Duplicity
I’ve recently picked up on a new group over on Flickr – "Get Pushed" that tries to take a personal approach to photography challenges – every round, participants are paired up together and your partner looks at your photo stream and issues a challenge to produce something in an area you haven’t posted.
I threw my hat in for round two, and got paired with Nikongirl1 who suggested “…one thing I notice you don’t PP much if any at all. So I must push you to clone yourself or someone interacting with one another…” – so after the initial “damn, she’s on to me already” thoughts, and spending a few days thinking up and discarding ideas (it doesn’t help that I’m a big fan of people like Miss Aniela who have elevated this type of post processing into some serious kind of art – examples here) before trying a few things out.
In the end, I went with a fairly simple setup – one camera + tripod, the stairs (quietest and tidiest part of the house that day!) and after setting up for a 10 second delay attempted to pose – now, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t like having my photograph taken, and find it much harder to (com)pose for an image when I can’t see how it’s looking in camera so this was “slightly” out of my comfort zone (a touch), but in the end I managed to get a handful of images together and then, through the magic of layers and masks turn them into something that at least met the brief 
So that was that – I got pushed (big style!) and it was a great learning experience which was the main point, I can’t claim that I enjoy being in front of a camera, but I think I’ll probably play around with this kind of image again in future and will be looking for the next push soon too…
A little bit of “UrbEx”
I’ve been fascinated by derelict & abandoned places for a while, but it’s been particularly bad since a couple of trips out with Chrissie_Red and Pinkerbell that included some astounding locations, along with a group shoot (ok – I need to get this posted!) down at the Lead Factory in Newcastle.
After taking a look at some of the UrbEx sites, I took a trip down to the Steetly Mangasite in Hartlepool for a look round – especially keen to take a look at some of the “pools” that have been left on site here. Sadly, due rain stopped me from spending a huge amount of time on site – there was quite a doozy of a thunderstorm I was watching getting closer and closer – but I’m thinking about when next I might be able to get down there, and hopefully take a model or two as it’d make a fantastic location for an Alt / Cyber-punk fashion type shoot!
It’s Blurb Time…
A while back I started playing about with Blurb – I’d thrown together some photo books before (take two small children, photograph liberally and produce a photobook every christmas for the grandparents for a popular gift – we don’t talk about the year I missed the order window and the books didn’t arrive until the new year…) but haven’t really tried it with a more adult topic. Between that, browsing through my “archives” (from April, not exactly the distant past) I found myself wondering about the shoot with ChrissieRed in particular – after a bit of experimentation, frustration (the Blurb software appears to crash at random intervals and “forget” the last twenty or so pages that you’ve added into it) I’ve got my first effort prepared here: