Here’s something else positive for you. A young girl can’t sleep so her Dad sings a song with her, and puts it on YouTube. Every now and then they have to stop to let the imaginary fireworks go off, then they continue.
Thanks to Scot for bringing this to my attention.
Heather Kavanagh is someone, like Paul Dunning, whom I’ve known online for a very long time. As a freelance designer she really started to struggle when the financial crash of 2008 hit, and a concerted effort to find full-time employment let to a few interviews but no work. It got to the stage where she was feeling so low, she considered professional help.
However with the help of her network of friends, and the support of her partner, she managed to keep up the search for her professional niche. She decided to look into photography of scale models, something she had been doing (and enjoying for years), but nobody took her seriously enough to want to hire her.
A chance conversation with a friend at a railway modelling meeting let her to build a model railway coach for him. He was really pleased with the result, so she ended up making three more coaches for him, and three more, to the point where her friend suggested she contact the manufacturer of the models to offer her services.
They took her up on her offer, and before long she became a professional model maker, working on a commission for a complete stranger. She now has a whole stack of commissioned models, with the prospect of much more to come, with a workload that will keep her busy until the middle of next year.
From a personal perspective, having been witness to Heather’s struggles as she tried to find something that was right for her, I’m delighted that things are going so well for her now, and, like me, she’s finally being paid to do something she loves, which is the best feeling in the world. She credits her success to “trying to be positive about something I could do, and talking to people who were prepared to give me a break”.
So, a really positive positivity story for you! You can see her site at www.heatherkay.co.uk and her blog is at www.snaptophobic.co.uk.
Following on from my post a while back about being positive, to counteract the tendency towards negativity that seems to prevail on social networks these days, I asked my Twitter followers to let me know of anything they’d done lately that they were proud of, that I could share. Paul Dunning, a freelance web designer and artist, has recently been working on a fascinating project based on the unique street name signs in his home town of Chelmsford in Essex. You can read more about it, and see some of the fruits of his efforts, in this Flickr set.
If you have something you think people should know about, let me know!
Yesterday I went into London to photograph ElÃn and Bragi, an Icelandic couple who had recently been married on a tour of India and Thaliand before returning to London. I met ElÃn before they left, and they were both very keen to be involved in the Icelanders in London project, and so I have added their photos to the project website which you can see here and here.
My assistant for the shoot, Caitlin (who is also a photographer, and a good one too…), took a sneaky photo of me with the Icelanders as we discussed where to take some of the photos:
The enduring popularity of black and white photography could, at first glance, draw similar criticism to that levelled at the current trend for Hipstamatic photography and its ilk. After all, in the digital era where all images are captured in full colour, isn’t converting to black and white also ‘fake’, and merely imposing an effect to replicate what was once a technical limitation? And is it not also true that many people convert a photo to black and white in an attempt to ‘improve’ a mediocre image?
These are valid points. But there is more to black and white photography than this. Many of the biggest names in photography are from the era of monochrome film, even though some of them (for example, Ansel Adams) built up large portfolios of colour film after it became available. So what is it that appeals about black and white photography? Continue reading Grey Areas