Preview Exhibition

Last week I put up a preview of my coming exhibition in Perry Barr. You can see the 6 selected images in the Union building at Birmingham City University City North Campus. The images are of the High Priestess (Model Erica Millwood, MUA Joolz Hyland and Costume by Emily Britton), The Empress (Model Hazziehat Scheck, MUA Gaving Pickle), The Emperor (Models Adam Bennett, Tyler Blake, Maximillian Genoni, Murray Sommerville, Jeremy Williams, Ben Poultney), The Lovers (Model John Gihair, MUA Joolz Hyland), The Wheel of Fortune (Models Jess Charles, Martyn Aston, James Zaremba, MUA Roseanna Velin) and The Hanged man (Models Kyle Perks, Paul Og, MUA Roseanna Velin).
The full exhibition shall be launching on the 12th of April in the Works Gallery - details to follow

Surveillance on Cosmetics

I went out and about town with make-up artists Gavin Pickle and Roseanna Velin, and friend Seth Blaine. We went into loads of shops video blogging and generally causing a scene. Especially in superdrug where the woman over the tanoy was like 'Surveillance of Cosmetics please!' THE CHEEK OF IT!!! Here's the video, check it out and subscribe!

In the print room

I'm in the print room doing my printing! Here is my first print test of 'The Lovers' image on my new Oyster roll from Permajet that arrive today via Fedex. It was a day late due to Focus orders backlog but better late than never, let's hope the city council take that same view =)

Here you can see me and almost make out the printing genius that is Tony in the back. Enjoy!

Photography by Jannis Tsipoulanis

I've just found this series of images that I really like and thought I would share with you. It's a series by Jannis Tsipoulanis and has some really nice styling. I want to know where I can find that necklace!

Waking in Tears

So who likes to hear about random nonsensical dreams? Well here is mine… My mother is becoming angry about where to host the Christmas dinner and my father is being less than helpful. I go into the living room to see the table set; relieved it’s not in the bathroom or airing cupboard. My father comes in and my mother vents some anger to which my father says he was bonding with his children. My mother is relieved and decided to do the same by hosting a Milkshake Straw Sucking Competition in which you get a seriously long straw fill it with milkshake and two people suck it (one at each end) and you see who can suck the most part of the straw flat.

Now a crowd gathers and there is an elderly lady in it. She’s looking a bit shabby. She touches her hair and a large portion of her scalp falls of –cancer we decide. ‘Oh no, I’ve just dyed my hair, it must be that I got some on my scalp’ she implores –dementia we diagnose. It becomes my job to take her to the hospital.

Now it’s time for the roughly cut strange dream transition that sometimes occurs where everything changes. I’m with two guys, life long best friends. One is leaving, and one has dementia. I call us a taxi to take us to the doctor because I imagine that’s where you go when someone had dementia. We get in and I tell him where to take us. My friend with dementia is loosing his mind and memories. We’re in the taxi and his phone rings. He doesn’t realise its his phone, but then he does, but then he doesn’t realise how to answer it. I try to take if from him and there’s a little kafuffle and the phone is dropped.

He can’t remember how to use the phone to see who rang so I take a look, but annoyed with the situation he hits the phone out of the window. It’s tense and we’re all quite sad about what’s happening. ‘Don’t you hate it when you know everything is about to change and you can’t do anything about it,’ I ask the Taxi driver, ‘It’s not like what you had recently was amazing, I mean I’ve just been working and stuff, but over all, my time with these guys was something else and now it’s over.’
‘You just have to wait and see what the future holds’ says the taxi man. We reach our destination and come to a shop.

Queue final nonsensical dream transition that relates to other parts of the dream unmentioned. To get to the ‘gate’ where one of my friends has to go we have to buy special transport (a small blue creature like a rubber toy about the size of a pencil sharpener, of which we all ride on the back of). We’re deciding which one is best.
My friend with dementia becomes agitated and upset claiming he hadn’t given me my gift. ‘No, no, you have. You’ve given me my memories!’ I exclaim. We embrace and I’m so taken by his degrading memory and my resent to the coming end to our friendship I’m in tears. I awake bringing this part of the dream back with me.

3,141,600,000 miles around the Sun

Having travelled over 3,141,600,000 miles round the sun since birth it was time to celebrate the date of my birth on the 16th of March, however I was too busy to do such a thing with shoots coming up on the Wednesday. Poppy got me a gift and card though which was nice and I plan to have some kind of celebratory gathering of friends in the coming week which should be nice.
Pierre et Gilles book from Poppy =)

The Fool, The Lovers and more

I was in the studio again recently shooting for my Major Arcana project. I was working with models Luke Grimley and John Gihair, as well as with Make-up artist Joolz Hyland. I'm still going through the images and am hopefull for the end product. Here's a video we put together from the day, enjoy =)

Luke Grimley

I took Luke Grimley in the studio today for a portfolio shoot. It was such a relief to be doing something photography based that was different to my current project. He was really easy and cool to work with and wants to get signed by an agency some time soon. Here are the pictures I took.

Lost inside my own confusion

Well I've just woken up which will explain the slighlty more heart felt (or whiney) approach to this blog post. This project I'm doing is so difficult and because there is so much riding on it I am really feeling the pressure, so much so that I can hardly bare to be awake. I go to sleep to avoid thinking about it any longer. So far I've done 12 out of 22 photoshoot, some I really like and some I hate, some so much so that I want to reshoot them, but is there enough time to be thinking this? I've roughly got less than two weeks to get this done. That's 2 weeks to shoot 10-12 more images as well as finish editing them all, have them printed and mounted before the 19th of March is out.
The most difficult thing is that my corrispondence has dropped dramatically.
The other day when trying to organise shoots for this coming Wednesday, through Model Mayhem, and Facebook messages including a group based messages I would have sent out 200 messages. From that 200, I had 2 responces. That's 1%. You can imagine what a gut wrenching effect that would have. However I'm not giving up. I will try my hardest to get this done in the time. I've pulled it off so far, and I will continue to do so. I guess this is just goodbye to sleep.
I've had a lot of help from people, working as part of a team has really helped and I guess that is what this is all really about.
I still have unplanned images or images that have changed due to the circumstances and on top of that I haven't recieved the grant yet and my account is coming to zero. I'm going to fall short on my rent and will have to ask the bank to extend my overdraft tomorrow otherwise I don't know what I will do.
This project was about a lot of things and a lot of important things to me. Because it became so vast I lost some of that. Perhaps now for that final push as I fall into slight desperation I'll rememeber the reasons I started this projects and my initial intents.

A busy time

So I've been behind on my blogging, and quite rightly so. Everything is up in the air at the moment. The 8 week challenge is definately on a hold at least for the next three weeks! I've been piling on the photoshoots as there isn't much time left. At the moment I have I've probably got 10 more to do and I'd quite like to reshoot one.
I've worked with another new Make-up artist Joolz who has done some wicked make-up for a couple of the shots and will be working again with me on Wednesday. I've also been working with Christina King who made this wicked crown for the Emperor shot, and she's going to be making a few more things to that I look forwards to.
On the 'Temperance' photoshoot James Lawrence Slattery and Gavin Pickle (Make-up Artist) did some modelling for me and Roseanna Velin did the Make-up. The costumes they're wearing were made by Kyle Perks who you can follow at www.Justin-Focus.co.uk
This image along with a short article will also be going into the next issue of Spaghetti Junction.
I think it's going well, and although very stressful at times I'm still enjoying it.
I shot judgement the other day, which is going to be the biggest nightmare to edit but here are some sample images I thought you might enjoy :)