Edge Bespoke Picture Framing

edge bespoke picture framing
www.edge-framing.co.uk
bev@edge-framing.co.uk

After my shoot with Jasmine and her two beautiful boys I wanted to welcome her as an ambassador of my photography with a couple of framed prints. I knew of a local company that I had been wanting to use and this was a perfect opportunity/project to assign to them. Bev at Edge Bespoke Picture Framing is not only a convenient contact as she is based in the same village as me but someone that I also wanted to support as a local small business.

My First Film Experience

The title is probably slightly misleading, I used to photograph with a film camera all the time when I was little, it was like an awesome pink and purple brick with a wrist strap attached to it that had a very particular smell. Still not sure how it could have such a distinct smell but it did and it travelled very many places with me capturing all the things my tiny girl brain thought were worth capturing. Apparently a Winnie-the-Pooh pillow was one of those things. Children, they work in mysterious ways.

However, as groundbreaking as disposable/point and shoots are with their picture quality, I thought it would be great to try using an SLR film camera just because I have always shot digital ever since I woke up and thought "I want to be a photographer." There is one very tiny minor issue I have with digital cameras which is that the display will not necessarily show you the true exposure of the photo you've taken for varying different reasons. The LCD brightness changes from model to model and you can manually alter it yourself as well. If you work in bright sunlight the screen can appear pitch black (which happened to me at a recent event, every photo looked under exposed until I stepped inside and they were actually fine) and finally I fell into a habit of relying on the review image to adjust my camera settings...not genius!

Hickstead 2013, The British Jumping Derby

I haven't written a blog in so very long, mostly because I rarely have much exciting news, however I have been keeping busy assisting other photographers at horse events such as The South of England show.

As the title may suggest though, this is just a quick insight into my second year working at The All England Jumping Course, Hickstead. After a brilliant experience interning last year I was thrilled to be invited back for this show season as a press office assistant!

The Spanish stallions of Stelling Minnis

Look at that, a photography post! I confess it's been a while and even still these photo's aren't new, I took them back in august. If you follow me on facebook or twitter however you will have seen glimpses of these every now and again. 

Andalusian horses are one of my favourite breeds and i'd resigned to photographing them "someday" for lack of knowing anyone who owned one. However, I am more than chuffed that my "someday" arrived a whole lot sooner and in a far grander scale than I could have hoped for. I discovered early last year a family run stud farm that are dedicated to producing purebred spanish horses and couldn't believe they had been on my doorstep this whole time and I never knew anything about them. I contacted Jayne, owner of the business, explaining who I am, what I do and how i'd always wanted to photograph this breed. As an avid Andalusian fan she was more than delighted to welcome me up to see them.

From the instant I arrived the horses were everything I could have hoped for and then some; expressive, lively and stunning! Jayne and her husband were more than willing to answer all my questions and I learned about their breeding programme, spanish riding/showing competitions in the UK and information about the breed.

The two resident stallions were the main point of interest this time around. Carceno V is a showing superstar and a total show off who exploded with energy the instant he was turned out. He seemed to be aware of the camera and took tremendous joy in performing for it, throwing his head around, rearing, bucking, leaping in the air, prancing and kicking. 

Carceno V

Ulano is the older of the two (If I remember correctly he's in his 20's) and has a unique gene that adds a silver sheen to his coat. There aren't too many spanish horses that have it but it's a characterstic which has been passed on to one of his offspring, a 2 year old colt that literally shone silver in the sunlight. He was let loose in the school and demonstrated a beautiful collected canter and extended trot with the elastic movement that is associated with the breed. 

Ulano

The full set of photos has been posted to my website so please click this link if you'd like to see them: http://lottesimons.com/andalusian.php 

For more on the work Jayne and her family do at Grays PRE Andulsian Stud head over to their website: http://www.grayspre.co.uk

F**k It

I said a little while ago I was working on putting motivational techniques into place and playing guinea pig to them to see if/which have any positive effects towards productivity. I had even written up the framework of the post that I would eventually share after a fair amount of time to give the techniques a chance to sink in.

