Life Inside the Doll House

I have noticed that the whole 365 experience feels different this time around. In my previous 365 I was preoccupied with the need to get a good understanding of the exposure triangle and the different creative effects that can be achieved through aperture and shutter speed. I'm not saying that I have fully grasped those things necessarily, but my focus has now changed to editing. I am keen to find my personal style and very slowly I think that it is coming together. Very slowly. Last year I played things very safe with only minor tweaks in Lightroom. I have been surprised by how much further people are willing to push those sliders when I watch tutorials. Of course this runs the risk of over doing it, but I think that I will have to push the boundaries for a while before I figure it all out. I have managed to keep up with the doll a day challenge this week. I have enjoyed it actually. Day 49 Day 50 - This were taken after a very late night out with my work colleague...

I am sticking with my photograph a doll and day challenge for this week. These challenges are pretty common in the doll collectors world and people will do a whole 365. I think that I might struggle with that, so I will stick to this week and see where it takes me. Day 47 - Shaped bokeh... so dreamy! As the scene was all set up I decided to photograph some daffodils that had passed their best - by quite a long way. There is something poetic about dead flowers.  Day 48 - My mood was a little darker tonight which pushed me to explore darker colours and tones. 

Now that the 20 day project has ended I think that I would like to get back into the groove of doll photography. This takes a whole other set of skills and lots and lots of patience. I am going to try to take a doll picture a day for one week. I am a little nervous about this one to be honest. Here are today's photos. I am pleased with how they came out in the end, but they were a lot of work to photograph and get right in Photoshop. Photoshop does an amazing job removing the objects that are propping them up. I used to spend ages faffing around with thread, which didn't erase very well in free editing software but now I can use forks, doll stands and even my hand and edit them right out. The skating one was achieved using layers in Photoshop and therefore is my first attempt at composites.  Lets see what the next 6 days brings...

Yesterday was the last day of the 20 day photography challenge. It has been tough to find fresh creativity everyday but I am grateful that it pushed me though another 20 days of the 365. I am relieved to take things down a notch for the next while and hopefully this will give me the time and space I need to do some more reading about photography and push myself more on the technical side of things. Day 41 - Unnoticed. This was a bit of a tricky one for me because it evoked very personal and moody images. This is a theme that touches a raw nerve for me and I have struggled with for years but the challenge called for positive images. At first I played it safe with this picture of Rexy and his unnoticed gesture of love. I knew that I wanted to use my 100mm lens to capture some unnoticed beauty in the world. This made me think of a cool tutorial I saw in a magazine recently. These macro pictures of bubbles were hard to get right. I spent a long time playing around with lightin...

It's Monday, the busiest day of my week. It is always hard to fit photos in on days like this. I attempted a cute turban photo with Bear. She gets a kick out of wearing her wet hair up in a towel but she wasn't really in the mood to have her photo taken. We didn't waste much time on it because it was never going to come together. Everything was off. On nights like this I am grateful to have my dolls to fall back on. They have been neglected of late. I must spend more time on them. 

We got a little bit of snow today and needless to say the kids were very excited. Sadly I only managed to get a few shots before my battery died. Day 39 Luckily, we always have camera phones to lean back on.  I have been in two minds about whether to continue with the 52 project I have joined this year. The theme from this week was Where I come from, which I struggled with. Perhaps I have been too focused on the 20 day challenge, but I just couldn't think of anything to photograph for the theme. Today, at the last minute I decided what the hell and took a picture of Bear holding my old comforter.  I actually love how these turned out and might have to send a copy to my parents... just for nostalgia value.  Yesterday, the theme in the 20 day challenge was Sound . I got Rexy involved with this one and asked him to rub his wet fingers around the rim of a glass of water to capture the effect it has on the water. The resu...