2009 - Spring, Still Life, Snails and Stalking

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Digital Photography School Forums inspired me to experiment with photographic still life in the spring. Their weekly assignment topic was wisdom, which I found quite inspiring, as it can be interpreted so many different ways.

Another hobby of mine is genealogy - finding out where I came from and understanding what my ancestors experienced helps to put things into perspective. I decided to focus on this as a source of wisdom, the wisdom of knowing where you came from, to construct a still life to photograph as my entry into the competition.

The photographs are of my two great grandfathers (although you can't really see at this size - click photographs for larger versions).

It was also around this time that I discovered my mums table was ultra reflective, and she also owns some quirky looking bits and bobs, so I thought I would take a few shots of this antique clock, and I quite liked the resulting reflections.

"Reflections of Time"

I found this little fella in my garden, sliding along the now dead (I'm still upset. This was the down side of the snow/frost) red banana plant. My macro lens (a Tamron) was blurring the background beautifully, but it was all a mass of browns, and I wanted more contrast, so I propped some coloured card behind him.

Here's a stalking little cat on a hot tin roof!

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2008 - The Beginning...

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In the beginning there was a birthday.

Finally I had a real camera. Not the convenient shove-in-your-handbag point and shoot I had used forever, but a shiny new Canon EOS 450d, complete with an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS kit lens, and a Tamron 70-300mm f4/5.6 DI LD Macro lens.

I had to take it out for a trial run, so headed up to Warrens wood at St Blazey to make the most of the Autumn colour scheme. I had a quick look at the manual, but with so much to take in, decided to dial it to manual and experiment with the settings in the hope that I might take a shot that I liked.

My macro lens still needed testing, and with the Autumn weather giving way to the chill of Winter, I felt some indoor practice was in order. Water seemed like a good place to start, so to the bemusement of those around me, I spent a weekend taking photographs of various combinations of water, oil and cds... as you do!

Flowers seemed like the logical progression, and since I was new to the world of macro, I headed outside to shoot the only flower still standing (in my defense - it was December by this point!)

What my back garden lacked, the supermarket provided, and I bought some flowers. I must be naive, but I didn't realise they actually dyed flowers... I thought I had bought blue flowers, but it turned out I bought white ones that someone had dyed blue.

I felt duped, but they were still pretty!

I finished the year trying to make a crap Christmas tree look better.

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