I've got a new toy...

...A 50mm f/1.8 lens that is a cheap way to start playing with wide aperture. Perfect for capturing the kind of shots I love to take, naturalistic, low light still life and portraits. I had the perfect excuse to try it out this weekend at the Featherdown Farm in Herefordshire where we celebrated Phil's 30th birthday.

Photography Class

I've enrolled in a photography class at my local AE College. I'm not sure if its for me, as I primarily wanted to learn step-by-step how to use my digital SLR, and this course has more of a creative, compositional leaning to the teaching. I'm trying to extract from it what I think will be useful though, and its good in that it gives me the discipline to take the camera off of its automatic setting and try and take better photos every week.

This is one of my favourite images I've made on manual settings on the course so far...

Seaside Photo Fest

I'm back from my holidays and full of inspiration. Last night I enrolled on a photography course at college and I got chatting to the tutor about what it is that I like to photograph. Generally I like to take photos which document my life, and the people and places in it. More specifically though, I love taking photos at the seaside. Probably because I just love the seaside full stop.

On my course, I will be doing a photography project every week so I decided to get organised on Flickr so I would have a place to keep all my projects. I thought I'd start by going through all my old photos and collecting together the seaside shots. It was only then that I realised just how many seaside photos I've taken over the years!