A little bit about me and my photography...
After completing my BA in Professional Photography at Stevenson College in June 2011 I started off doing Press and PR work. I attended numerous press photocalls as well as taking on commissioned PR jobs. While the images taken at those press photocalls didn't always make the papers, they provided invaluable experience in getting great publicity images.
My college course was a three-year, full-time period of study that covered many of the technical aspects of photography from making a rudimentary pinhole camera to using a digital-back medium format camera tethered to a computer. In the first two years I was required to take pictures of many different subjects from bowls of soup to landscapes and high fashion to street portraits but in my final year I was able to concentrate on photojournalism and events. That final BA year was all about applying the principles and techniques I had already learned. And the key to it all was, and still is, LIGHTING. Get the lighting right and you can photograph anyone and anything and make it look great. Get it wrong and people and places simply won't look their best.
While most things these days are captured digitally and printed out on computer printers, or increasingly not printed at all and simply sent and displayed electronically, I have also done my share of analogue photography using 35mm, 120 and 5x4 film formats and all the processing and printing required to produce black and white images in the darkroom.
Talking of film, that's where I started, way back when I was eight, when I was given a Kodak Instamatic for Christmas. It took those totally enclosed film cartridges that you just dropped into the back of the camera - no need to struggle over threading a film onto the spindle in the camera. After a few years I inherited my grandfather's Olympus Trip. It was a step up, in that it used 35mm film (so I had to get to grips with properly loading a film, and discovered it wasn't that big a deal after all) and was something of a design classic in its day. It was still a compact, point-and-shoot camera, with a fixed lens so it seemed a logical next step to get myself an SLR - a Pentax ME Super that still works well today, more than thirty-five years later. I continued to use my film SLR even when I started using a small digital point-and-shoot but it was when Digital SLRs became affordable and I bought myself a Nikon D70 that my passion for photography was re-invigorated and I've not looked back since.
Back in my student days I was shortlisted for the The Herald Scottish Student Press Awards in both 2010 and 2011, was a merit winner in the Fujifilm Student Awards 2010 and runner-up in the BIPP (Scotland) Student Awards Photojournalism Category in 2011. More recently one of my portrait images got a Merit Award in the BIPP Scotland Awards 2015.
I am a licentiate member of the BIPP (British Institute of Professional Photographers).
After completing my BA in Professional Photography at Stevenson College in June 2011 I started off doing Press and PR work. I attended numerous press photocalls as well as taking on commissioned PR jobs. While the images taken at those press photocalls didn't always make the papers, they provided invaluable experience in getting great publicity images.
My college course was a three-year, full-time period of study that covered many of the technical aspects of photography from making a rudimentary pinhole camera to using a digital-back medium format camera tethered to a computer. In the first two years I was required to take pictures of many different subjects from bowls of soup to landscapes and high fashion to street portraits but in my final year I was able to concentrate on photojournalism and events. That final BA year was all about applying the principles and techniques I had already learned. And the key to it all was, and still is, LIGHTING. Get the lighting right and you can photograph anyone and anything and make it look great. Get it wrong and people and places simply won't look their best.
While most things these days are captured digitally and printed out on computer printers, or increasingly not printed at all and simply sent and displayed electronically, I have also done my share of analogue photography using 35mm, 120 and 5x4 film formats and all the processing and printing required to produce black and white images in the darkroom.
Talking of film, that's where I started, way back when I was eight, when I was given a Kodak Instamatic for Christmas. It took those totally enclosed film cartridges that you just dropped into the back of the camera - no need to struggle over threading a film onto the spindle in the camera. After a few years I inherited my grandfather's Olympus Trip. It was a step up, in that it used 35mm film (so I had to get to grips with properly loading a film, and discovered it wasn't that big a deal after all) and was something of a design classic in its day. It was still a compact, point-and-shoot camera, with a fixed lens so it seemed a logical next step to get myself an SLR - a Pentax ME Super that still works well today, more than thirty-five years later. I continued to use my film SLR even when I started using a small digital point-and-shoot but it was when Digital SLRs became affordable and I bought myself a Nikon D70 that my passion for photography was re-invigorated and I've not looked back since.
Back in my student days I was shortlisted for the The Herald Scottish Student Press Awards in both 2010 and 2011, was a merit winner in the Fujifilm Student Awards 2010 and runner-up in the BIPP (Scotland) Student Awards Photojournalism Category in 2011. More recently one of my portrait images got a Merit Award in the BIPP Scotland Awards 2015.
I am a licentiate member of the BIPP (British Institute of Professional Photographers).
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Personal projects can be very specific and time-constrained, taking pictures on a particular occasion, or can be long-term and ongoing as and when opportunities present themselves. Some of these involve visits to other locations and therefore depend on being in the right area, while for those involving a temporal element, record the passage of time by repeated visits to the same location.
One such project was on Referendum Day back in 2014. And another was Fifty Fifty in 2015 I also post a picture a day on the Blipfoto website and have been doing for more than thirteen years / 5000+ days. |
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