Zoe-Lee Skelton

I’ve spent the past three days at #SESLondon sipping copious amounts of caffeine and attended some very useful digital marketing talks.

The highlight had to be Philip Storey’s presentation about “Breathing new life into your email campaign”. I’ve taken away loads of brilliant ideas and I can’t wait to apply them to my campaigns. I hope to add an email alert function to this blog at some point, but I’ll need lots more interested readers!

Anyway, whilst at the conference, I slipped into tourist mode and snaped a couple of the key attractions during breaks.

I took this nighttime scene of Big Ben and managed to achieve an awesome bokeh effect – possibly the best to date.

 

OK, so technically I didn’t take this today, but it’s been waiting in the wings for a while.

I captured this beautiful male stag whilst at an animal sanctuary in Derbyshire. It was the beginning of December and this particular Deer had sprouted his tufty winter coat, and you can still see the delicate circles marking his side.

He was quite assertive, and looked me in the eye (my lens) a number of times.

This one is titled, Stag Do:

f/5.6
1/13s

Please share!

In today’s photo, I’ve played around with focus.

I really like it in cinema when Director’s shift between different focus points during one single sequence. The most common example I can think of is where two character’s are having a conversation. It’s a cinematic micro element that helps to push the narrative along, without the need for editing.

Below I’ve focused upon an object that’s further away in my focal range.:

f/4.5
1/15 s

I then added a pink haze and changed the angle of the thickest area of colour to try to emulate the sensation of being intoxicated – not that I was drunk on half a pint of bitter!

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s update.

So today’s photograph is somewhat different to the usual landscape and outdoorsy shots I’ve been sharing. If anything it’s a hybrid between two styles: portraiture and street photography.

Here’s Day 15’s shot, titled “Testing”:

It was actually an accidental shot, as my camera had gone to sleep and I was trying to wake it up –  perhaps the concentration on my face gives it away.

Anyway, as I previously mentioned, this challenge isn’t about perfecting one style of photography rather, it’s to allow me to experiment with this medium. But I hope to pursue some of my favourite photographic techniques and styles; one of those is street photography.

Street Photography

As an artist who’s practice involves scavenging disenfranchised objects during anti-social hours, the secretive nature of a street photographer has always intrigued me. More so than any other type of photographer, the street photographer has to think on their feet, and draw as little attention as possible to themselves if they want to capture an authentic shot.

Other traits I admire, is their ability to firstly see the beauty in the everyday, but to also force us to see the beauty in our everyday lives and routines, from the mundane to the spectacular. And if they want to create their art, they need to react at the speed of lightening if they want to make sure they record a certain aspect of a scene, event or happening.

Nobody does this better than Vivian Maier.

Vivian Maier

One of my heroes is Vivian Maier. A New York Nanny who took her extroadinary talent for street photography to the grave. It was only when her lock-up was auctioned off to pay for her debts did her furious documentation of the world around her emerge. The buyer found over 100,000 negatives spanning five decades and sought to piece together this furtively private yet outwardly liberal nanny’s work.

Here she is:

Vivian Maier – self portrait

Vivian’s unique ability to both capture “joe public” with poise and seize part of the narrative unfolding in front of her has captivated audiences worldwide.

Iamge courtesy: http:/www.vivianmaier.com

For the majority of  Vivian’s pictures, the subjects were totally unaware that they’d been photographed. I particularly love this one:

image courtesy: http:/www.vivianmaier.com

We can see that Vivian must have been close enough to capture this couple, but it was her inconspicuousness that allowed her to record the intimacy.

I hope to be able to explore street photography more over the year.

I had every good intention to walk miles today in the hope that I’d stumble upon some uncharted ruin that nobody has ever seen before.

Wishful thinking. And it didn’t happen.

Instead, my long walk was rained off. But before I made a dash for some shelter, I was greeted by two donkeys and a small horse. All three were very eager to meet me at first, yet as soon as they saw my camera, they instantly became hesitant. Bashful even.

Here’s one of the donkeys I met today. He was the least camera shy (I assume that he is a he)

f/5.6
1/50s

As it’s cloudy today, the image needed touching up in Photoshop. Although I’m a fan of natural light, I wanted to draw out the donkey’s tufts of fur, so I added a curves layer and selected the “increased contrast” option from the dropdown section. I also slightly tinkered with the saturation.

I hope the weather’s better tomorrow. Too many pairs of shoes are caked in mud.