to do for an hour or two. I think I need to put the kettle on, PDN first me thinks.

Adventures in Apertureland........................

So with the introduction of Apples new App Store came Aperture 3 at the knock-down price of £44.95, question. Who hasn't bought it? Thought as much. I'd downloaded the trial version ages ago and really didn't get to play with it much before I'd used up the 30 day trial period. I've got it installed on the Mac Pro and the Mac Book now and last week I was experimenting with the tethered capability on the laptop, okay it's not the quickest model and it's only churning on 2GB of memory so I was experiencing some hang time between images but on the whole it was an enjoyable experience. I set up one of my eldest sons toys that Father Christmas dropped by last month and played with the lighting a bit to get the effect I was after. I have to say that my adventures in Apertureland look set to continue, having figured out by trial and error and later by watching the excellent how-to videos that Apple provide on their site, I'm really taking to this software.

Happy New Year.......................................

With Christmas out of the way and New Year done and dusted it's back to putting the business head on. So much to do and as usual so little time to get it done, chasing money owed is one of the first priorities, well I've a tax man to pay at the end of the month and he don't like waiting and he'll fine you if you're late with payment.

My new slogan for 2011 is 'Marketing, marketing and then a bit more marketing' well it's predicted to be a bad year might as well try and get the most out of it.