Arts and Crafts

After a family do, we managed to off-load the kids on grandma, however it was 5:30 by the time we got back into town. To cut a long story short we decided that we could spend the evening sitting at the dining table doing some crafts together.

...so off we went to HobbyCraft and bought some gear and then headed back home.

Making stuff is kinda 'my thing', I have tons of tools, glues, tapes and just about everything you could ever need. But I'd like to bring out the other-half's creative side, and have been trying to encourage her to take up a hobby so that she doesn't get so bored during the daytime.

The pasties wot I did dun.

So I decided to make some pasties. She has a DVD from the Ministry of Burlesque which shows you how to make nipple tassels and fascinators. I thought this would be a good start as they are fairly easy. Previously, I had forced her to go into charity shops and pick out a garment that we could chop up and make into pasties so we had some red felt and black sequins to make one set, and a blue blouse with embroidery to make a second set with.

I have to point out that this is an exercise purely to get her doing something so she can see how easy it is -- and so that we can spend some time doing something together.

As it turned out, she decided that she wanted to make some stuff to go in her hair instead which is great. And as it turned out, by the time we had done dinner and had a few glasses of wine, we were both very tired so we didn't get much done. I did finish a pair of pasties and this morning she finished a flower to go in her hair. It was a flower that was on a hair band, she chopped it off and glued it on a hair clip and then decorated it with some beads. Easy, done in 10 mins.

She loves going to charity shops and hunting down bargains, and hopefully if she can start hacking stuff up and making things, this will add a whole new dimension to that hobby.

Dr Martins Boots

I took the missus out today, she wanted to visit the charity shops in my old home town, which is rather posh, and thus the charity shops often yield some rather nice swag.

Unfortunately, they seem to have gotten wise recently and are researching the value of the stuff they are selling... £20 for an ash tray, £85 for an old telephone. It's more expensive than ebay.

Just when I was beginning to think that her bargain hunt would be a dead loss, we stumbled on a pair of Dr Martins in her size, very good condition, just £4. She's been on at me for ages to get her some Dr Martins and I was going to get her some for xmas, now she has some that are already broken in (If you have ever had Docs, you'll know why this is a good thing).

So the goo news is that the missus is happy, the bad news is that I'll have to think of something else to get her for crimble... I was thinking of some stockings and a short skirt to go with the Docs, but unfortunately that's not the look she had in mind. It's a shame because it would look good on a photo shoot.

I'll have to twist her arm.

Zombie Sazza Photography

Zombie Sazza Photography

The website of Sarah Takahashi, somebody I follow on DeviantArt. Beautiful pictures from Scotland -- I like her work.

It seems like a cool place to host a website for free too.

I'm talking to myself

...it's the only way to get a decent conversation!

The forums on dA are terrible. Seems like no matter what you say, you get contradicted by some nerd or 20 year old know-nothing. It's just one big pissing contest to  prove who knows the most about photography and has the least social skills.

Oh, don't get me wrong, the answers there given are highly knowledgeable about photography and cameras, but they seldom usefully answer the question asked, and they prove once and for all that photographers generally know nothing about art.

As somebody once said, talking to photographers about art is like talking to Dog the bounty hunter about fashion... sure you'll get an opinion, but you'll not learn anything useful.

Tattoos

The missus wants a tattoo.

I have no real objections but as Iv'e been a graphic designer for over twenty years, forgive me if I'm going to be a bit fussy over the quality of the artwork!

***
The weather is going to be crap all this week. My guess is that it will be next summer before we do any serious outdoor nude photography -- I like sunshine.
However, her-indoors has been playing with henna and now is a lovely natural looking redhead. That could look good in the Autumn, although I think it looks striking on a green background. I'll have to see if I can twist her arm.

Scouting for Girls

We took the whole family for a walk on Sunday to a location I wanted to scout. It wasn't as good as I remember, and certainly not as quiet. It was about a mile walk to get there and along the way was some wonderful countryside. Shame we missed the summer!

I really should get a Twitter account for posts like this. I think i will.

Plenty of plans, but no plans to do them. Hopefully now the kids are back in school things will settle down to normality and I can take some photos.

Experimental post

I'd like to talk about my work, problem is that it does contain nudity, which is no big problem as far as I'm concerned but it means that I probably can't post thumbnails to it because it's marked as mature content on dA and I don't want to break any terms and conditions on blogger.
So here goes...


Statuesque by ~DannyBillArgent on deviantART

I'm used to photographing cars, so using a worm's eye view seems natural to me, thats all I did with the photo Statuesque. I took a load of photos while the model posed. I like this pose because it was sorta right, but sorta wrong too. I had some work to do blurring out the artex on the ceiling, I generally used the smudge tool on Photoshop where the pattern showed, which was mainly down the left side of the picture.
One of the lamps I used was a bedside lamp with a violet lampshade, this gave some of the picture an unusual cast and so I went with it, adjusting the colour temperature in CameraRaw, and that was it. All done!
Essentially I had an old camera and some household lamps. The location was our dining room, I photographed upwards to avoid shooting any furniture. The model was nude because we didn't have any clothes that she'd want to be photographed in... she just slapped on a bit of make-up, and this picture was the result. I'm quite pleased with the result, considering that it's basically a product of circumstance. If we had a studio and some nice clothes I may have produced a very different picture, but making do and working with what you got is kinda fun.