I look back on the photographs now and I see faces filled with hopes and dreams, laughter and love and I’m reminded of something that was once said to me. A photograph of you smiling at the camera is a postcard sent from you in the present to you in the future and it says “you were having a good time”.Sean Ellis, June 2002

That’s the closing paragraph to the introduction of the book; 365 - A Year In Fashion, a book which is a collection of photographs by Fashion Photographer Sean Ellis taken everyday for an entire year.

It’s an interesting book, with every page showing photos day by day; everyday during 1999. Photo’s range from his professional work, to personal ’snaps’ depending on what he did on that given day. The book brings a sense of acomplishment, being able to see what he achieved in one year, and is a good book to look at as a whole to see how his life, and styles changed over that period.

At the beginning Sean says how making the book made him become compelled to try new things, travel to new places and meet new people, in his search to try to get interesting moments for each day, an intriguing technique to make you go out and do something with your life, he had a goal to complete, and he made the most of it.

Anyway, if you ever have the time, I suggest rent the book from your local library to have a look, it may not be one of those books you keep to look at again and again, but it’s good to see it atleast once.

Hampton Court Palace, Taken March 13th 2007

After entering an on going BBC Photography competition, this photo has been selected to be shown on BBC Online and on BBCi Interactive TV as part of the BBC Britain in Pictures series this summer. Here’s a photo of it on BBCi below, thanks to Myles for taking the photo below for me.

Hopefully this will be the start of something good! To see the photo for yourself, you can have a look at the BBC Website, or press Red on your TV from a BBC Channel, and navigate your way to Britain in Pictures.

I can’t believe that two years ago I was sitting in examination rooms my 6th Form Westlands, completeing my A-levels. Now, two years on I’ve completed my second year of university, and boy what a year! From going to America and getting adjusted to life over there, to then coming back to Kingston for the second semester to get re-adjusted back; or atleast try to get re-adjusted.

Four months, three final exams and enough coursework to feed a starving goat later, and I’m done for this year. All packed up and after leaving Kingston earlier today and after a quick stop off at Stonehenge for a photo spree I was back in Devonshire for two months over the summer, hopefully with a long well earned break if I can call it that. The summer will be me bracing myself for a year working in industry during an internship starting in a couple months, which will then be followed with my final year before going into the real world for good!

Hopefully there will be plenty of time for other stuff too though over the next couple of months; such as photo sprees and even perhaps our very own British photowalk! There’s also another Open Day and then Broadcast Live later this month which I may be attending which will be good, as well as some other events if any happen to come my way!

After much persuasion from Myles, and much retaliation from myself, I finally joined Flickr for somewhere to showcase my photography, and to my original surprise I love it!

I’m going to be uploading some of my better works onto Flickr for the world to see on my account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lloydengland/ . I hope to get some publicity out of this move by getting my work ‘out there’ as Myles would say, but also it’s a good website with a great established community.

On occasions I am also going to be blogging a ‘featured’ photo, like my Snooker one below, which will be photos I have taken and uploaded to Flickr which also deserve a mention on my blog, similar to what Thomas Hawk does, however probably less frequently as an when I take a photo worth featuring.

I plan to get alot more photos up in the near future, for now there is a small selection of what I’ve taken on a few topics and places. So if you’re find yourself browsing around Flickr one day, give my account a visit!

According to a news blog post at CNet, the average American household has 994 digital photos, stored on CD’s, DVD’s, Websites & hard drives, holding about 3 to 4 years worth of photos. Now, for the everyday household this may seem ‘average’, but after a quick snoop through my digital photos on my laptop, I have approximately 8048 photos of my own, a little above the average 994 for an entire household.

Now as these 994 photos are supposedly taken over 3 or 4 years, lets assume the latter, as I too have digital photos since 4 years ago. This would mean that each household takes 248 photos per year with their digital camera, supposedly on holiday and the odd family outing. Seeing how the average household has 2 children, lets assume one is old enough to have their own camera, and there is also one camera for both parents. So, with two cameras snapping away, thats 124 photos per camera, per person, per year.

Then theres me, 8048 photos over 4 years brings my average to 2012 photos per year, a tad higher than the average 124 per year everyone else is taking. But with over 8000 photos brings problems and that is how to easily store and manage photos in a way which makes them easy to locate and categorise. The main hurdles which I’ve been facing are exactly how to categorise over 8000 photos, is it best by name, by location, by date which I can always adhere too, and something which will be future proof.

