A Year Ago Today!

Well, here it is, folks!

2nd July 2012. My blog's birthday! Happy Birthday Blog!

I've had a wicked year personally, as you can probably read back (if you have a lot of time!).

In the past 12 months I've:
- bought a new camera
- bought a new lens
- acquired a portable(ish) studio and lighting
- exploited my make-up brush wielding genius of a friend.
- worked on films
- assisted other shoots
- worked with various models, MUAs, artists, actors, designers, film crew, authors and a director!
- executed several personal shoot ideas and concepts
- shot live gigs
- taken stills for film
- made some moolah doing what I love
- filmed someone on fire with my camera (no, I didn't put them out either)
- forced Ceri Williams to pose for me.
- painted Ceri Williams
- exposed Ceri Williams sexy shoulders on camera
- worked with THE Ceri Williams
- turned Ceri Williams into an unforgiving diva
- shot some gangsters
- won a (reasonably dodgy) competition
- been in other blogs
- cut off nearly all my hair to raise money for the Little Princess Trust
- shot my brother... O_o
- time-travelled
- let a stunt-woman (notorious for making things go boom) ride my beloved bike, Angus.
- shot too many weddings!
- gotten a lot of people half-naked
- received fan mail \o/
- made some clothes?
- climbed trees
- acquired a cat
- shot a rather iconic dress
- found a ghost
- broken some houses
- had photography assistants
- avoided security guards like a ninja
- been gifted with new studio-lights, filters, a new lens, a VERY EXCITING piece of kit that I can't tell you about as it'll ruin the surprise and a VERY good tripod all by amazing friends. Thank you millions.
- turned a boy into a maybe-girl
- taken pictures of myself (*sings* "you're so vain.... you probably think this... blog is... about...")
- run two competitions
- bled a vampire (to come)
- shot catwalk
- stalked someone at a train-station
- been interviewed
- set myself some targets for 2012
- posed topless! :o
- achieved all but one target so far (and the last will be happening in Oct!)
- scared some locals in Hindhead
- shot a bald princess (to come)
- started my lovely new business
- made lots of lovely new friends (models, MUA's, designers and the like!)
- taken on several regular business clients
... and posted (now) 42 posts all about it all!

All this while, you brilliant folk have followed it all on Facebook, Twitter and on this wonderful blog.

I have, in that year had 11377 views on my blog which is about 270-ish views per post! So thank you all so much for following my progress (at least I hope it's progress)!

I can't believe that it's been within just one year that all of these things have happened!?

Though it would explain why I've not slept much. :)

Post-wise, I have coming up to start off the new blog-year:

Post-shoot, now editing
- A Little Princess Trust shoot
- A 'Vampire'-related shoot (non-glittery)
- Live bands
- Me again! (*sings* "You're so vain...")

To shoot soon!
A sci-fi themed shoot, to put it vaguely...
... and many many more left to do (but if I told you, I'd have to kill you).

Anyway, I can't stop... apparently I've got some editing to do (see above) and I have private work to finish before I get to do mine!

Cheers for sticking with me and thank you all so much for all your support so far, you guys! Ahhhh!

\o/ *in happy place*

x

Self Portraits: A Bit of 'Me-Time'

Right... truth is... I haven't been able to get my creative on for a couple of weeks and it's made me hungry for image creation. Big time.

So, I got a new lens for my birthday (thank you to all who emailed and messaged to wish me happy birthday. If you want to give me a 'free' gift, please recommend me to your friends, share my blog or share my Facebook page www.facebook.com/chloeisherwoodphotography as that would be most ace of you.). Martin kindly bought me a 50mm f1.4 Canon lens. Yum yum. Unfortunately, due to various reasons, I had no-one to test it on! D':

So, needing to get a self-portrait done at some point (whilst they're lovely, I feel a little pretentious using old modelling shots as my portrait images), I volunteered myself late one evening. \o/

Here's how it went!

I got the camera, complete with new lens set up on my new tripod (another birthday gift, thanks Adam), set the aperture to f/1.4 (because I can :D ) focussed roughly where I thought I would be and set my camera on a timer.

That didn't work.

with such a shallow depth of field, of course I wasn't going to end up in the correct place. even despite the 20th or so attempts... O_o

So instead, I kept the same settings and then pushed the button manually.

Naturally I looked away at the last minute because I'm just so very shy. ;)

So that one was under a tungsten bulb and with the tungsten white balance setting giving it that lovely cold/blue look. Which I like. Makes me look a bit elfy.

And then next I popped up one of my lights for a bit of a sharp shadow/lighting effect.

And got this....

... with the shallowest depth of field EVER (n.b. not an actual fact)!
Well there they are then. Took a lot of trial and error to get just these two. Didn't really like the rest. Too blurry, not well-framed, wrong angle of nose, too much cowbell, etc.

Will refrain from talking a lot about myself now and leave...

... resisting.... usual... egotistical... comments... erk...

... struggling... with... self...

But I am pretty fabulous though.

OUT!