There is one fundamentally huge obstacle in the way though. You need to be motivated to make motivational changes. They didn't think that one through properly eh? It's true that to make a change you have to really want to do it like with all the classics such as getting fit or giving up smoking. It is easy if you have the will power and enough Winston Churchill determination bubbling inside of yourself. However, as much as I want and need to make these fairly small alterations in life my enthusiasm peaked within a few hours of thinking the idea and it's slipped ever since.

So how do you motivate yourself to be motivated? Or encourage yourself to do something despite the anxiety, depression, fear, whatever it is that's mentally standing in your way?
One book that I read about a year ago by John C Parkin is  "Fuck It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way" Now don't be thrown off by the word spiritual if like me you don't have religious or spiritual beliefs because the book is actually pretty logical the whole way through. It's more life coaching than enlightenment. The underlying message is incredibly simple, just say fuck it.

2012 in summary

I said some time ago that I would write a post on depression and I have drafted one but I think it's easier to write about in context of the entire year. So I thought i'd do something cliche and take a look back at the past 12 months, which with new year coming up i'm sure a lot of people have started doing.

2012 was a slow start and that's because for the last six to nine months I had unknowingly been suffering with depression and it was a gradual decline downwards each month. I didn't have the motivation to do anything, no inspiration or desire to photograph and for the most part I didn't want to exist at all. Not die, I wasn't suicidal, I just didn't want to exist, perhaps a little hard to differentiate but ultimately two very different things. For two months I just read books. All the time. As soon as I woke up I would start reading and pretty much until I went to sleep, i'd just want to stay in that fantasy world because ultimately it was a lot more tolerable than reality. It got even worse when my guinea pig passed away. Now I know that they're just small fluffy rodents but she was MY small fluffy rodent and the last of four that i'd had over the past ten years so I felt extremely lost when she died and that pointless feeling to life just got worse and I no longer cared about anything.

That's a very short summed up paragraph of what is realistically very complicated. I've made it brief, skipping out most of the details of what actually happened but for the sake of an overview, you get the point. In terms of my career, i'd been promising to do shoots left right and center and just never managed to uphold to them due to the previously mentioned mental illness, but in March things finally came together for a shoot in Brighton and it helped re-inspire me. I always forget how much passion I have for photography when I haven't done it for a long time and then everything clicks back into place in my mind when I get behind the camera again.

All legs and personality.

This summer I returned to Stud UK Euro, they breed competition horses and I visited last year to get some shots for them and blogged a series of photos of their rising 2 and 3 year olds as well as the new foals.

I had seen them tweeting throughout spring this years new arrivals and was itching to go and play with some foals so asked if it would be ok to come and take some more photos, to which it was happily agreed that it was fine for me to come up any time.

He stalked me all around the field.
We became very good friends!

When I got to the offices to let them know I was there no one seemed to be expecting me so I mentioned that i'd arranged it with a lady over twitter that I was coming over to take some photos of the foals. Little did I know, twitter duties had been handed over from Katie, whom I had arranged things with the previous year, to Rupert (Husband & Business partner of the company). They called across to him to confirm that I was supposed to be there and directed me over to his office where upon arrival he introduced himself with "Hi, i'm the twitter lady." Bit humiliating!

Anyway, onto the foals! They're brilliant. In short, hilarious, sweet and cheeky. I had one little chap follow me around for a long time and kept getting in the way of my shots because he wanted ALL of my attention, I found myself sneaking round the field trying to outsmart him so that he would leave me in peace to work. For the most part they are all very inquisitive and as soon as I stepped through the gate I was full on ambushed by the lot of them, all curious to see who I was, what I was doing and what was in my hands. As well as the foals there is also the mares to contend with, those which are very sweet and enjoyed a scratch whilst others, understandably, were keeping an eye on the "kids." One in particular was happy to mind her own business and stay out the way but she had a particularly friendly foal who walked over to me a lot so she stood a little distance away but never took her eyes off me.