Sub Project 52

As part of my Project 366 I've also joined a number of groups on Flickr which are aiming for the apparently less taxing goal of 1 photo a week rather than a day throughout 2012... I'm not entirely sure that is much less challenging - I've already spent many brain cycles selecting my submissions for the first two weeks from the two sets of 7 candidates....

Winter Get Away?

Manful @ Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen

16 days into Project 366 and I'm almost up to date with all the "process" surrounding it - without the need to scramble for a subject at 11:55pm...

Project 366 – publish one picture a day for a year…

The new year brings me a new project – and possibly my first “new year’s resolution” – to take at least one photograph every day of 2012 – all 366 of them.

One challenge I’ll have to over come creatively is crossing the international date line – which means that I’ll actually only experience the normal 365 days this year, loosing the leap day to jet lag as I travel round the world….

I’ll be publishing one picture a day on a new blog I’ve created – 66photography99 – as regularly as internet access and time allows. I’m also uploading them to flickr and adding them to a number of groups on flickr.

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize ‘11

None my own photographs this time, as this was a chance for me to be inspired by images created by others and judge to be the best of their genre captured this year…

Having recently become a member of the National Portrait Gallery, I had the opportunity to attend the members private viewing of the 60 images selected from thousands of entries to have the honour of being hung in the gallery. I viewed the images to the sound track of KT Tunstall’s newly released The Scarlet Tulip EP – a rarity these days – only available at gigs and via the artists own website – a proudly barcode free item, purchased the evening before after KT’s gig at the inspiring Union Chapel.

Having previously enjoy the stunting images selected for exhibition at the Natural History museum for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, I was left a little flat – all the images where certainly classic portraits – but few had any special qualities to draw the viewer into them – even the five prize winners where “good portraits” rather than stunning images.

Of all the images the one which drew me in and left me wanting to see more was Old Truman Brewery/Claudia, 2011, by Darren Hall – my highly commended would go to a portraits of Keria Knightly by Michael Brit which had a twinkle in her eye, and an image of Malega, Surma Boy by Mario Marino which had an almost 3D quality.

New Perspective

With the help of a new lens I'm getting a new perspective on London! There is certainly an art to using a lens as extreme as a 360x180 degree fisheye! But even my first attempt produced some interesting images of London around my flat on a mid-summer eve. The most successful was pointing the camera to the sky amongst a grove of trees in front of Tate modern.

From Fish Eye

It also proved interesting to include reflections, it was amazing how close you had to get to a building to make it fill the frame. And then being up a very tall ladder would have assisted getting the image I was really trying for - getting the dome of St Paul's into a close up shot just wasn't going to happen from ground level! Using the lens amongst the sky scrappers of Hong Kong is going to be interesting... Now the hunt for software to manipulate the images beings - and I think I'm going to have lots of image to experiment with HDR - having every thing in view in one 180 degree by 360 degree arc can make getting all the details at a single exposure setting impossible!