A blend of photography and exploration
I’ve been collecting photos of the social distancing floor dots since the first lockdown lifted. Finally collated into one image just in time for another shift to the rules before Christmas. All taken with my phone’s camera. Nothing sums up the current situation than the waiting and distance between people.
The final creative project for my still life unit in college. A recreation of the government’s Covid-19 advice graphic using my favourite tiny railway model people.
Hands – Hand sanitiser swimming pool complete with Baywatch lifeguard.
Face – A discarded face mask ski slope. Has various levels of difficulty.
Space – Get your health and safety signage painted by our elite crew of painters. Don’t worry they do clean up after themselves.
All done as set ups on my desk top. It’s one of the easiest things to do. The fight I had with photoshop at 1am to put the work together however…..
I’m missing the gold and orange tones of autumn already, as we start the downhill slide into winter and the festive season.
Meanwhile college continues on both in and outside. The studio is fun and I wish I could spend more time there but we’re out here dodging a virus….
I don’t normally get to play with flash but there’s actually a whole world out there waiting to be manipulated with light. But back to why we are actually here……
Some natural light. Autumnal colour and life is out there. It’s been a kind season for my photos. I miss going roung museums and the city catching people but they are all in hiding. So I am fungi hunting and looking for interesting nature while walking in the local park. My back needs a break from my camera bag though. Hopefully Santa will bring me one with decent shoulder straps and enough space.
Lucky in love? Seal it with a padlock. It’s an odd tradition that started in the real city of love, Paris, and can be found almost anywhere now.
Today’s college project. Learned that the model train figues are a little too small to be taken outside into the wild. I’ll probably keep them to desktop set ups where they can be carefully placed and secured. But lego figures…. now there’s a scale that works well in the wild.
I had completely forgotten about this image till I was reminded this morning. Taken as part of my Higher work at the craft fair in the SEC. It didn’t fit in with my theme so was left to gather dust.
It was a whistle stop trip to the isle of Arran for a Sunday shoot.
After a little early morning jaunt on one of CalMac’s finest. They do a cracking bacon roll, by the way. It was decided that we would head to Brodick Castle. A National Trust for Scotland property with extensive gardens, it’s a beautiful place. I need to head back to spend longer there sometime and to see round the castle itself.
If only there had been more time…. We were running a little late to get the ferry back (there’s limited spaces just now) so had to do a bit of a route march to get back to the terminal. My legs almost couldn’t take it…. I need to to more excersize if I plan on doing more shoots like this.
So I went out to the recently reopened Riverside museum and it was abit of an exerience compaired to the last time I was there in late November 2019 (all of 8 months ago). Last time it was teeming with people as you can see in the photos I took for my Higher Project. Of course, I was also there for fun when I wrote this post all about it in March 2019.
If you had told me back in March, or even November, that it would have about a third of the usual number inside, no cafe, no museum shop, and that you would need to book in advance…. well I would probably have laughed.
It really is a whole different world to the one that shut up shop in March this year.
Meanwhile, out on the streets….. I had a meet up with some of the guys from my Higher class and we had a bit of a walk about. It’s always good to get out and see other humans these days
Sitting on the edge of the Firth of Forth is a sweet little town better known for the iron rail bridge that cuts through and dominates the skyline. A place with its own history and teeming with sightseers currently, it’s a great place to visit. It does boast some great views of the 3 Forth bridges – the famous red rail bridge, Forth road bridge, and the new Queensferry Crossing.
All three bridges stacked up, looking west. If you move further to the east beyond the Queensferry Crossing then you can achieve amore startling effect as the grey road bridges stand out out over the red of the Rail Bridge. I didn’t manage to head out that way this time but did walk out from the town further west to get the shots to build a panorama.
As assembled in Photoshop and then reduced….. the original image is over 23,000 pixels long and broke WordPress. I’ll admit it does lose something in the reduction. The colour and vibrancy is kinda kicked out of it.
For more on the science of the iconic Forth Rail Bridge and it’s history check out Wikipedia.
I’ve gone over to the dark side. No, not really, I dont plan on making all my photos look artificial. It’s not my style but it does allow from some editing that I might not have done before. I’ve also been trying my hand at repairing an old family photo.
It was pretty badly damaged when I scanned it in at college nearly a year ago as part of my beginners night course. I managed to do most of the repair work in an evening but didn’t have the confidence then to repair the faces. The image on the left is how I left it after that session and, eventually, with the house move the original went into storage so I can’t even start it again just now. On the right is the best I can do at the moment to bring it back. The faces trouble me but I’ll keep practicing.
It’s not all restoration….. I had a bit of fun while I was practicing. Poor Frankie is the terror of the Tenerife roads.
In a decision that I made what seems like many moons ago, really it was only last year, I started studying at night school for my Higher. The work builds up into a year-long project and an exam. Of course covid-19 stepped in and the exam was cancelled, so I have no idea how that would have worked out. The project, however, is half finished and the photos mostly unshared. I kept the photos quiet while I was working but it’s time to share what I did work on.
So it was called People Make Glasgow…. Oh that sounds familiar, you say? Yes, I’ll admit it was a shameless theft of the toursim catchphrase. It did give rise to an interesting set of images as I went out to find “people”. I didn’t manage to get the final set of images so I’ll share some for my favourites from the shoots I did manage to complete. The whole project was about 2 shoots short of a full set.
2 of the shoots were attempts at street photography. The city centre at night – Halloween night to be exact, and Pollok Park and SEC craft fair. I got quite into these shoots.
The next shoot was a marathon of a single day. Riverside Museum in the morning and the Style Mile Christmas Carnival in the afternoon. This yielded a lot of images and a fair few that would probably have made it into the final line up. It was brilliant trying to catch images as the parade went past in manual mode, that was a challenge.
Over the month of December I centred on the Christmas markets in George Square. It was a challenge to get images handheld in the darkness.
My mojo kinda left me after Christmas for a bit and the next thing the world had changed from under us. I took my camera with me to work at an office in the city centre for the final week before the lockdown started. Then it was empty streets and lines outside supermarkets and pharmacies. For a project that had people at heart it got very complicated.
Eventually word came through that we wouldn’t be submitting anything of the project for external assessment. So it has been gatering dust since.
The results arrived last week under a storm of issues. The SQA were taking the teachers/tutors grades and downgrading some of them based on the outcomes of the place where you studied. I got very lucky, my grade remained what my tutor submitted. I got an A.
Selkie’s Photography 