Auschwitz

On the last day of our trip to Poland, we took a trip to Auschwitz. I shot with digital, film, as well a couple of Instax Mini. Though I obviously liked the way that the digital pictures looked, I much preferred the gloomy, overcast black and white film shots once I'd seen them developed. On a completely different level, however, are the Instax. Detached from the rest of the book due to their medium - and their hazy, glazed tone in comparison to the sharp, accurate photos in the rest of the series - they are timeless and ethereal. Instax, and instant film in general, are influenced directly by the temperature around them, meaning that on a gloomy, stormy day the temperature is low and the sun is hidden, and the Instax are therefore filled with cold blue tones and grey shadows. On a warm day, on the other hand, the photos would be doused in warm reds and glowing floors. On this particular day, the clouds were parted and rain was soaking us all from head to toe - and I really love the way these photos turned out as a result of that. Misty, with puddles reflecting the view back at us, the photos are eerie and seem to stretch onto a foggy infinity. I wanted to centre the main subject of each image, and really focus on similar shapes; and this is evident in pictures 3 and 4, and adds to the idea of the environment in general. 

Being at Auschwitz, at the time, didn't feel real and was hard to comprehend. These pictures are a reflection of that. 

Krakow: The Journey is available to buy and view here.

Krakow: A Journey

"Krakow: The Journey" can be found on Blurb here.

A few sneak peek photos from Krakow

I'm going to be heading into the university to use the 35mm negative scanners tomorrow, but for now here are a few sneak peek photos from the 3 days I spent in Krakow. Though the trip was fraught with disaster - on the first day I fell off a high curb and my ankle was the size of a golfball; on the second day one of my films failed entirely - the photos I did get look fantastic, and I'm very excited to start sequencing the images and creating the book. These are just two images I got of traditional musicians, taken on two different days, at the Florianska Gate that leads from the Old Town Market Square to the Barbican.

The Nexus Agency and The People Tree

I'm heading out to Krakow tonight, and I'm extremely nervous - everything has been very last minute after being mucked about by my former employers regarding my pay. Around £180 should have entered my bank account last Friday, and instead I was appalled to see that £17 was sitting there, the week before I was due to fly out to Krakow and two weeks before my rent is supposed to come out. Therefore I've had to dip into the money I received for my birthday only two weeks ago, and thus everything has culminated in me hurrying about the city today trying to get my pounds changed into Polish banknotes, and attempting desperately to find somewhere that stocked cheap enough film that I could spend my last £15 on it. Luckily the university shop had some slightly-expired stock left, and I managed to get my hands on four lots of black and white film, two of which are C41, and one colour. Phew!

There was more to last Friday than just sheer panic over my struggling funds; it was my first job for James Thomas, my new photography client who will hopefully be employing my services over the next few months. James is head of the Nexus Digital Communications Agency, a company that provide online promotions and media for local businesses. My role in this is to photograph the interiors, exteriors and products of the companies for use on their websites and social networking sites. Friday's job was for The People Tree, a small shop in central Norwich that stocks ethnic goodies for your house, bedroom or even pocket. From ornate furniture and wall hangings, to beautiful jewellery and accessories, the shop is filled to the brim with the brightest colours, the most delicate ornaments, and incredibly embellished masks. There are trinkets hidden everywhere, such as tiny wooden cats that are painted a vast array of bold colours, and hanging mobiles of pigs with wings; with hidden gems tucked beneath every surface and burrowed into every corner, the room has been used to its fullest potential, packed solidly with a feast for the eyes. I borrowed an amazing wide angle lens from my uni, a 10-22mm lens, which stretched each view from wall to wall and produced brilliant results.

The following photos are my favourites from the shoot.
Click for higher quality.

You can find The People Tree at their website.

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.