April 5th, 2010
This years good friday was made a little bit more special when I got my first ever FWA photo of the day!
For any one who doesn’t know about the FWA photo of the day site here is a some info from the site:
“FWA has been showcasing creativity online since May 2000 and has reached over 50 million visits to date. FWA photo is a dream showcase for us and we hope you will join us in enjoying one amazing photograph every day of the year”
March 13th, 2010
After the story has been in the mail, I later found out on Twitter that the story was featured in the Telegraph online. It was pretty cool following all the comments on Twitter, with in an hour or so there where several hundred tweets to the article.
The article also made 31, 000 hits on stumble upon and nearly 500 digs.
Here is the origional shot on my flickr, where the shot was discovered:
March 12th, 2010
I was recently approached by an agency regarding my penguin couple photo taken at Chester Zoo last year. They wanted to interview me and create a story about the photo and how I was able to capture the penguins preparing for “perfect picture”! I had no idea what paper’s the story would be featured in and I was amazed to see my photo on the homepage of the Mail onine :)
You can see the full article here.
March 2nd, 2010
I created a desktop wallpaper titled “Escaping Winter” from one of my New Zealand photos. It is available for download from the Smashing Magazine site here :)
I hope you enjoy it!
February 27th, 2010
New Zealand is such a beautiful, clean and epic country. In our 3 week road trip we managed to see plenty; driving from the North to South Island. Each drive took us through national parks, past lakes, mountains, rivers and beautiful coast lines. We had to stop every few miles – there was so much to take photos of across the ever changing landscapes.
The road trip consisted of:
2796 miles driven across the North and South Islands (with a ferry trip in-between). An average of 2.3 hours a day
10 National parks visited including Te Urewera, Whanganui, Tongariro, Abel Tasman, Kahurangi, Paparora, Nelson Lakes, Arthur’s Pass, Westland, Aoraki
100+ Mountains including Mt Cook, Mt Ruapehu (aka Mt Doom), Mt Ngauruhoe, Mt Adams, Mt Sefton, Mt John, Mt Tasman
50+ Lakes including Lake Taupo, Lake Tekapo, Lake Matheson, Lake Pukaki, Lake Rotorua
12 Cities & towns slept in, including Wellington, Christchurch, Auckland, Rotorua, Taupo, Kaikoura, Twizel, Greymouth, Takaka
6 Beaches including Wharariki Beach, Hot Water Beach, Wharekho Beach
3 Glaciers walked to. They were the Fox Glacier, Franz Josef Glacier & Tasman Glaciers
2 Thermal Parks, Orakei Korako & Whakarewarewa
856 Photos taken, 23 gigs worth. 101 editing & liked
5 Lime shakes drunk (amazing!)
2 Kiwi burgers eaten
3 Animals killed by the car (1 cat, 2 small birds) ;(
0 Wild kiwis’s seen (but we did see 2 captive so they are defiantly not mythical)
Highlights would be Skydiving over Lake Taupo, driving through Arthur’s Pass, Wharariki Beach in the golden bay was stunning (that’s where this photo was taken), Lake Tekapo and the surrounding glaciers were also incredible.
19 gigs worth of memory cards didn’t last me long, I ended up having to buy another 4 while out there and every night I would delete any I didn’t like from the day – which was a pretty tough to do! I have 101 photos from the trip I like (from 856) I get them on Flickr over the next few weeks. A few can be seen below:
November 24th, 2009
It’s been over 3 months since my last post! Can’t belive how fast time is flying at the moment, I have been really busy with work and just bought the 5d mk2; so I have been spending lots of time playing with that too :) Seeing as tho it’s been such a long time since my last post, I thought I’d add some free iPhone wallpapers for anyone to use. They are some recent photos of patterns in nature and buildings; a selection I thought would make decent iPhone wallpapers.
Choose from any or all of the ones below. Simply click to see full size and then save to your iPhone.
Above: zebra and giraffe skins. Taken at chester zoo, england
Above: zebra skins taken at chester zoo, england & metal pattern taken of the Lowery in salford quays
It would be great to hear from anyone who uses them – either on here, Flickr or Twiiter :)
Enjoy
August 14th, 2009
Awards, Photography, Web development
June was a pretty busy month. I attended 3 awards nights and picked up 3 different awards!
