Sussex Photographer Bernie Greene scratching out a tune while trying not to fall off the roof

Liz Lets Loose

Yesterday you saw Liz on one of her few and far between better days. Today I’m aftraid she reverted to form after drinking some camomile tea.

And today is day 50 of the project. It has gone remarkably fast. I’m very glad I started the project. It has so far been the very best creativity exercise I’ve ever done. I am much more familiar with my kit and with the whole process of image making. It is amazing how fast I can now go from the idea to the shot in the can. I can place lights and get their settings right in about the same time a waiter can lay a table with cutlery. Well maybe a little slower but not that much.

I have learnt many things in the last 50 days. One of which is that I am pretty much uninspired by inanimate objects. I can shoot them but I have to work at it. Whereas with people it comes very easily.

I have also found that scenes are a lot of fun. Noir lighting is great fun. Lighting on two or more planes in the picture gives great depth and separation of image elements. I often like to restrict the colour palette and go for comic book type images.

If you’re a shooter and have wondered about doing a 365 but haven’t I can heartily recommend it.

Edit: Just found out that 48/365 was chosen as 1 out of 2 favourites for the month on the Digital Photo Experience blog. The guys that run that blog are way up there so this is a pretty cool thing for me. You can see the post here.

Today’s picture was a hard one to come up with. I’ve found more and more that I am easily inspired to shoot people or dogs and possibly other critters but other things are very hard work. I had no one else around and I didn’t want to use myself again, even though I had a recent shot featured on Don Giannatti’s site again (thnks a lot Don).

So there I was without an idea and thinking that I just did not want to do this today…. but I am committed to doing it. So I knew I had to. So I had to come up with something. The result isn’t exactly as I had conceived it. I might have got there after a couple of hours but it had already taken about 30 minutes to get this. It is very difficult to get a playing card in just the right spot as the flash fires. This was about the 100th attempt and was the best I had.

And there is a lesson here. I know that if this was for a client I would have continued on until I got it perfect. Or I would have figured out another way to get it perfect. It wasn’t so I didn’t. But maybe I shoulda…

Cards in the Hat

And a most welcome one at that. I have been busy in London for a few days and just got back. So I’m catching up on email and blogs I follow and there is what looks to be a cool piece in Lighting Essentials

Lighting Essentials is a pretty high profile blog by a successful pro photographer who teaches others as well as shoots commercially.

So I read the post and start to look at the images. I’m thinking there is some cool stuff here and then…

I almost fell off my seat. It isn’t just one of my own pics, it’s a self portrait. You can see the rest of the post here.

So why is this posted under “business related” and why should you care? Glad you asked.

I re-started my career as a photographer in January of this year after a 25 year break mostly in IT. This domain name was only registered in mid January. I have worked daily since then to promote the site and myself as a portrait shooter. I have a Facebook account along with Twitter and Flickr and others are coming soon. I have studied SEO for photographers and other kinds of businesses and am putting it into practice as I go along.

I’m not sure I’m doing everything right but it is good to get an acknowledgement that I have at least been doing something right.