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:

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

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.

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

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:

The mobile site can be seen by accessing the site while on a mobile device (such as the iPhone)! It features less functionality than the full site but gives quick and easy access to personalised guidebooks containing guides saved for quick reference when needed most – out taking photos.

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.

Real life content from the social networking site Twitter has been dynamically overlaid onto the images to give a narrative and help people connect with the subject. I added icons to add extra value to the images and re-enforce his thoughts in a quirky way.

Filler images and lines have been used to connect the series and keep the flow between them. A few common themes including time and repetitiveness are also used to connect the images.

I have kept the project simple and focused on a story in an attempt to raise awareness of what can be a tragic situation for those involved, I hope people can draw something positive from my project either on a creative level or a reminder to peruse their happiness and not to get stuck in a job they don’t like.

This is a demo of my Adobe Air application built for a project at University. The brief was to create a complete Flash app that utilized a variety of web services. I wanted to experiment with Adobe Air and create an application that had the potential to be useful.

My idea was a Portal to the web, one place to check several different services – a bit like Google desktop in an application. You may wish to view with the demo full screen and video with the volume off! ;)

A web development project built using asp.NET. The brief was to create a fully functioning, database driven ticket booking service for a made up theatre company. Detailing all shows, venues, cast, productions and performances, the ability for customers to register then book tickets and for admin to add/maintain all content.

As well as simply viewing all the normal theatre content, the site has the following functionality:

• Full admin controls for updating all content and adding new content
• Booking system, and ticket availability checker
• Order history and ticket cancelation
• Dynamic cancelled performance and production notification

The design was created by me and the following technical functionality has been used:

• Themes and skins for styling and managing Controls, Menus, Login and Images
• User controls (for the promo boxes), a master page, several content place holders
• AdRotator driven by XML for the large promotion banner on the homepage
• Login control with LoginView and role groups for three types of members, all with different access levels
• Validation (regular expression, required field, range validator)
• Dynamic drop down list creation and manipulating data using standard form controls (check box, text input, DDL)
• Step wizards for registering and updating passwords
• Role based access to admin sections and different options on pages for individual roles
• Repeaters, Grid views, Form views, Custom data forms for inserting new data
• Data bind, database queries, session variables etc in code behind
• Fully commented code
• Cross browser compatible (ie6, ie7, safari, Google chrome, Firefox 2, Firefox 3)
• Dynamic page titles
• Complex data binding for ddl when updating / creating new shows/members/run/productions etc

The site is not live as I cannot host it.

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!

Behind the scenes showing me, the four softboxes, industrial fan (this was incredibly powerful), tripod etc… A nice little set up.

Ebay make the shops fool proof and ‘easy’ for shop owners to add brand identities and style, it’s understanding as the appeal of Ebay trading is that anyone can do it no matter what their business background or web development knowledge. However Ebay make it extremely hard for web developers to customize beyond this and to make shops attractive and unique is a challenge.

I had 24 hours of free time on this project so I worked through the night on a design and began implementing it on the Ebay shop. The only place Ebay allows developers to insert HTML or any code is in the header, so I created an external style sheet that contained CSS to style all the basic assets in a shop – items, categories, the Ebay frame, search boxes, etc. I then created a custom header to make the shop look more like a typical website and less like a standard Ebay shop, I wanted to improve the customers experience and make their visit more pleasant and efficient to benefit both the customer and my client.

Unfortunately Ebay shop frames and all their components are created using hundreds of nested tables with very few unique classes or ID’s so styling is not for the faint hearted or un-experienced.
My results can be found here: (link to Settle Down Books) and early results are promising sales are at a high for early January!

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.

The second of the series: