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I’ve just finished packing to go to Glasgow for the weekend and in the midst of it all managed to make an entry for one of the current Utata projects.

The project is Take Two : Before & After. Take Two is a new series of projects where the entry must be a diptych (a diptych is two photographs presented together to show opposites, some story or just simply because they look cool together). You can interpret the project title as an how you wish, the title for the first project being Before & After. I think this is quite an open title and can apply to a lot of things. My entry is before and after packing my bag for the weekend.

Before & After : Packing, originally uploaded by faithmonsoon.

The project will be published on February 19th so I wonder if I will come up with any more ideas before then.

Diptychs are fun!

The utata weekend project for May 11th was Utata Lights Up. What better an opportunity to get out some of my “novelty” lamps and try some shots.

Not having a home studio I setup my lamps in my small hallway where I could close all the doors and eliminate any street light from the streetlamps of London.

I think the results are not too bad for a home setup, especially as I don’t even have a tripod. How did you manage to hold the camera for so long then? I hear you ask. Easy… balance it on a dining chair!

Here are my attempts:

I didn’t get them submitted over the actual Saturday/Sunday of the weekend but hey, close enough!

I’ve done some re-work on my submission for Iron Photographer 21. I’ve split the photo into 2 layers - 1 with the background and 1 with the strawberries. I’ve faded the background and brought up the red colour in the strawberries. I definitely need a bit more practice at selecting parts of the image for creating layers (there are a few highlight type halos around the strawberries) but I think it looks much better than the original and certainly not bad for a first attempt. The removal of the orange tint and contrast of colourful strawberries with the de-saturated background really makes the subject pack more of a punch!

Here they are side-by-side. What do you think?

I’m a member of the Utata group on flickr.

The group sets regular photo challenges for members. Participation is voluntary but taking part has helped me to isolate specific parts of my technique to work on and given me different things to think about when taking my photographs.

This photo is my first attempt at an entry for the Iron Photographer series of challenges. The iron photographer challenges each have 3 unique elements which you must include in your photograph - each photograph should be a new attempt, nothing from your archives is accepted. The elements for this were:

1. fruit
2. something black
3. close up

I think the first 2 are covered quite obviously by the strawberries and black plate. Close up was a little bit harder as my lens doesn’t really allow me to get that close to my subjects (minimum distance 49cm) - hopefully I’ve made a good enough attempt for my first go at this!

To check out the other (far better) entries in Iron Photographer 21 take a look here after the 8th of May when the project will be published : http://www.utata.org/project/ip20/

That’s all for now folks - back to some Friday night E4 viewing!