…For a week at least, luckily however Wales isn’t another country as I can’t find my passport at the moment.
I would say I am taking a holiday, as I do have a week off of work whilst I am there, but I will still be working. That is if you consider taking photos of drunk students work. I said last year that was going to be my last Freshers’ and I was wrong, so I won’t say that this year will be my last Freshers’ Week - Merely that it’s the 10th I will have attended.
The above picture is about the limit of my skill with a pen or pencil and shows why I stick to using a camera when doing portraits. I might only be an average photographer, but I am certainly a sub-par illustrator.
Photoshop is a very useful tool, indeed any program for photo editing is useful, but they always have more filters than you know what to do with, for every unsharp mask there are 5 artistic filters that usually produce dubious results (at least in my hands as you can see above).
As I mentioned yesterday I wasn’t planning on being Camera Dave last night and I kind of managed it, as I only took about 100 photos instead of my usual 400 or so.
My first mistake was getting a camera out to take a photo of some friends as once people saw me with a camera they quickly did the maths and came up with Dave + Camera = Camera Dave. It has to be said though that my new camera doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as good as my Fuji judging by the photos from last night.
It seemed to have a real problem focusing and gave a lot of people red eye which my Fuji rarely does (in fact the Fuji is so good at avoiding that I have never even bothered with teh red eye reduction setting). Further evidence of how bad the camera is is presented above, as you can see the camera made me look hideous!
Last week when I saw Emilie Autumn she was not alone on stage, she she some rather delectable company in the form of Lady Joo Hee playing the cello.
According to her MySpace page she repaid her teachers by murdering them and now only plays with people who cant read music as it, “makes her feel smarter”.
Thanks to the wonders of Facebook old friends and acquaintances can easily get in touch and one such person I have renewed contact with is the woman pictured above, who I knew when I was at uni and asked me to do some photos of her.
At the time I did have a bit of a crush on her and so being asked made my day. I might not have tried taking proper portrait photos before and not have had much in the way of equipment, but who needs a studio set up when you have a manual camera twice as old as you are, a single camera mounted flash and a few items lying around the room where the photos were taken.
I took the photos one afternoon in a condemned building on campus and we were supposed to organise another shoot once we had done some testers and I had a little bit more of an idea how to work with a model, but sadly the opportunity never arose thanks to busy schedules and her moving away upon graduation - I was both disappointed and relieved by this though, as she had asked me to do some more ‘glamourous’ shots of her and whilst on one hand I would have relished such an opportunity to photograph her nude, I was also rather shy and nervous about the idea.
I still recall my response to the idea when she broached the idea to me. I laughed, thankfully she raised the idea in a txt message and didn’t see how embarrassed I was. I mean having a girl you are attracted to ask you to photograph her in such a manner is a dream come true, unless of course like me at the time you were rather shy and awkward towards women. Add onto that the fact that I used to hate the comments I used to get (and still do occasionally) about only doing photography for such opportunities, claims I vigorously denied and I knew that I would never hear the end of if anyone found out I had actually done it and I was mortified - Even if I knew that in reality, although there would be a lot of jokes there would also be quite a lot of envy towards me as well.
So sadly because of my nervousness I never quite managed to make time for our second shoot, something I do still kind of regret - Although since then I have had a few similar offers from girls I have known to photograph them in various states of undress, but it hasn’t been the same as after the first time of being asked it’s nowhere near as surprising - Besides when it’s a woman you aren’t actually attracted to asking, it’s a lot easier to deal with.