On the right is my current folderisation method which I sorted out only a couple weeks ago; sorting photos by main location first, and then by date, however this poses a few problems in itself, such as if I wanted to find a certain photo from a certain place, I have to try and remember the date, or atleast the rough date that it happened. My America folder is slightly different, categorising photos just by place rather than date, which too works well to some extent, but as always has its problems, and would be difficult to implement on a full scale basis as I would have to merge photos from different times, sometimes years apart into the same folder, and that would become messy, and something I wouldn’t like to have.

There is always of course 3rd party applications, such as Adobe Lightroom which tries to help with photo management by using folders and tags and such, but its not future proof, and Lightroom won’t be around forever, so knowing my luck I will tag and categorise all my photos for Lightroom, get use to it and then have it replaced or become defunct. For now though atleast I’ll continue on with my current system until I get frustrated with it more and try to change it again, but with an ever growing photo collection, the future doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy!

The other day I visited the London Aquarium next to the London Eye on the Embankment for a couple hours while it was raining outside. It was a good place to visit, and has the potential for some great photos to be taken, once you wade through the hordes of people around the tanks to actually get to the front. Now, I say there’s potential for good photos, as I seemed to walk away at the end of the day with very few which actually were any decent. People may have thier own reasons, but I put it down to poor lighting, the fish moving too damn fast and a crappy camera.

So, out of 145 photos I took actually in the aquarium, I have uploaded a magical 8 for your viewing pleasure, 3 of which arn’t even of fish. Now to add to my photography woes from the outing, on the camera screen at the time most looked marvoulous, but what any regular digital photographer should know, you can have a photo which looks like a masterpiece on the back of your camera’s 2.5″ screen, but when it’s back at home on a 15″+ screen at full resolution, you find that you’ve got something which looks like its been hit by a truck.

In a mangled large envelope which looked like the postman had given the package to his dog to play with before posting it to me, my Moo Cards arrived this morning - much to me excitement! Thankfully, the cards are in a hard plastic box which itself is fine, and has kept all the cards all safe and well!

Some turned out better than others, but overall I’m pleased with them.

Hopefully I can put them to good use! First come first served folks!…

This evening I took the liberty of ordering 100, yes, 100 Moo Cards! Now, at this moment in time you must be thinking I’m crazy and what on earth are Moo Cards!?! Well, after being informed by my co-worker Myles, about a blog photographer Thomas Hawk made a while back about him ordering some Moo Cards, I was intriguied!

Moo Cards are mini business type cards, which can feature your own photos on the back of them, in full colour, for only £10 for a pack of 100 (all of which can have a seperate individual photo!)

Well, after pain stakingly choosing ten different photos (so I would have ten of each), and then making them look decent on the back of the cards, I wrote my information in and ordered them! So, in 10 working days apparently I should be the proud owner of 100 Mini Moo Cards, hopefully all looking as good in real life as I think they did on my computer screen! We’ll see…

I’m talking photo and screen ratios today… and well, it’s not technically classed as ‘widescreen’ - but, in my mind it is! Since forever it would appear, when I started taking digital photos, I kept to the standard size of photos which came with the camera… this being the ratio of 4:3. You may have heard 4:3 be refered to a few places else where, and the reason for that is, 4:3 is the standard size of ‘old’ televisions and computer monitors (the square ones, as oppossed to 16:9 widescreen).

 
A ’standard’ 4:3 digital photo.

 Anyway, since Myles purchased his new Canon EOS a few months back, we noticed it took photos at a different size than normal, making the photos more wide. Not much came of this until the other day when I was exploring my camera options and found I too could take photos at this size. At a ratio of 3:2, the photos are wider than a standard photo from a digital camera, which are apparently at 4:3 so they look better on computer screens.

The 3:2 option on the other hand is supposedly for print (with photo paper being 6:4), and being the same ratio as ‘old’ 35mm film cameras, as well as being a tad more professional, as it is what the pros use! It also makes the photos look better (for me personally atleast) as I have a widescreen laptop, and it makes the photo appear less ‘boxy’ if you will.

Well, anyways, from now on expect wider photos from me, like the one below;

A 3:2 digital photo of the same view as above

Diagram showing size differences