The aim of this blog is to enable you to see what myself and past students have been up to since they attended one of my courses, at Brighton Journalist Works, Park Cameras or West Dean College.
Please do send me your published pictures and keep us all posted with your news.
Here's a lovely piece of correspondence I got recently from one of my former students, Paul Adams. Look at the extra detail Paul managed to squeeze out of his picture from the RAW file! Excellent stuff Paul, and thanks for staying in touch! Dear Andrew
Thanks to you I am getting the hang of this game!
Gear set up and timings tested, I took this image and uploaded it with 3 others to the Portsmouth News within 15 mins of the Gunwharf fireworks show finishing. Captioned 'Pictures of Gunwharf fireworks 2 Nov 20.00hrs from above Gosport showing harbour foreground'. Then I phoned the newsdesk who brought up the images, liked this one and agreed a credit (no money, but there...) and it was in the paper the next morning at 15x11.5 cm with the Caption 'Lit up - Paul Adams took this great picture from Rope Quays in Gosport'. I did not have the computer with PhotoShop with me so sent the JPEG straight from camera ... subsequently I have brought out more detail from the RAW file as in the xxx+.jpg and would have preferred for that to be published. As it was, mine proved to be a better image than a collection from their own man in a double page spread of 10 images!
No money but a result, teaching me that the process matters as much, if not more, than the picture! Next time I will rename the image file to make it more identifiable.
A freelance needs to keep his or her net cast as wide as possible these days. I am a great believer in this. So I recently decided to dip my toes into the world of film and video. I have owned a Nikon D300s for a while now and I figured it was about time I actually learned how to use the video facility. I made a few test films and, on the strength of those, I got an assignment from Ardingly College, for whom I do quite a bit of photography. They wanted a film concentrating on the school's hockey department, which would hopefully entice a few students to take up the sport and even come from abroad to study and join the team. It worked, and the school decided to commission another, more wide-ranging, film, this time showing other aspects of the sporting curriculum. If you decide to give it a go, get yourself really, really familiar with some editing software. I used Adobe Premiere Pro and loved it. Here is the second film......
