Why I need to learn to light (via Ask MetaFilter)

However, you will learn how to light in a dark room, which will be the single most important skill in your repertoire. If you can make it look like natural light, you will be extremely successful. Nothing personal to all the natural lighters out there, but when a big project is on the line, one rainy day and you're fu*****. Who cares if you're good with your DSLR.

via ask.metafilter.com

Wow, that says it pretty succinctly. This is part of a larger piece from AskMeFi on how to become a magazine photographer, which is chock-full of useful information and tips (most of which are those sort of tips that are "obvious if you think about it, but you probably won't think about them because they're pretty scary and involve a lot of work")

I definitely need to learn to light my food work more effectively. At the moment I'm very reliant on decent daylight, as this post points out, and tend to shut up shop as soon as the light fades – but this suits the style of imagery that I'm making at the moment. I don't have deadlines or scary photo editors breathing down my neck. However, in the dark British winter this does mean that the hours where I can take pictures are severely reduced in number. And I don't ever want to find myself in the position where I have to turn down a job because I don't have enough daylight to supply the images that the client's after!

Something to think about.

Posted via web from Charlotte's posterous

Sushi Tree

via flickr.com

Blimming brilliant. One of my aims for 2010 is to make sushi on a more regular basis – and this beautifully shot Christmas tree made by bananagranola is great inspiration!

Posted via web from Charlotte's posterous

a photo I couldn't take

this morning saw a grey, damp mist settling over the roads and fields that lined my route to work - the kind of weather that makes you pull an extra jumper from the cupboard before leaving the house "just in case".

The final leg of my commute sees me driving through the suburbs of a small country town, where the speed's limited and sleeping policemen rudely punctuate the tarmac (helps jolt me awake if the coffee hasn't done the job)

on this particular drive, some odd combination of weather, light and time of day meant that at the exact moment of my passing a bus stop, another commuter waiting for his ride exhaled on his cigarette and sighed into the thick, grey air – and instead of dissipating into the atmosphere the breath of smoke hung in front of him like a tiny cloud, crystal-like and beautiful.

I couldn't take my eyes off the scene and kept my head locked on him and his companion cloud, so the upper-half of my body looked like a pirouetting ballet dancer in slow motion. In what cannot have been more than two seconds, this ran through my head: Did I have a camera? no. Should I stop? No. If I was a better photographer I'd have stopped. Yes. Why didn't I stop? I should stop. I'm going to stop.

With that final thought, I had to swing my head back round to the front to stop from crashing horribly, and the sudden movement broke whatever spell had been cast by the commuter and his cloud companion - I peeped at him in my rear view mirror before he slid out of sight as I turned off the main road into work. I sat in the car for a few minutes, thinking about the light and the smoker and how I should have stopped to take his picture.

then I came indoors, and wrote this.

want + ♥

I've tried, but I think it's completely impossible to quantify how much I love this ring by YellowGoat designs - it's a mini Polaroid frame for your finger. Genius.

I'm putting it in the Inbox section of Photo Pro magazine this month, and keeping my fingers crossed that the designer is so delighted with it that she ends up sending me one for keeps... stranger things have happened.

In slightly related news, how beautiful is this image? <- click here, press "fashion" then "fable" and go right 5 frames. Sorry for the runaround, I felt guilty sticking up a low-res of his image, no matter how small...

It's by British photographer Chris Craymer (who's just released a new book with Mulberry called "Romance" - something else that I'd absolutely love to have on my coffee table) and shows Johnny Depp and Mrs Depp-Paradis reclining lazily - it's part of a series of equally stunning shots of the couple and well worth flicking through if you get a few free minutes. I like to think that they're in Paris and it's a Sunday morning... *le sigh*...

The light is just completely incredible - this man is a ridculously talented photographer. I'm going to try and chase him for an interview in Photo Pro - fingers crossed I can navigate his agents and PRs...