Happy 1st of Advent everyone!

Hope you have gotten into the Christmas feel now, I decorated our house yesterday so it is now looking as Christmasy as it ever will. I also made homemade mulled wine (glögg) that I have had brewing over night so I have had some of that and some ginger bread cookies today together with listening to Christmas songs trying to get into the Christmas feel. It is otherwise a bit hard for me to get into the Christmas feeling when it is 26C outside and sunny. How is the weather where you live?
Have you celebrated 1st of advent today? If you have how did you celebrate? In Sweden its traditional to light the first candle on the advent candle holder. I unfortunately could not find any candles at home yesterday only the advent candle holder its always something missing isn't it?
My photo shoots last friday that I  told you about both went well I have not had time to go through all the images from the latest shoot but the one I had during the afternoon are all done and delivered to the client it is always nice when you have finished a job so that you can concentrate on a new one.
I have now started a personal project that I will have going beside my regular work that will be of producing more Abstract Photo Art I really enjoy doing it. I will also produce a few different kinds of calendars for 2011 it is after all time to buy a new calendar very soon if you are in the market for one. I will have all mine ready for purchase at Red Bubble.
http://www.redbubble.com/people/hshippey 

Well I better go and get ready I am invited to a party at the Hyatt Regency Taba Heights this afternoon.
Catch you all later.
Helen

Dance show Photography.

I have just finished cleaning my camera sensor and charged all my batteries so I am totally ready for this afternoon and evenings photo shoot.
First I will take some tournament presentation photographs then after dinner the fun begins with photographing a dance show hope I can get into the rhythm. :-)
I hope it will not be too windy either tonight it has a tendency to be more windy during the afternoon/evening here than it is during the day. I will use my Canon 5D together with my Canon 70-200mm 2.8f  L IS USM lens to get those lovely close up shots in low light.

Keep your fingers crossed for some great photography tonight. Its all about the performance and the dance costumes don't you think? I am hoping for something colourful. Like these.

I have been feeling very patriotic today wearing my Sweden T-shirt, but I guess I better go and change before my photo assignments.
Ta ta.
Have a lovely weekend I certain will. I do know what I will be doing on Sunday... at least where my hubby will be for most of the day and that is watching The Dubai World Championship Golf Tournament I will of course sneak some peeks here and there as well but I can seldom sit for a whole tournament part from the Ryder Cup I was totally hooked then day and night. That was some great golf on display!
Ps. I played on the Earth Course where the tournament is on now in July and it was a great course to play on I must admit, it also looks very well manicured from what I saw on TV yesterday.
Cheers,
Helen

Macro Photography.

When I take photographs for myself I prefer to do macro photography or abstract. You know when you are so close to a subject that it becomes abstract to you it's almost hard to see what the subject really is. Abstract and macro (close up) photography both look really great printed on canvases so that they look more like a painting than a photograph. I personally like to have large art in my house the bigger the better or a few small ones that fit together to make a larger one almost like a montage.

This image will look great in a large format printed on a canvas. It will give a lovely colourful touch to your room I can also see it together with other similar images in different coulors to have them all in  close proximity to each other complementing one another.

This is a hibiscus flower.

Getting this hibiscus flower I sadly got a lot of pollen on my shorts and in my beach bag while carrying it home... not good for my clothes but it would also have been very cool with pollen on the images! Need to be more careful next time.

These are yellow flowers that grow several tight together on a bush I am not sure what their names are.

I took all flower images at home so that I could have the flowers arranged and my camera on a tripod. I also sprayed water on the flowers with a water squirter from IKEA. I used my Canon 100mm 2.8f lens for these shots had my camera on Manual as well as the lens. When you photograph images so close up it is usually hard for the lens to focus so you need to focus manually.

This image was taken with my 50mm 1.4f lens camera mounted on a tripod.

Last week I was busy photographing a sport event which I also enjoy doing, the organizers also had evening activities that I attended with my camera at hand. I felt a bit like one of them paparazzi photographers pointing my camera into peoples faces while they were chatting and enjoying themselves. I guess it is a bit different since I was at least not sneaking in the bushes with a long zoom lens but rather asked everyone to please look at me and don't forget to look at the images on facebook!

So this week I have been busy with editing some of the images to get them ready for magazine use. I am just finished and will deliver all the images to the client tomorrow.

I just heard from my sister that it is Thanksgiving this weekend in America so Happy Thanksgiving to everyone that celebrate it!

