Don McCullin meets Digital Photography

Yesterday circumstances were such that I didn't make it to college but I did manage to be creative of sorts. I started to look at photographs I had taken over the past year and to pull out suitable images for the Photography Unit at college. This turned into a positive experience as firstly I hadn't realised I had quite so many interesting images and secondly my head wasn't in full concentration mode. Why is this a good thing I hear you ask?.........well it meant that I could cope with playing but not with thinking too deeply.

So I played a little.......................and this

became this...............

and this.........................

became this.............

and finally this one.........

was transformed into this......

and this.....................

Today my head is in a different place so I probably would approach this task differently which is always the case anyway....different time different place. Having said that I like yesterdays results.

I also spent some time today watching this short film on the Canon website which documents Don McCullin's first journey into the world of digital photography. It's worth a visit if you have the time. I found it immensely comforting watching such an iconic photographer getting to grips with the latest technological gadgetry..... and he made it look so easy.

http://cpn.canon-europe.com/content/Don_McCullin.do

How to Kill Two Birds with One Stone

Tonight I was working on designs for the surface pattern unit at college. I wanted to explain how my design had developed from two dimensional to 3D so decided to use photographs. I photographed the object and then loaded the image onto the computer to crop it etc before printing and pasting into my sketchbook.

Suddenly a eureka moment........I could use this for my photography unit. You have no idea how happy this little light bulb moment made me feel. I played around with the image on Picassa and this was the result. I love the contrasts in the image. It looks like the logo for The Scottish Gallery!

My photography unit has been lagging behind, probably because it's the one I feel least confident about. I thought if I really concentrated on the other two units first I'd have just enough time to complete photography, hoping that the tight time schedule would fire up some inspiration. 

Little did I think I could kill two birds with one stone

As someone who likes contrasts, while I was doing two jobs at once on the computer a message popped up to say the temperature in New Zealand was approaching 25 degrees. Here the temperature was zero degrees. This produced another light bulb moment....but that's for another post.