2014 continues to scream by at breakneck speed and is showing no signs of stopping which, I guess, is pretty good actually considering the alternative. Still, there’s only two months left of the year before we’re suddenly and unexpectedly in 2015 (and on a more personal note, less than three weeks left of my twenties, with the inevitable loss of marbles that entails – not that I had many to spare).
All considered, October has been a pretty good month. I managed to stick to the posting schedule I announced last month, not missing a week at all.
The first post of the month was even one I’d promised at the end of last month’s review: London Fashion Weekend III. I’d shot them only a couple of weeks before but with about 1,800 images to edit it took longer than I’d hoped to turn them around. I’m pretty pleased with a bunch of the photographs I took there, but ultimately I still prefer the shots I got eighteen months previously on my first attempt. That, I think, is partly because of the content – I think the fashion on show the first time, especially the umbrellas, looked a lot better than what we were shooting this time round. Of course, should the opportunity arrive, I’ll be first in line to go shooting there again.
The next post of the month marked the start of me releasing the images from my road trip around Europe at the start of September. I started the series at the same place we started our holiday: Reims. I’m actually very happy with the images I got on holiday, I was a lot more selective about the shots I took and although I took over 1,000 images, that’s spread out over a fortnight, when I took almost double that in a space of a few hours one Sunday afternoon at a London fashion show. I think I was a bit slow to get into the mindset of shooting on holiday; I only took ten images worth sharing on our first stop (although in my defence, I’d not taken many photographs for a while before we went away, and I had gotten up at 5am and spent five or six hours driving and ninety minutes on a boat by the time we arrived in Reims).
The next post of the month was not my next stop on the road trip. I’m keen to avoid a long-running stream of photo posts from Europe and keep some variety in what I share here, so after Reims I published Party Poppers, a largely experimental post featuring my attempt at using my Triggertrap as a sound trigger to capture party poppers in the process of firing. This was more of an experimental post first, in the sense that the photos were not stellar in themselves, but I felt that the process of obtaining them made them worth sharing. I still have a bunch of party poppers left so I’ll be returning to the concept sooner or later.
The next and final post of October was Verdun, our next port of call on our Europe road trip. By this point I was in the flow of photographing and produced a lot more images, and what I feel to be quality ones at that. We were obviously a little more rested after the short hop from Reims and in no rush, so I could take some time to get some more measured photographs. I think they’re amongst the best city scene shots I’ve taken – I especially love the bench shot, and the HDR and old gate shots. I think they came out pretty well. For both Verdun and Reims I’ve included a map at the end of the post showing the rough route we took to get from our last stop to that one.
These posts weren’t all I did in October. I’ve also prepared a bit of shameless self-promotion in order to hopefully attract some more work at the Greenwood Theatre. I’ve soft-launched a webpage promoting my work at the theatre and have had a batch of flyers printed which should be available to groups using the theatre at the start of year briefing next week. It’s good to have finally completed this little project because I’ve been working on it in fits and starts for quite a few months. Time will tell if they work and get me back to the Greenwood for any shows this academic year.
Going into November, I’ll be continuing to post the images from my Europe road trip. So far I’ve been posting images from the trip every other week in an effort to not flood this blog with nothing but holiday photos, but since I currently estimate there to be a good dozen posts of images that would mean it would take at least five months to share them all. I’m not sure if that is the best way to proceed, so I’m considering releasing some of them as an additional post during the week (on top of my usual Tuesday post) so there is still some new or at least different content. For now, however, I’m sticking to the biweekly schedule for now, so the next one will be published on November 11th – and it’ll be quite fitting. Aside from that, however, I’ve not got a lot of content lined up – I really need to go shooting again because I’ve not really shot anything in the last month. That needs to change.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Rob
Creative Splurges 