In all the years I’ve lived in Bristol, I’ve never visited these gardens before.  Thankfully the weather gods were kind and we had a lovely sunny day.

I left my digital camera at home, deciding to take my 35mm slr and new acquisition that has been languishing in my mother in law’s loft, an Ensign e20 pocket camera.  We have no idea if the bellows are still lightfast so it is going to be interesting to see if any images weere taken.  Another challenge with this camera is that I had to get used to the view finder, and then remembering to wind the image on.  So out of eight frames I’m definitely going to have a few that are happy accidents as we say.   I now need to find a dark room to develop them.

With the 35mm film, I stick to using black and white, I’ve also been challenging myself by using it on manual mode.  Again, I need to get the film developed.

My phone camera, I used as I would a dslr and played around with exposure, focus etc in the professional mode.  I did fins it a little restrictive in how the settings wanted to still automatically interact and change each other  – but maybe I need to investigate it further as I am probably missing something really simple.

Drawings…..

Flowers….

Mirror maze…

Pond…..

Wood structure…

Prism…..

These are some of the images I took in professional mode on my phone camera. I have to develop my slr 35mm images and the medium format ones. Once I’ve got those I will add them to a seperate blog post. I think it will be interesting to see how they’ve turned out.

I’m drawn to light, textures and contrasts. This is evident from the kind of images I take. I think I need to finetune that a little. I use photoshop to overlay images and use the textures to create interesting backgrounds and patterns. How can I utilise this to help portray the horse? Tell the story of what I see, and the personality of the equine model I am using either in a commission or a one-off personal piece? Experimentation is the only way forward.