I've finished school

So yesterday was the last day I ever have o go to school!!!! woohoo!
I still have 2 exams mid June and then i'm completely free of education, but now i'm on study leave for 3 weeks then I'm off to Yorkshire for a sort of holiday visiting my friend and her horses.

Anyway, I dressed as the 'press' photographer yesterday and didn't really take part in any of the antics I just photographed them for everyone else :)
There was a joke since the Tv show Glee started for our school, as it's the Folkestone school for girls it gets shortened to FSG, which means my friend as a glee fan started FSGlee. So I was 'reporting' for fsglee Tv hahaha

Most of us were back in our old school uniform, the kilt is WAY too small and I couldn't breathe all day. My friend and I later figured out that day we couldv'e just left the buttons undone and rolled it up instead but whatever! no pain no gain it was funny.

The whole year did a conga line through two of the school buildings so I had to dash up the opposite stairs to get them through the corridor, then run down and up the other side of the building to get them on the next floor, I was knackered afterwards there's way too many stairs in our school!!

A few shots:

Don't lose yourself

A good friend and myself were discussing the other day the concept of people losing themselves. It's not so much a concept as reality, and we've seen it happen to a fair amount of people that we know. When someone distinctly acts as a person you know they're not.
I think it's quite sad, becoming so caught up in fitting in with your friends, drinking, partying, work even, whatever it is, that you lose touch with who you are.
Anyway, I did this shoot with Jess and it was based around the complete opposite of all the crap that people get caught up on in their lives and just...being. Enjoy :)

A trip along the coast

I did a shoot with one of my friends today and we went to a couple of locations, the second of which was atop some nearby cliffs.
When we got there we saw that there was a really really low cloud bank and it looked like a giant cushy blanket that you could jump and land safely on (obviously we didn't test that theory!) but it was all rolling inland from the see and it looked as though the town down the hill was being eaten up by it.



The South East coast really is quite a pretty area, you have beautiful countryside in one direction then the English Channel and continental europe the other! I'm fortunate to be able to see France for most of the summer, when the sun is shining and the sky is clear.




Also, a bird of prey flew past, i'm not sure what breed of bird it is but I saw it out of the corner of my eye and snapped a photo quick before it ducked down behind the cliff. It was only a flash so it's just as well I was paying attention or I wouldn't have seen it.

Relax

You know when all those smalls unimportant things in life annoy you and it REALLY winds you up?
Well next time you know something stupid is bugging you, relax, let it go and carry on with your life!! because chances are it's really not worth your time or mental effort stressing over.

Anniken Hannevik

I decided to feature my friend and incredible photographer on here, Anniken Hannevik.

She is AMAZING and one of the most lovely people I know, she's helped me so much with my photography and become such an amazing friend.
Find more of her work here:Website

Trailblazers

Trying to keep this up is proving mildly difficult, I'm going to keep forgetting to write.
Anyway, yesterday I went to a horse show to do photos for The Paddocks, they're a registered charity that offer riding opportunities to those that wouldn't otherwise be able to ride...kinda thing. Check them out they're an awesome group of people that I love to shoot at shows, it's a lot of fun.
(website)

Anyway, I wasn't originally supposed to be able to attend I was busy elsewhere but it was canceled so I blasted my little 1 litre yaris up the motorway as fast as it could go to Limes Farm Equestrian Center.
SIDENOTE: I DROVE SENSIBLEY, DON'T BE AN IDIOT DRIVER PEOPLE :D

So I arrived just before midday and shot two classes (can't remember which ones they were) fairly soon after arriving. The ponies they ride are great and really enjoy they're jumping, so much fun to watch the team ride.

We were waiting around for HOURS for the 95cm class but photowise, I was happy to wait, bigger jumps are so much easier and interesting to shoot. Unfortunately no one from the paddocks team rode a clear round although I two of them still won 2nd and 3rd place.
Everyone all rode really well and the horses/ponies were brilliant as well. I'm really happy with the photos I got and i'm always more than happy to shoot for them. I had a great day and I hope they like the photos as much as my bias self does!!

Because they started everything

I thought maybe I'd write an entry on why I seem to love obsessively using horses in my work, and why I continue with an 'equine' side to my photography. Some people probably know this story actually but here's my beginnings, enjoy: I used to go horse riding for about 5 years from when I was 11? I think. I was reeeeally into horses at the time and I wanted everything and anything to do with them and my friend at the time found a pony for loan and asked if I wanted to share it with her. We went and saw him one weekend with our parents and we both absolutely loved him and had him on loan from that day. Chester 14.2hh chestnut gelding
After having him on loan just under a year I was riding on the lunge with no stirrups and he slipped in the mud and landed on my leg and it broke in three places. The trip to the hospital was hilarious actually, more when I reflect on it rather than at the time, but the paramedics were just funny chaps and when I had some Gas and air I was not aware that it makes your voice sound lower, so when I was asked if it was working I said 'yeah' but completely sounded like a man! So embarassing. So anyway, this is the part where photography actually starts to make an appearance. So I was stuck in cast for an estimate 12 weeks (it did turn out to be that long in the end) so I wasn't able to ride but my friend obviously kept riding Chester and I would go to the yard to visit every so often and we'd always taken photos of eachother riding but I wasn't there to do that anymore but i'd go to the shows she competed in and i'd take photos then.

My dad came to visit at some point during that summer and he brought an olympus dslr with him (I can't remember which model) I didn't really know anything about cameras at this point but after he let me use that to take some shots of my guinea pigs and brothers I wanted one and asked if I could have 'a proper camera like yours' for my birthday that year. That's when I got my hands on my own first SLR, nikon D40x. So when I'd go to the yard i'd always try and get better photos than I did with the casio compact, because I had better equipment. That's how my interest first started, because I started to think about what I was shooting a bit more, I obviously still wasn't great at it! but i'd try and get better shots each time I saw the horses. I wanted to purely be an equine photographer at this point, I knew that's what I wanted to do with my life. I think because of the amount of time i'd spent not particularly involved with the horses because of my leg (about 6 months total) I started losing interest in them and riding so by august in 2008 I no longer had chester on loan and effectively had no ties to horses anymore.

My interest in portraiture had started picking up in the last few months being involved with horses and by the end of 2008 that's what I mostly shot, but i'd usually stick to self portraits, until I decided to ask some friends to model for me. I hadn't taken a photo of a horse in about 7 months or so when I went to see Chesters owner and her other horses and I took my camera with me, i'd had an idea to just use a horse in some portrait work, but since then I started seeing them as separate subjects again and i've also used them in other photoshoots. Over the last year i've been redeveloping my equine photo skills and set up a comission package that combines aspects of my equine and portrait work. So there's the story of how my interest in photography started, why I obsess with using horses so much and evidence that I can't write life stories for toffee!

A sample of horse portraiture and photoshoots from the last year: