A rant

Today must be a bad day or something because no matter who or where I try, I can not take any pictures I want. I had the idea of shooting some interesting shops such as Cigar, gun and tattoo shop and they all declined me taking pics. I never get such bad luck with these things. Now I need to rethink what will I shoot. Miffed am I. I wanted to impress with these images as I was set the task of getting some good photos. It almost makes me wonder If I'm on the cutting edge of photography for Preston. Probably not but these days people wont open up. Hide on the defensive. Thinking that the world is out to get them. Scared. Come on Preston open up, why does everything need to be planed. Whats the point of asking your permission if you gonna turn round and say no. I'm trying to improve my craft at a time when its easy to give up. Well I say no. I have not come this far to just have people turn me down. A good shoot would make me feel better.

Monika's family pics

Last week I was asked if I could do a shoot for my friend Monika. She wanted to send an acrylic print to her mother from her new family, while her sister and brother-in-law were still about from their visit to the new baby. The shoot was very much off the cuff as it was done in short notice. I wanted the shoot to be very casual as well because it was dealing with baby photography. Again studio cost would had proved too costly and almost unnecessary. As Monika wanted the windmill at Lytham to also feature in one of the pics. The shoot was done away from the comfort and warmth of her home. If only I had remember that its still the worse time of year to be shooting outside. It was freezing and blustery outside right on the coastline. Just made concentrating on the job in hand harder. Before the shoot it came to my mind that Monika's sister and brother-in-law did not speck english. It made it almost impossible to help them relax into the shoot. However by the end of the shoot I began to really enjoy the time I was spending with everyone, as I knew I could relax as the job in hand had been done. Bellow are my favs from the shoot. 

Yashicmat prints back from printers

My yashicamat prints have arrived back from the printers. Fabulous results? Nope. But hey at least the camera works. The shoot also doubled as a bit of a test shoot with the camera. Not to say I haven't used 120 before. The best way to test out the camera was to be on a shoot. With this camera it appears that I may have to think differently when using it. Apparently im a digital natural, but this has not been the case when I use this classic camera. Nothing to beat my self up about though. So what went wrong? Firstly it appears that the yashicamat underexposes by about 1.5 stops when I have used my 60d exposure meter. Meaning it has resulted in the images being too dark. Secondly the square format is not as forgiving compositionally. Bearing that in mind I can not wait to raise to this challenge again regardless of the cost. All together the one roll to buy, get developed and printed, plus postage cost is about £19. Thats £19 for just 12 shots! No wonder I also shot with my 60d as insurance, just incase of the worse. I used Fujifilm Digital Imaging Service to get my film developed and printed. They even gave me a digital copy of the images on cd. Looking at the prints I felt that perhaps their printers favored darker finishes when compared to the scanned reults. Or maybe scanner software (mine included) corrects images to achieve the best possible results. At least now I know what I have to do to achieve what I want. Again I feel a shoot coming on! Bellow are the actual scans from the pints that I took using the yashicamat.