www.lifecyclesfilm.com/
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DH Expert English Champion, Adam Holleyman

A few reasons for it; I’ve been wanting to move my portfolio over to a database driven site for a while to make uploading easier, and so had two realistic options (that I was familier with) Indexhibit or WordPress. I chose WordPress just because its way  more flexible than Indexhibit, if a larger entity, and uber customisable with plug-ins and stuff. I also wanted to get rid of the flash galleries I had as they were a pain to update and of course not iPad/phone friendly, and to have BIG images.  As it is I’m pretty pleased with it. Everything’s built from the ground up, so took about two days solid of coding (fun). I used the Galleria-wp plugin for the gallery, and some other plug-in for the drop down menu, with a few mods to get them to position and look right.

It validates as HTML5, a few CSS3 bits to make it stand out, no idea how it will look in IE, hopefully it degrades nicely, will check tomorrow. May tweek the blog a touch to get the branding the same sometime soon too.

Nearly there…

(and my 100th post!)

Freshwater Bay in the rain.

Good old British Summer…

Went to the beach for a Birthday BBQ, took a few pics, but I really like this one of my friend Anna’s cousin Ellen…

51 to go…

Since graduating uni I have pretty much taken no photos. Not because I don’t want to, but life in general has got in the way. Poor excuse I know. To counteract this, I have decided to attempt a ‘Photo-a-week’ project. What?! a week! why not a photo a day? – well, this is why: I have attempted a PAD before, It maybe works for about a month, then falls off fast. I have seen other people try PADs and its worked out for them, fair play to them finding the time. I think a week would give enough scope to produce 52 decent photos, that can all stand on their own merit, yet will look coherent as a body of work, and show my style and shooting direction. One a week I think is an easy and obtainable target. Trying to do one a day is fine (especially if its more flickr-style snapshots that don’t really say too much) but I want to produce decent work, a having a week to do one good photo means I’m not trying to justify the 3rd photo in a row of a cloud or a bug in the garden. I’ll start it on my birthday week, and see a) how long I can keep it up for, and b) what sort of photos I’ll get out of it. My aim is to use it as a springbord to get more into portraiture, one area that I’ve struggled with in the past, and expand my lifestyle photography as I feel that I need to try and get myself more commercially orientated…

Exiting.

lifecyclesfilm.com

While up in London we also visited a few exibitions, the first of which was ‘The Family and the Land’, a showcase of Sally Manns’ photographs at the Photographers Gallery. Mann, whose ten year project, Immediate Family, photographing her three children growing up in the countryside and surroundings of Virginia, gained her recognition as a photographer or note, producing some amazing, intimate photography of her children. These photos are as close to being perfect as its possible to get, but for me this was also her best work. Her later series of pictures, Deep South, Photographing landscapes that were significant during the American Civil War, just didn’t look as polished and completed. I can understand the process of large format wet-plate photography and the inconstancies that each photo will have, but to me they just looked like some blurry not very well shot landscapes. Her most recent project, What Remains, deals with the taboo of death, with Mann photographing bodies in various stages of decomposition at a research facility in Tennessee. These photos I found intriguing, and morbidly interesting, and would have liked to have seen more. Lastly as a conclusion to What Remains, Faces, was to bring the project to a close, with 30 photos of her children as adults, with very large closeup prints of their faces made to celebrate life. Again I found these photos were eclipsed by the near technical perfection of Immediate Family, but I think thats just cos I like literal photos…

The other exhibition we popped into was the Wolfgang Tillmans Exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, This I found “interesting”, and did give me a good example of  ’Art Photography’, not that it was bad, but to me I didn’t really know what to make of it. Some of the photos I found interesting, but only when I thought of them as pictures,  not photographs. I think this is were I start to struggle in my appreciation for the less literal, more conceptual side of photography. If I was some super art critic I think I would have liked this, but I just found it odd.

Luckily the Serpentine Gallery has a cool pavilion/cafe/tent thing for 2010, designed by Jean Nouvel. Its red. Very red. in an homage to Londons busses and phone boxes, it kinda messes with your eyes when you first step inside. Inside are bean-bags, sunken seating pits, hammocks, and table-tennis tables. Its a very cool space, and very red. Personally as a part-time architecture buff, I liked it better than the exibition we went to see, and I’m looking forward to the creation for 2011.

Red & Green, The Serpentine gallery pavillion.

This actually happened the beginning of the month, but I’ve only just got around to processing the photos…

More info and all the tourist blurb can be found at the official site, yarmoutholdgaffersfestival