Evans & Smith- Combine for Summer 2010 offer

I have decided to join forces with another photographer for this summer and come up with a deal to help us freshen up our portfolios (Inspired by the current weather I’d say). Its really simple if you book us for a Saturday this summer you get:

• 2 x photographers
• 1x full day photography (including weddings!)
• Full professional editing
• High resolution JPEGS on a new 2-4gb pen drive (handy for getting your own prints)

There is no catch to this, only that we would like to use some of your images for advertising purposes such as portfolios on our website.

All this for just £250 pound if you are within 2o miles of Blackburn, outside of this area? No problem there will just be a further 50p per mile charge on top of the £250.

We can still offer story books or high quality Italian Mario Acerboni albums just enquire for further information. Contact via contact form at www.lydiasmith.co.uk or email me lydia.e.smith@hotmail.co.uk .

Exhibition-Blackburn June 16th-June 30th 2010

It has been a very busy few months building up to my final exhibition for which the opening night was the 16th of June. The exhibition is Based at Blackburn college and is open to the public for two weeks ending on the 30th of June.

I am pleased to have now completed my Diploma and get my Final Major Project results next week. I have attached a few snapshots of my FMP work and exhibition prep. For my presentation I decided to mount all images without frames onto foam board and this didn’t go as desired so I started again and re-printed. This time I mounted all images onto MDF instead, and this gave better results. I displayed my work around a blue line which represents the road of the journey I went on to take the pictures. Along side this was my book which showed all the gaps in the journey that couldn’t be displayed.

There is more excellent work at the exhibition, which students have worked really hard on, from a variety of different courses such as art,graphics, media etc…

I must say the attached photographs are of terrible quality  considering that this is a photography blog but I only took the images on a mobile phone so it coudln’t  be helped and they are of course in the wrong order, I’ll leave you to figure it out but the bottom right is a picture of the final presentation the other similar ones are practice displays.

Birmingham NEC Focus on Imaging Event

Today I visited the Focus on Imaging Event based in the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre.

We made the 2.5 hour coach journey to Birmingham starting at 9.15 this morning and arrived back in Blackburn at about 4.45pm – it was a busy day with lots of travelling.

There were companies from all over the place and I was introduced to some brilliant new products and processes. I saw the highest quality albums I personally have ever seen, these were by an Italian Company Mario Acerboni and I was very impressed by the Acrylic Prints that I saw by TYI (transform your images) which seem to be increasing in popularity.

I hope to look into creating an Acrylic Print of one of my Spring Landscape images this year. I also carried out research for my personal project so still I have a lot of material to read through that I collected today.

Overall a great event and well worth visiting, but I would make my own way there if I went again and spend longer looking around.

Personal Project Introduction & Update

For the next 4-5 months the good majority of my Blogs will concentrate on one of my personal projects which I started in Febuary. For this project I had set out to photograph the 185 mile journey between where I used to live (Berwick-upon-Tweed) and where I now live (Darwen, Lancashire).

I was hoping to produce a set of quality (hopefully technically sound) landscape images to exhibit in Blackburn, UK in June 2010. Throughout the project I want to keep detailed research in sketchbooks along with plans and records of work I have carried out. I was sure of one thing in particular-that I would be open-minded, and willing to change what I set out to do. Since February, I have already made various changes about how I will accomplish the project.

The historic town of Berwick (the most Northern town of England) is 185 miles from where I now live in Darwen. I have made the journey ever since being a baby so it is an interesting thing for me to re-visit.

As a child, I didn’t appreciate living in Berwick, I found it boring on most days, except in the height of summer and on the cold snowy days in winter. At these times I loved being outside on the farm. After a few years of being away from the town and growing a bit older, I now really miss the rural landscapes and slower pace of life that I once enjoyed. I looked at images taken above both towns and Berwick looks like a patchwork quilt. For me this project could end up being about bridging the gap between the two places.

For now my task is to brainstorm! I need to think about places on the journey that I could photgraph and narrow this down to those that I should photograph.