Coming soon... my first self-published book.

In less than a week I'm going to be heading to Poland, Krakow, with my best friend of 5 years Becca. It's for my latest photography project (despite there being the chance the book may not arrive at my house before my deadline), but it is also something I've been wanting to work on for a while.

Not long ago, I sat down and thought long and hard about what I want to do with my life. Obviously, I said to myself, I want to take photos. But in what context? I've always been very flexible, accepting jobs from anyone who offers and setting up photoshoots in a variety of genres. I've worked on film sets, created fashion shoots, stripped my models down for artistic nudes, worked a small stint in a nightclub, and religiously photographed events for no-one's benefit but my own. But what is it that I really want to do? Ever since I've been young, I've been obsessed with the idea of exploring. Family holidays were accompanied by me snapping photographs of everything and everyone, and my literature growing up consisted of books like The Famous Five, or The Magic Faraway Tree. I sought after books that could tell me about different worlds, played video games like Tomb Raider that were set in different countries, watched documentaries about the world, about tribes and islands and underwater mysteries.

So it only seemed natural that my answer would be 'to travel'. I've always loved the adventure of going to a new city. I've gone on family holidays from the age of about 10 to France, chose to go to both Paris and a whale-watching cruise to Bilbao when given the choice of activities in high school, and am forever planning my next trip - no matter how close to home I have to stay. Last year I went to Berlin with my uni course and loved it so much that I returned half a year later, armed to the teeth with cameras and film. This year I've been to Prague, again with my university course, and this time I made it my mission to capture everything we visited, even the things that didn't interest me so much, knowing it would add to the collection of images that described the city as a whole. And that is my aim with this project. I'm heading to Krakow, and I'm going to document the city in a series of black and white, colour, instant and digital images. I'm going to portray the city's identity by capturing its overall mood, split between two chapters - day, and night.

My itinerary so far is vague, but I've read the guidebooks and the online literature about the city and can honestly say I'm excited to visit a city with such an intense, awe-inspiring amount of history. Our hostel is located in the dead centre of the main square of the Old Town, meaning that everything is within our grasp quickly and easily. But 3 days isn't a long time, and the budget is extremely tight. I have to make sure to photograph everything with the sharpest of accuracy, both digitally and on film, and can't afford to make a single mistake.  So all I can really say is that my fingers are crossed tightly for some luck; something that, recently, has been running low for me.

Anyway (getting to the point), the culmination of this project will be in the form of a book. Paper-back, and filled with images of various formats, it will be found on www.blurb.com and will be my first ever self-published book. I'll hopefully be bringing it along to photo festivals, book fairs, and am planning on proposing to several independent book stores for it to be on their shelves.

All of this, however, is only the start. Next year, I'm planning on developing this idea into a much larger project; one that will require a far bigger budget, and that will hopefully have a larger-scale result. Well, maybe. A girl can only dream, after all.

London: a week of sunshine.

Perspective

For my most recent project I received a 2:2. The brief was to create a series of images that could be used for the office space at a prominent mechanical and electrical consulting engineering company based in London. Their main ethos was on shape, pattern and light, and I decided to focus on these aspects in the form of fisheye images of architecture and structures. I chose to abstract these images slightly by always looking up, down or along, but never out - this creates a different perspective of these everyday structures, as the human eye is usually looking out or around.