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

7 hours looking at this

Thanks to those who wondered what had happened to me for the last three days. I’m happy to say I’m alive and survived them.

Friday night was not that interesting. I set off from East Grinstead at around 6:00pm on my way to Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex. This is a journey of around 60 miles which normally takes an hour and a half at worst. This was not to be a normal at worst occassion. I came to the rear of the jam above at around 6:30pm and moved about 1 mile in the next 7 hours.

I got to my parents’ house at about 2:30 and would have made this post then had I remembered to bring my laptop power cable. Without the cable I couldn’t edit or post as I can connect with my blog only via the laptop as that is the only place I had the password saved.

So the lesssons learned in this experience;

1. It is always a good idea to have at least enough fuel to complete your journey.

2. It is always a good idea to have some snacks of some kind hidden away in the car somewhere. (I didn’t)

3. It would not have been bearable without an mp3 player.

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.

The Flower

Liz wanted a picture showing this plant that had suddenly flowered after years of not flowering. I wanted to do more lighting on different planes similar to yesterday’s shot of Dave Press. This was the result.

Dave Press

Dave Press is an amazing guitarist.  I am proud to say that this is the first shot of a series I will be making over the coming weeks that will amount to the first of my unusual local people projects. The idea of the project is to create a feature type profile of local people that interest me.

This picture wasn’t shot in the store room of the local guitar shop but in Dave’s living room. He has quite a collection that aren’t all shown here. But more interesting than his collection is his playing. He is a virtuoso in many genres of music. Go check out his website or better still catch him live.

The Season's True Colours

I heard there were manisfestos being published. Thought I’d try and help out by putting the main three parties intentions into one succinct image. Yes  I have used the same image before but not with quite the same text.

Wolfgang

We had just done a fairly standard, safe, profile portrait and then I switched the lighting and props around so as to get this. Quite like it.

Pupak Haghighi-Brinch

This is Pupak. A very interesting lady who got a group of local artists in the Ashdown Forest area together and helped them form a group to facilitate collaboration and help each other with marketing and such. We met today and had a talk about how we might help each other. There will quite possibly be more to come on this in the coming weeks.  Then we made some pictures. This is one of my favourites.

Leaving The Scene

Conceived and lit in about three minutes. Then about 45 minutes to process. Some people think it all happens in a snap.

Crumpet

I was advised that if I wanted to get more readers then this was what I had to do.

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