My Photography
I am a keen amateur photographer who gets a kick out of playing around in Photoshop, and most recently Lightroom, seeing what can be done with the images I take to create something a bit "different".
Past favourites have been kaleidoscopes, painterly effects and of course the Buzz Filter effect. Having said that Lightroom is my "goto" program of choice now and has been since version 5. Now subscribed to Adobe's Creative Cloud, I find it much easier to use for general photo editing and you can still achieve some artistic effects using it, plus it helps me to catalogue my images and use keywords to find the buggers again ;-) I've even figured out, using the camera calibration section, how to process my infrared images in Lightroom, as infrared is something I've got involved in over the last few years, both colour and now black 'n' white.
I currently own the following photographic gear for those out there for whom this matters :-
Kit:-
Canon 77D with 18-135mm IS STM lens - an awesome lens
Canon M50 Mirrorless with 22mm, 15-45mm (kit) and 18-150mm lenses plus EF-M lens adapter
Various infrared converted cameras to cover Goldie, 720nm and 850nm deep black 'n' white
Panasonic TZ90 for those times when I don't want to bring the big guns out to play - now I have the M50 this is less often ;-)
Olympus TG-6 Waterproof compact camera for those rainy days!
Various lenses by Canon, Sigma and Tamron
Canon 470EX-AI Flashgun plus numerous diffusers and bounce attachments (and other, smaller flashguns)
Various tripods and monopods
For a couple of years I was a member of the Invicta Camera Club based in Detling Maidstone but after entering, and winning, some of their many competitions I became fed up with not expanding my learning and so chose to leave the club world behind in order to "do my own thing" as and when I feel like it.
In more recent years I've been a member of our work camera club, although Covid-19 caused it to pause, now we are being "encouraged" back to the office, at least part time, it's started up again in recent months. It's very informal and presently has quite a small core of regulars which is nice. We are even hoping to garner permission to bring our cameras back on site for the meets - something which has been a bone of contention since the Pandemic Pause...
Some of the Invicta CC winning competition entries were :-
1st in Imagination Slide Comp
Judged by John Wigmore FRPS EFIAP MPAGB
3rd in Imagination Slide Comp
Judged by John Wigmore FRPS EFIAP MPAGB
Below are a couple of my arty shots of the Millennium Dome and the London Eye taken on a really wet day in June when we went up the River Thames on a boat.
The London Eye shots have been inverted, toned and added into a single image shot
The Dome shot has been coloured using a Cross Processing simulated digital action and I love the colours. It can be hit and miss as to what the outcome will be though, some work some don't.
Considering the original shots were really drab because of the awful weather I was glad to get something more unusual out of them when I got home :-)
Work Camera Club
The next selection of images are where I have won at either a works camera club site wide or monthly topic (just the club members for the monthly topics). For the monthly topics we covered a myriad of topics, with a trophy which you held for a month until the next session, until Covid-19 shut us down for a couple of years. Whether the competitions will make a comeback now we're allowed to hold meetings on site again I'm not sure. At the moment our sessions are relaxed and most often just discussions around a topic or topics that someone has made enquiries about. Possibly the odd PPT presentation thrown in for good measure. All very laid back and simples.
Physalis Fruits
Site Competition 2016 - Food
This my winning entry, came 3rd in my first site competition where I actually placed! Uber proud.
Monthly Competition - Shadows
Won with this image of a wedding ring placed in the fold of a book and light by a torch to form the heart shape shadow.
Monthly Competition - ICM
Won with this image in the Intentional Camera Movement monthly topic, uber fun to do but with varied and somewhat random results. This is rotating the camera around a "central" point during a slow shutter speed.
Monthly Competition - Self
So this was my winning entry for Self - where you had to take an image that represents you BUT couldn't contain any part of you.
Covered my love of photography, chocolate, strawberry laces, my kindle, Lightroom & Photoshop and Jaffa Cakes ;-P
Monthly Competition - Christmas
Need I say more? This was a little cone Santa which sat atop my old super huge widescreen TV and won me the Christmas comp.
Monthly Competition - Leading Lines
This entry of Southend Pier was the winner for the leading lines comp. An HDR version which captures the moodiness real well.
Monthly Competition - Abstract
This was my abstract winner - part of a grating down at Dockside, cross-processed to give it that somewhat funky look.
Measuring My Photo Progress...
Having initially started creating a new Excel chart at the end of each year showing which cameras I'd been using over the past year and the number of images taken, a pie chart if you will, I thought that there had to be a better way to collate this info. If you have ever done a Colourworks course then you'll know what I mean when I say I am primarily a Blue person and so very much data driven. And let's face it who doesn't like a spreadsheet?
Having played around with PowerBI at work, which is kind of like Excel on steroids, I wanted to learn more about using it but with a much more interesting collection of data. So was borne my idea to calculate some statistics on my photography - numbers of images per year/month, which cameras did I use, when and how often?
2022 Camera Stats
I started collating the raw data from 2017 onwards in an Excel sheet and still manually update this around once a month using a filter in Lightroom to easily locate the numbers and info I need. Then this info is locked into a PowerBI file which I can refresh and Bob's your Uncle so to speak, the various pages update automatically and I can slice and dice the data anyway I want.
I still post a yearly stats shot of my figures for the year, number of images per month, percentage by camera category. and finally the number of images per camera. With this page I can simply click on previous years to see whatever I want. This clearly shows that my M50 Mirrorless is my "goto" camera over the course of a year.
The whole journey to create this "database" has been quite the eyeopener! Not only from the perspective of learning more about PowerBI but also figuring out my photo habits, busy months and most used cameras. I even have a page for retired cameras, those I no longer own or use and that helps me to remember when they were last used in case there is ever a need to know - because you never know!
It's certainly shown me how my photography has travelled through from DSLRs to Mirrorless via Compact Cameras. And my mobile phone camera got some prolific use during the Pandemic!
If you are interested in seeing more of my work you can find some of it hosted below, its a kind of rolling year of my photography - feel free to take a look.