Skip to main content

Exhibition at the Atkins Building is Up and Ready!!


This has been a long time coming.  Probably for as long as I can remember I've wanted to be the sort of person who could put on an exhibit. I remember being 8 years old and asking for a camera because I wanted to produce the sort of photographs I admired from others. I always had a fascination with the family albums and our slide projector. I was forever asking to put on a slideshow, much to my parents annoyance. I remember vividly loving some photographs of me as a baby sitting on a shag carpet with the light coming in from a window to the side and thinking it was a fantastic photo. I realise now that I was already admiring good available light. I might dig that photo up one day and post it actually.


So finally I've done it. My work is on display and it is everything I wanted it to be and more. I didn't realise how much seeing all these images in print would mean to me. I spend so much time working on them on a computer and sharing them on social media that I don't get to have a lot of these in print. Of course my clients do but they don't stay with me for long before my clients come to collect them.


It made me realise how much more impact a print has over a digital image. When I saw for the first time some of my portraits framed I actually felt a little emotional to the point where I had a lump in my throat. These are images I've worked on over and over again, either preparing them for clients, competitions, my Fellowship and for social media. I would have thought they would have lost their impact on me by now. But the way I feel when I see an image digitally is nothing compared to the feeling I had when I collected my work from the framers.  Jo from The Frame Game in Hinckley does all my framing.  She did a fantastic job, as she always does for me.


I am now incredibly excited for the preview night on Friday May 15th. I keep getting emotional thinking about it and seriously hope I can hold it together on the night.


I can finally say that I am where I've always wanted to be and doing what I love. I've heard it said before that if you do what you love for a living you will never work a day in your life. That feels so true for me because so much of what I do feels nothing like work. Even as I write this now I'm happy to be doing so.


The Atkins building is a superb venue for this event and I'm so pleased with all the help and support from Hinckley council in putting this all together. My exhibit will be running through to June 1st and as I mentioned above we are hosting a preview night on Friday May 15th starting from 7pm. All are welcome and the more the merrier.  So if you are in the area I'd love to see you there.


And while you are there I'd love it if you'd sign my guest book. This is an important event for me and this will make a cherished keepsake for me to remember this by.

I hope to see you there!!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Work Experience Week by Hester Sharpe

A week in the life of a Photographers assistant, is not all about saying cheese! I’m Hester Sharpe, currently at JCC but took a week out of normal school life on work experience to be a photographer’s assistant and learn the bits behind the camera, photograph and the process to get to the end result. During my week of work experience in photography I have learnt that there is a lot more than just taking the pictures and printing them. The steps in between are the key to getting the perfect photo. For example the photos have to be cropped, tweaked, edited, colour corrected. That is just a taste I have had in the processing of the photos and there is a lot more than just those things. Those processes are the most time consuming part of the photograph and a tremendous amount of detail is put in to the picture but all the hours spent are paid off with the end result; a perfect picture. It isn’t just how the picture looks; presentation is a key to photography too. Selecting the best ...

Wedding Workshop in Nottingham

On Wednesday of this week I made the trek up to Nottingham (which wasn't actually much of a trek compared to most of the other delegates who travelled from as far as Glasgow, Portsmouth and South Wales) for a workshop held at Crash Taylor's home. Crash, a very talented photographer, specialising in weddings is someone I can highly recommend to anyone. Apart from spending the morning getting to know the other photographers we then spent the afternoon photographing a hired model, in her own wedding dress, as we wandered through Nottingham Castle. It provided me a chance to see how other photographers handled their weddings as well as a chance to experiment with equipment I haven't had a chance to play around with. Like in this image to the right. Here I used my flash, mounted on a tripod off to the side. This allowed me to achieve studio quality lighting out of the studio, a technique I will be using in my environmental portraiture. I can't seem to make up my mind on whi...

I Shot My First Wedding

I finally did it, my first wedding. After years of saying I would never do a wedding I finally decided to have a go. I don't know what convinced me. Maybe it was the thought that if I did one I could say with authority that I don't do weddings. My husband had been on my back for ages trying to get me to give one a go. For me I would have to say that the most difficult aspect of wedding photography is the pressure and stress caused by the importance of the day. I worried about this since the day Dawn emailed me to say they had decided they wanted to book me. I hadn't expected to get this wedding given that I had no samples to show them. And I certainly didn't give them a hard sell as I still wasn't convinced that this was something I wanted to do. I kind of figured that if I got this wedding, with no samples and no experience then it was meant to be. Well I have samples now. In the weeks prior to the wedding I read and I read and I read. I read books, magazines and ...

More Newborn Baby Portraits

This time we worked with a more alert baby, even though she was within the 2 weeks we recommend for newborn sessions.  But to be honest, I do like getting a selection of both.  Its nice to get the chance to see their eyes as well as those beautifully peaceful sleeping portraits.  Making eye contact is just difficult and smiles are nearly impossible, which are only wind related if we managed them at all anyway.    I always try to get a few detail shots in order to capture their tiny little fingers and toes.  These can be quite difficult with an awake baby as they move so much and I need to rely on autofocus to make sure these details are in focus and with such a narrow depth of field this can be difficult.  And rather than just a hand or a foot I like to get some of baby's face in the shot as well which poses another problem with an awake baby, they just don't stay still for very long so their hands and feet aren't always in the right place....

I am Still Me: A Story about a Transgender Boy

  Meet Leo. Leo is 15 and currently going through an epic transformation that has momentarily turned the lives of himself and those around him upside down. A mum who once had the daughter she always longed for is now coping with the realisation that she will be living the rest of her life with a son instead. When your child is born you have certain expectations of the typical life they will lead but most of us know and accept that it won't necessarily end up the way we imagine. Not every person wants to marry, have kids or be involved with the opposite sex. Most of us have come to accept this and can adjust to whatever comes our way relatively easily. But few of us have expected to have to deal with a change in sex. Its not that we've hoped it won't happen, but just that it never occurred to us that it might. This is a new adjustment that we as a society are being presented with today, just like so many others that have come before. When I first heard that Phoebe ...