Cheers,

Helen

Birds are magnificent creatures

Hi there!
Today I saw a Pigeon Hawk chasing a Pigeon it was a very noisy flight but quite magnificent to see in a way. To see first hand how life evolves in the wilderness and not only happens on the Discovery Channel. I did however watch something very fascinating yesterday on the Discovery Channel about fish! But that is another story all together. Of course I did not have my camera at hand to shoot some frames so that I would have something to show you guys.... Murphy's Law isn't it?
Yesterday I also wished I had my camera with me I think I need to start to carry it around with me at all times! I walked down for lunch and on the way I saw an eagle sitting not more than 5 meters away from me I would have had a great opportunity to get some great close ups. Of course it later on flew away once I got closer but wow are they great birds of pray to watch them fly they look so graceful.
I am having a busy week of events photography so I have made sure I got all my gear sorted out there is one last thing I need to get done after I publish this and it is to clean my camera sensor and format one of my cards then I will be all set. 
Yesterday I got my bookmarks from the printers and if I may say so myself I am very happy with them! But then of course I have done the design and taken the images LOL so I guess I better like them. Don't you agree?

I have made personal bookmarks so I have had a specific person in mind when making them so using images that I think would be suitable for them either with them in an image or with places they have been to or I know they like etc. So takes a bit of creative searching in trying to get the image I feel would be perfect for just that person. But I then also hope that the receiver  of the bookmark also would enjoy it even more. We will see how well that goes only time can tell.

A sneak preview for you of them.

A great gift that is perfect for posting (snail mail) to your friends and family living far away since they weigh next to nothing.

If you are interested in purchasing any of my images for Christmas or any other occasion you can take advantage of this promotion that lasts till the 14th of November 2010, 15% Discount when using this:
Discount Code: hshippey_is_on_sale_2887
You can buy my art work as postcards, on canvas or framed or as large posters.
Take a look at this website to choose your image that you like. http://www.redbubble.com/people/hshippey/portfolio/art

Image filing system and some Portraits

I have recently gotten a request from a magazine about images from a certain place here in Egypt. No problem I have plenty of images to send to the magazine to choose from. My biggest issue was to find the images on all my several external hard drives. I thought I had a good system but it turns out it is not so good so it took me a lot longer to find all the images that I knew that I had. So I have this morning started to make up a new system my issue that I am facing now is if I am going to continue my old system parallel to this new one which then means that I will have duplicates all over the place that will take up space that are quite precious to me… I am leaning towards to only use my new system. I hope it will work. The system I have now is according to year and month of when I have taken a picture but then you need to remember when you took an image. My new system that are far from all implemented or completely thought through, it will probably take me months to get it all done anyway it is based on categories. Such as a folder for; food and vegetables, Stockholm, Golf course names etc. so all images that have anything to do with the categories goes into that folder no matter when the image was taken so Stockholm for instance will have plenty of images from several different years since I go to Stockholm about once a year and take pictures every time. What do you think will this system work? I guess most of the time a client do not need an image from a certain year they just want an image of the place they are requesting.

Some images will of course be trickier to place in just one category and there is no point having duplicates (unless it is your back up of course!) Maybe that is when sub categories come in? You know when a picture can be thought of as fitting in two or more different categories such as an image of a date palm tree with dates on, it could be in the fruit or tree folder or in a golf folder since it is taken on a golf course. I will have to think about that one! I do think it would be good with subcategories though to make it easier and maybe fewer folders to see as a start. If I do folders per country but then I will have it tricky when it comes to golf courses since I have so many images of them from different countries. If I make a folder of golf courses then I can put it all in their but if I do countries then I will have to have a golf course folder as a sub category in all country folders which I guess there is nothing wrong with either… Let me know if you have any great insight into my new filing system or if you have another one that is idiot proof. I spoke to another photographer about how de does his filing; he had a system that he thought was very good well at least worked for him. I just thought that it was the most complicated one I had heard of so I will definitively not do what he does. I guess it is all down to making one that works for you personally and sticking to it.

I am already quite good at deleting images but I think I need to up my game a bit and become even better at it to save space. I save almost no images on my hard drive on the computer itself but still I got a worrying message the other day when I opened Aperture; that I had too little memory for it to work properly and that I was risking loosing images! Wow that was a wake up call so I straight away frantically tried to move images from the computer to different external hard drives. I did peek at the utilities on the computer and I was scarily low on memory not sure how that happened. I need to be better at keeping an eye on it that is for sure.

I recently helped a friend take some avatar images of her for an article that have been written about her for Living Abroad Magazine. So we both ventured out to take some lovely images of her for the editors to choose from here are a few of the ones we came up with.