Ready, steady, edit!

Today will be mostly spent editing, printing research, (hopefully) printing my recently edited photos and scanning in the negatives that I processed yesterday. I used 120 Black and White film, they seem to have turned out really well. I was panicking a little the other day since both studios are now unusable due to the smaller one being filled with tables, chairs and other random things and the bigger studio is being turned into an exhibition space. 2/3 mac suites have also been dismantled and only one remains. There's a definite atmosphere of stress and chaos in the air and I think I'm picking up on that too. I'll be glad when this week is over. I'll be more or less free for 3 months then :)

So far I've edited 5 photos, and I'm about to edit some more. I don't think that's too bad for just over an  hours work. If I keep the pace up I should be able to have some free time tomorrow. It's what I'm aiming for.

I've also recently learnt that I really, really need an external harddrive. A big one. I'm looking into getting a TB or 1.5TB worth of storage. I've got over 10 DVDs full of images. That's easily 30GB+ of images to sort though while hoping they don't end up corrupting. Thankfully I don't have to edit them all, I'm just choosing the best ones. I'll try and print some contact pages though just to show my tutors/markers how much work I did. They like that kind of thing.

I find it strange to think that another academic year has flown by under my nose. At this rate I'll be 30 before I wake up tomorrow. Each year goes by faster, and each year I realise how important it is to grab opportunities with both hands before they slip you by, if you want them. If you don't make an effort to live your life, then nobody will live it for you.

Right, back to work!

UPDATE: I've printed all my research (yay!) and now need to cut it out, stick it in and annotate. Fairly easy. Then I've got to edit some more photos ready for printing tomorrow, thursday and friday. I also have to edit down each photoshoot to include the best from the several images taken to include as a contact sheet, and then choose from those which ones I want to digitally manipulate and tidy up in photoshop. They then get printed out on A3 paper on a special printer in college which is pretty awesome. I'm just thankful that my screen is colour calibrated already, means I can hopefully avoid the repetitive printing out, scrutinising and printing out again cycle that takes hours. To be fair though, that was me panicking trying to get it just right for a customer. I'll be aiming for the same high quality, but it won't be nearly as stressful as last time.

Painting with light

So here I am in reading week! It's nearly over, but I've got some stuff done! I went to the fire station again on Monday even though I really didn't want to. Not because I don't enjoy myself though. I wasn't too sure why. I think it had something to do with being in the cold for a couple of hours and being a little tired. It was nice and warm indoors so I didn't feel like venturing outside to get frostbite! But I went anyway, and had a great time yet again. The firemen really embarrassed me at the end of it all though, words were twisted, holes were dug (by me) and hats were put over faces (again by me). As they put it, you could light a fag on my face, it sure felt like it was on fire!

Anyhoo, a few things have happened since my last post. I got my provisional license in the post yesterday! I wasn't expecting it for a couple of weeks at least, but sure enough 6 days later it arrived in the post along with my supporting identity documents! So now I can learn to drive and buy drinks without having to worry about ID! Seriously, it's great on one level that people think I look younger than I am, but it's not so great because it usually means I have to get a friend to buy me something with my money =/ Not anymore! Mind you, I don't really drink that much anyway so it's not that big a deal, I'm just happy that I have more doors open now.

What else has happened? Erm, I started playing my guitar again. Not that big a deal I guess but it's something I've not done for a while :) Oh, and I bought a market handbook for photographers that I've been meaning to get for a while. Should arrive either today or tomorrow. I still haven't bought certain bits of kit though...I really should sort that out. I just get stumped at what to buy. I fret so much over getting the right thing for the right price that I end up getting nothing. To be fair though, I'm having to spend lots on expensive equipment. I have every right to be thrifty :P

I also went out and about with a friend recently to do some painting with light. Partly because it's part of a brief we have in college and partly because it's one heck of a lot of fun. Before we got to the painting with light however we went somewhere else. I think it was Mumbles or Burry Port, I can't remember. Some harbour. I'll include those photos in a HDR post I'm going to make, since I used a tripod and bracketing. I'd like to try it out and see how it goes :)

For the painting with light, we messed around in Trostre car park first of all and then found a bridge to do some long exposures of cars going past. On the way home I decided I'd try and get something funky just by holding the camera loosely, let it focus on whatever and press the shutter down and see what happens. I got some pretty neat photos! Here's some of the results:

This one is one of my favourites, it's currently my desktop background :)

Please click for a larger image, I seem to have fixed the problem I was having with some being enormous. They should fit comfortably in the screen now :) I'll also be starting to use Flickr some more soon. I need to sort some things out first though.