Life Inside the Doll House

Wow, I can't believe that I have made it to day 65 already. I'm not going to lie though, this week has been tough. My husband was away, work is demanding and most of us are under the weather with some sort of bug. Many nights this week I have found myself hunting around the house looking for something *anything* to photograph. This is certainly what happened on day 64... Day 64 - Oh how I am loving our new floor! There will be a lot of photos of that for sure. I decided that I really had to up my game tonight, so I cracked open the studio lighting. I only put up one in the hope of achieving some dramatic side lighting.  Day 65.  Now that I have started to be more daring with my edits, I have noticed that the same picture can look dramatically different on various social media. In particular Flickr tends to bring out an extra green tint and Facebook can appear darker than this blog or on Lightroom. It is very frustrating and I cannot ...

I wanted to push myself a little further along the creativity pathway and found myself trying out a light painted background. This is a fun idea that will take a little practice to get right. Here is my first attempt.

I am still here!  I have been taking pictures everyday but finding time for editing and posting has been difficult lately. I think that it is because our kitchen is still not finished and this has added even more chaos to the house. Also it was my husbands birthday last weekend and we were away from home.  I can't say that I am overly proud of the photos that I have been taking lately, as most of them have been quick snaps before bed. As always poor light is a problem at this time of year. I am enjoying playing around with my edits a bit more but of course that can sometimes lead to frustration. I haven't even touched Photoshop this week and ideally I would like to push myself more creatively.  Day 54 Day 55 Day 56 Day 57 Day 58 - I cannot get enough twirling shots. I have big plans for twirling in our new kitchen.  Day 59 Day 60 Day 61  - I cannot believe how grown up Roo is ...

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...