Southsea Festival

So i've wanted to try Live Music Photography for a while but been waiting for the opportunity to arise. On saturday the perfect opportunity came along, my housemate (who I am very grateful to) managed to get me my first ever photo press pass. It was for Southsea Fest, which is a little festival held down the road near to our flat and has 100 local bands and musicians playing in all the cafes, pubs, bars and gig venues. It was a great first experience as I had to adapt to lots of different types of venues and acts. We went from a tiny cafe, to the theatre to a large gig venue. It was an absolutely incredible day and night, to top off the night I caught the drummers drum stick from the headline band....... I usually cant catch anything so I was over the moon. It was an exhausting day as we were there for 13 hours, but I kept going and still managed to really enjoy it after some rests. We managed to stay out till 2, which I was not expecting, however was a little sore the next day. I can not wait to do more Live music photography now, just hoping I get some of the passes i've applied for.

My highlight of the night was definitely Clock Opera who closed the festival (see above). I got the chance to photograph them while my housemate was interviewing them before their set (see below) they were such nice guys. Their set was amazing and each band member at one point would look right down my camera lens, it was an incredible feeling to have some-one on stage look into your camera while they are preforming to a whole room of people there to see them. I had such a buzz after Clock Opera and think I've found a new addiction...... Live Music Photography.

Others artists who were awesome were Luke Ferre, Tom Williams and the boats and The boy I used to be - All can be seen below. If you would like to see more of my photos from Southsea Fest then they are on my Facebook page i'd love to hear any feedback or comments.

Week 5 in photos

This week I really started to knuckle down and focus on the business side of my photography again. I started with a nice bit of room re-arranging, I created a proper office space in my room with all of my photography stuff in one place thats easy to get to, this really motivated me and I started a marketing plan and did lots more research. At the weekend a close friend of mine came to stay, all the way from the dark depths of somerset, we had an amazing time, the table tennis was brought out again and was really lovely to catch-up. On saturday I had my first photo press pass experience. My housemate had managed to get me a pass to Southsea Fest, which is just down the road from our flat. It was incredible and had an awesome timeI I will write up another post soon to tell you all about it and to show you my first live music photos.

 1: Me and my friend who visited at a BBQ, 2: Gizmo - the newest and fluffiest addition to our little group, 3: Playing pool at the pub (I actually got a winning shot which shocked everyone, including myself) 4: hot chocolate on a cold evening, 5: doing work in my new office space with a little glass of wine, 6: the most delicious fajita's i've ever eaten, 7: new angel lights, 8: my new flower hair slide, 8: the first book i've actually finished in a while, strongly recommend it.

Photo shoot with my pet rats

So I was a little bit bored the other day but actually had some energy so decided to take some nice photos of our pet rats based on a pop-art style photo I found that I woman did with her cats. I know a lot of people dont like rats but I adore them, they are such good fun and I wanted a nice photo to remember them by when they are no longer with us, (the older 2 are way past middle aged for rats). It was very tricky to get them to stay in the right place for where I had the photo framed. The camera was on a tripod and I used a wired remote because I needed both my hands to stop the rats running all over the place. This was the outcome.....

1: Wiki - she's the smallest and absolutely mad, 2: Petal - she's very blind and often poorly so she is very nervous and gets scared a lot (hence her expression in the photo) 3: Lemmi - is the one who will eat everything and anything, 4: Blossom - she's the best rat in the world, so friendly and fun, she loves exploring and is soo curious of everything, she's good company on my not so well days when everyone else is out.

Here are some of the pictures which didn't go quite to plan, they wanted to explore and play but I wanted them to pose for the camera. Distracting them with treats seemed to work, thats why so many of them are eating in the photos.

Hope you enjoyed my random little post about the rats and an example of what I get up to on my bored days when im not doing crafts. I'm aware of how mad this all sounds but the rats really are such great pets, always a great form of entertainment and awesome company when you are unwell and bored.