The first was the Sh! Awards held in Leeds and organised by the media agency Brahm. The competition was open to all students in North England University’s. I was chosen as a finalist and required to give a 60 minute presentation and Q&A session with some well respected, new media experts. A week later I was at the awards night, for some celebrations & to collect 2nd place in the Digital Media category. The award was for a collection of work from my final year, including my final year project – The Photo Guide and my photography project Poverty of the Mind.
Me presenting work at the BBC North Design Awards 2009
The second awards night was the Northern Design Awards sponsored by the BBC. Over 3000 students from University & Colleges across the UK entered and I was chosen as a finalist in the Digital Media category. My project Poverty of the Mind wasn’t a winner on the night but I enjoyed attending such a large event, presenting my work and socialising. I also managed to sneak onto BBC 1 news!
There’s a video of the evening on Youtube, check it out.
Finally I attended an awards night at the University of Huddersfield where I picked up 1st place for best use of Visual Design again for my Poverty of the Mind project. I also won second prize for technical achievement, this was for a destop application mashing up web services – build with Adobe Air.
June 19th, 2009
Following my adventure in the photography studio at the start of the year I returned twice to take some photos of more dresses made by my sister. The theme for this collection was Recycled Fashion and all dresses are made from 2nd hand materials. The dresses are really good quality and show great attention to detail.
This first dress is made from neck ties, collected from family friends and from car boot sales. I am sure a couple of mine got snuck in there too. We tried a variety of shots from a range of perspectives, this was a good one as it showed the full range of ties used.
The second dress is made from exactly 100 capri-sun pouches. Nealry all of them drank by my sister! To acompany the dress is a capri-sun bag made from 36 pouches. I had a bit of fun with photo shop on this one creating a quirky shot promoting the dress.
Here are some more shots taken in the studio of outfits made by my sister:
Click any to vew on Flickr
May 22nd, 2009
Front end, Photography, University, Web development, Wordpress, iPhone
The Photo Guide is my final year project; a community driven, portable photography guide for digital SLR camera users. I was fully responsible for everything from the design, time management, content, frontend (html, css, javascript) and backend (php). It was in development for around 3 months and accompanied by a 12000 word dissertation.
The site makes use of a wide variety of open source technologies, including: Wordpress, JQuery, Google Maps API, TinyMCE, Gravatar and Smart image resizer. I also created a mobile version of the site: Read the rest of this entry »
May 14th, 2009
Awards, Front end, Javascript, Photography, University, Web development
Using a series of five images for a online social experiment titled ‘Poverty of the Mind’ to raise awareness and offer support to people with mind poverty. The images use a minimal and saturated style manipulated to look like scenes from an office workers bad day. The style is consistent throughout the series. The expressions and negative body language of the main subject helps to show his state of mind and feelings about his current work situation. Read the rest of this entry »
February 11th, 2009
Yesterday I got lucky and had the chance use a photography studio used by my sisters college, we had a few hours to take some photo’s of a new dress she had made.
I had never been in a studio before and was clueless on how to operate four softboxes and no idea of what settings to use on my camera.
So I pretty much just jumped in and started trying some settings. I set my Canon to full manual, connected the slave softbox and took a few test shots, I found a shutter speed of around 1/125 and F16 worked best allowing me to hand hold and keep the light under control. I love the noise of the combination of all the flashes and the light they produced was insane. It was a fun and great learning experience, now I really want a studio of my own!
August 13th, 2008
So I created this blog during my placement year – after I had finished my second year. I just wanted to share my favourite piece of work from that year:
A poster to be used for a drug awareness campaign titled ‘Worried about Someone’? Designed to be used by the independent drug awareness and advice service FRANK.
The poster uses dark and abstract imagery manipulated to look like a disturbing scene of a drug user clearly distressed/confused and
in need of help. An unreal yet serious eye catching appeal is used in a bold attempt to get friends of, or drug users themselves to contact FRANK.
I tried to use shocking and serious content to show the consequences and seriousness of drug use, past campaigns from FRANK I
found where either too comical or too information rich. I have kept the posters simple but with a clear message that hopefully friends
of drug users will pick and act upon. Read the rest of this entry »
I am a passionate front end developer, and very keen photographer! You can find me in the usual places:
