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.

Going... going... going... gone!.....................

..... Kodachrome is no more, at least come Thursday it wont be. The last roll gets processed at Dwayne's Photo in Kansas, the last lab in the world still operating a K-14 line, the last roll to be processed was shot by owner Dwayne Steinle. When I closed BZ colour labs (Chester) down the last roll that went through the E-6 process was one of mine, it's kind of personal, like putting a big full stop on the line, it's over and mine was the last roll! Haven't got a clue where that last roll of 120 is, must go and dig it out. Goodbye Kodachrome you've had your day and we'll not see the like again.

New Year, new plan, new clients?................

It's that time of year to sit back and reflect on what the last twelve months have brought. It's been a roller-coaster of a year for me, the first few months were some of the busiest ever, unfortunately they were followed by a few lean months, which make me shudder even now. Through the summer clients started spending more on their advertising and thankfully on new photography to go with it. A couple of big jobs came in and everything started looking a bit rosier, there will still months that were a bit short on work but generally it was on the up.

So what has this shown me, simple more marketing, advertise myself more, GET MY NEW WEBSITE FINISHED, that's got to happen soon and hopefully pick up a few new clients. Also re-new my relationships with a couple of clients I've not heard from for nearly a year, sometimes I forget to send an e-mail asking how things are going or forget to make that catchup call, though I remembered to pop and e-card this Christmas, with some nice responses.

So may you have a happy and prosperous New Year.

What's in the back of the van.......................

This was shot way back in 2006, the client wanted images to go on the back of their fleet vehicles. Alex the Marketing Manager came up with the idea of looking into the back of the vehicles showing what equipment they carried along with an engineer. The shots were taken in the company vehicle maintenance bays using a Mercedes Vito and Sprinter van, the Vito was first up, with shelving and multicoloured boxes and parts it really lended itself well to being photographed. Rather than lining the camera up centrally we set up slightly to our left looking along the shelving and giving me the opportunity to open the vehicles side door and set up a light to illuminate the interior, something I would have struggled to do with just the two softbox fitted Bowens heads that were aimed at the back of the vehicle. Having set up the lighting (as shown in the diagram above) and filling the shelving with the right equipment e.g. anything that looked good, we got our model to start posing, even during the shoot I had a feeling this was the image the client would choose, it just works.

Next up was the shot in the Sprinter van, this involved a ramp and a very large wheeled equipment trolley, we got Carl one of the van crews to stand at the back of the van as if he was helping push the trolley out, getting light on him was a bit of a problem but I popped a beauty dish with barn doors on and aimed it into the dark recesses of the vehicle. I still needed a little work in Photoshop to even out the fore and background lighting.

It's all change now with the vehicles after four years, the fleet is turning silver and the back doors are now being graced with just the company logo, I'm going to miss seeing these pictures of mine whilst driving up and down the motorway, I seemed to see at least one of the vans out on the road every time I was on the motorway.

Police image..................... Lighting diagram

I was shooting a head/helmet camera designed for police use last week, this is one of the shots I took just of the guy, Tim, who had been roped in to do the modelling. The lighting remained the same for the head camera shot, I just got Tim to step forward so that the left side of his face would go darker, the side light to the left was then just lighting the white background, though there is a slight spill of light creeping onto the left side of the helmets band. The main light was to my right, a Bowens 750watt Gemini Pro head with a Redwing 70 x 120 cm softbox, the centre of which was just inline with the police helmet, giving me the shadow I wanted to the left side of the face along the side of the nose and a hint of darkness under the chin.

The shot below illustrates how I used the side light to put a catch light on the small camera on Tim's shoulder, it also puts enough light into the side of his head and clothes to improve the look of the image.

It's Christmas......... So here's the Santa shot

I had a shoot for a client last Friday, they were putting on a Santa's Grotto for a local disabled school. All the kids got teddy bears with their names on them, bit of a logistical nightmare but very touching. There wasn't a great deal of room in the Grotto area for me to set up so I just stuck a 750watt Bowens Gemini Pro head on a stand just to the right of my shooting position. Popped a white shoot through brolly on the flash, now there was a large glass brick wall behind the flash head, this definitely put a bit more reflected light back into the room. I was getting f11 at half power and was good to go, 80 kids later and Santa had probably lost a few pounds in weight, but to see the smiles on the kids faces it was so worth it.

Rejigged the office today..............................

My office has always been dominated by a big old Apple 21 inch Studio screen, sometimes two 21 inch studio screens, but not anymore, they've been consigned to the garage (doesn't my back know it). This has left space for my Mac Pro to move up off the floor and onto the desk, which is useful as I don't have to rummage around under the desk every time I want to put a disk in the machine. As you can see next to the Mac are a stack of iomega minimax external hard drives, there are three 1TB and two 2TB drives, these mirror the drives in the Mac, though now the 2TB drives are being used as a mirrored pair for back up as the Mac drives are pretty much full (though new internal drives are next on the order list). I like the iomega drives, as well as having multiple ports on the back for chaining them together they've always worked very well and look great next to the Mac. The new 2TB drives only come with Firewire 800 and USB2 ports, I use the Firewire as I've never been enamored with USB, finding it to slow.

The MacPro, as well as having all four drive bays full, has 8GB of memory to help keep the programs zipping along nicely. That's it as far as up-grades to how the machine came as standard. The Apple screen is an old 17 inch LCD display, not exactly cutting edge I know but such an improvement on the flickering CRT, I'm looking at up-grading to a bigger screen but will be waiting till the start of the next financial year before parting with any money.

My trusty Wacom pad, I really can't understand anyone who still uses a mouse for re-touching in Photoshop, it's become a real asset to my workflow I'd be lost without it. The new Magic Trackpad from Apple looks and feels great, I've played with them in store but haven't yet shelled out for one, maybe soon. The Mac clock on the wall of the office I made from parts of an old G4, the clock mechanism was bought on e-bay, different and fun.

New Lens................................... Coffee Cup

Drinking coffee from a 24-105mm f4 L IS USM lens is such a laugh. When my wife saw me she got quiet a shock. This quickly turned to 'So where did you get that from?' the answer Hong Kong, the link is at the bottom of the post, they also sell the 70-200mm Canon lens/coffee cup that Canon gave out to snappers at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. It's on my wish list, roll on Christmas. You'll have to excuse the image quality, iPhone 3G camera is nothing if not a little rubbish......

http://100milligrams.com/canon-24105mm-lens-coffee-p-262.html