Week 4 in photos

Well its been a really pleasant week this week. It involved lots of meeting up with friends, some of which I hadn't seen for a long time, its always nice to have a good catch-up. I started the weekend by cooking a delicious meal for my boyfriend, shockingly it was the first time I had properly cooked for him and was the first time I followed a recipe book for a whole meal. It turned out really well and I am looking forward to trying another recipe. The rest of the weekend was spent hanging out with friends and of corse eating lots of delicious food. However, sadly yesterday and today have been spent on the sofa with my duvet and a horrible bug of some sort, not feeling good but lots of films and tea are helping. Overall, it was a lovely week. I have lots of photography things to get on with once this bug has disappeared.

1: new rose headband, 2: silhouette of my boyfriend  3: the infamous meal i cooked, 4: strawberry cheesecake, 5: icing flowers, 6: me, 7: baguette pizza style slices, 8: me and my housemates in a hot tub :)

Photography Brand

I thought I would briefly share with you what I received in the post the other day :) I also realised that I havnt talked much about my photography on here yet, so here is a taster. The photography has been a bit quiet recently so one of the many things i've been using the time for is to build up my brand and idenity now that I have my new awesome logo :)

1 and 6: new business cards and nifty silver holder, 2: canvas bag for carrying all the release forms etc, 3 and 4: pen for signing all those forms, 5: close-up of the logo on the canvas bag.

There was also supposed to be a mug with the logo on but it didn't make it to my flat in one piece so I am being sent a replacement. I also got a photo-book of all my portraits so far (which you can see below) is lovely to see my work so far nicely bound and in good quality print, I get so used to just seeing it all digitally on a screen. I am very happy with all the new stuff, makes me feel very professional and I cant wait to take it all out on the next job.

Icing Flowers

It's been many many years since I've played around with icing and honestly, I had completely forgotten how much fun it is. The mission was to make icing roses and leaves for my housemate's parents anniversary cake..... we definitely succeeded. However it did leave us with a yellow stained dining room table and blue stained hands, but sacrifices had to be made. We were pretty chuffed with the outcome and the method was quick and easy as we had very limited tools available.

So here is the first of many tutorials for you. I hope you enjoy it and have fun giving it a go yourself.

Icing Flower Tutorials

1: Use food colouring to dye your ready-to-roll icing to your desired colour (this is the messy bit), then separate the icing into 8 small balls all of an equal size and 1 smaller sausage shape and place into a plastic wallet which has been cut open.
2: close the wallet over the icing and use your thumb to flatten the top edge of each ball to make a petal shape, do the same with one side of the sausage.
3: peal the sausage shape off the plastic and roll up to make the centre of the rose.
4: add each petal to the centre piece overlapping over the joins, making sure the fatter edges are at the bottom.
5: once all the petals are added, cut the bottom off with scissors and smooth off the edge.
6: Optional - cut out leaf shapes from rolled out green icing and you have a finished icing flower :)

Week 3 in photos

Well its been a really quiet week. It wasnt a great surprise that Reading Festival left me feeling a little run down to say the least. My energy levels were non-existant and my knees are still very painful. Therefore the majority of my week was spent in bed or on the sofa. It did mean however that I got to watch a lot of films I had been dying to see recently and I decided to re-watch every episode of Dexter (really cant get enough of that show). The weekend was a lot nicer as the boyfriend treated me to pizza and a movie which was lovely then we met with some new friends at the pub, this was finished off by a game of drinking table tennis (which is a dangerous game and not for the light hearted, you have been warned). Overall a quiet and calm week which lead to a lovely weekend. Energy and general health is slightly getting better so maybe this week I can do a few more things.

1: new make-up bag, 2: blossom (one of our rats) doing a ninja mission to the top of the door, 3: my broken photography mug :( very sad about this, 4: chocolate pancakes with bacon and maple syrup...... yummy, 5: Pizza!!!!!, 6: drinking table tennis with wine........