Litherland Local History Society Exhibition featuring my work

As a result of the brilliant feedback and support I got from my exhibition in Hatton Hill Park Pavilion, in which I exhibited printed images and a book I produced on Litherland & Bootle; the Litherland Local History Society have decided to host their own exhibition. The book that I made for my final major project in University, solely about Litherland, will also be displayed here, as will a number of my postcards which you can take away and keep!



I am really happy to have been asked to be a part of this exhibition, as I have been in contact with some of the members of the Local History Society since my hosting my own exhibition, in March 2011, and I get on very well with them. For me, (as corny as it may sound), it is actually an honor to be able to display my work along side their findings, personal collections and memories of Litherland.

I hope that those of you from Litherland, Crosby, Waterloo and other neighbouring towns, or even further out toward Liverpool would like to come and can make this exhibition.

Shy Lowen Horse and Pony Sanctuary

On Sunday, 31st July 2011, I attended the open afternoon at Shy Lowen and took over 200 photographs of the horses; some in the stables and some out on the grass. Below is the link to my Flickr account, here is a selection of some of the 200 images I took at an open day at Shy Lowen Horse and Pony Sanctuary, Buckley Hill Lane, Thornton, Liverpool.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarah_smiff/sets/72157627210789493/

Samsung Camera Phone Photography

Recently, I have been seeing a lot of articles or videos on YouTube about camera phones. For example, people using their camera phones to make short stop-motion movies, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieN2vhslTTU&feature=player_embedded), or even do an entire photo shoots with their iPhone, (http://fstoppers.com/iphone). I personally love these, and it made me realise just how much I use my phone to take random photographs when I'm out and about, on the rare occasion that I don't have my compact or Canon camera with me. Although everyone now-a-days uses their phones to take pictures, I like to think that I use mine differently, just as I would if I were using my Canon or digital camera. In this post I have decided to share some of the images that I have taken on my Samsung Tocco Ultra Blue Edition camera phone, which has an 8 mega pixel camera. Although I do have a 14 mega pixel digital camera, which is also a Samsung product, I feel that I get the same or close to results from both.
Below are some of the images I have taken on my mobile phone, none of these images have been edited (apart from the addition of my watermark). The colours are exactly how they were when the image was taken, and the camera simply captured them well.

This image (above) is one of my favourites, I love the sky, and the way the two trees meet to make an arch like shape is really nice.

Those images were all take in day time, the image below was taken at night time and I love the colours. It is slightly blurry or fuzzy as I zoomed in quite a bit to take this photograph.




I would love to know if any of you use your camera phones to take pictures, even if its just of yourself, your friends or random things (like mine). And let me know what you think of the quality too, examples welcome! =)
...Just so I'm clearly, in this post I'm simply pointing out how good camera phones can be. I am not slagging off any make of other camera, just saying how well camera phones can photograph. I still now and will forever think that Canon's are remarkable cameras, and will always be my favourite to use!

Litherland Project status...

Lately, I have mostly been blogging about my University project about Litherland; however, now that I have come to the end of the University Course I feel though my project, at this stage is resolved. I completely intend to continue the project in the next few years, as I believe there to be some changes to Litherland, one of which being the alterations to Litherland Lift Brigde; I would like to document all of the changes in Litherland over the next 10 years, and compare them to the old imagery I got from the archive and my previous work. I will still be updating this blog with information about my Litherland Project, should anything come to light.

However, the only news that I have regarding my Litherland Project for the moment is that the book that I produced for my final end of year assignment and show, will be exhibited in an upcoming exhition curated by the Litherland Local History Society. I am very greatful that the members of the society want me to display my book with the imagery and information that they have to show, and would like to thank them for that.

I will be posting information about this exhibiton closer to the time. This will be in September 2011.

Layering

For my final project for University I produced a series of images of my home town, Litherland. However, I tried a number of techniques to get the best of my images, one of which called layering. This method involved chosing my positioning and taking several photographs of the same scene, metering for the highlights (e.g. the sky), and the shadows (e.g. the road), in the frame.

For example, below I have outlined which sections of each image I used as a layer, and then brought into the image by deleting a section of the over lapping layer:



I used the image above as my background layer as it included many of the desired details of the scene.
In the image below I used the bottom left hand side of the image below; the section with the walk way, grass and gate.


I decided to use the sky from the image below.



To finish editing this image, I adjusted the perspective on the building on the right hand side of the image, and cropped the image so that it is similar to the archive photograph that I was comparing it to.
These two images, the archive image and my own are below.

Rimrose Valley, Litherland, Liverpool

Whilst walking our labrador dog, Bella, with my dad on our local field in Litherland, Liverpool; I was able to take my camera along and document some of the beautiful flowers that are on and around the field. The Leeds to Liverpool Canal cuts goes through Litherland, on which I spotted a number of baby ducklings which I also photographed.
These images are displayed on my Flickr account, again due to the size of the files, here:


http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarah_smiff/sets/72157626903643554/

Street Photography in Manchester

'Street photography as a genre sits between both documentary and journalist approaches in representing the urban everyday. On this blog we will practically explore a range of ideas and techniques central to the street photographer. In this we will question what the ‘street’ can tell us about the political and social realities of contemporary life. We will explpore how different ways of working can open up an array of visual realms often undetected by conventional ways of walking.'

Taken from the Uclan street photography blog, this paragraph explains the idea behind the ever growing practice of street photography, and what their blog sets out to discuss and illustrates. Link below:

http://uclanstreetphotography.blogspot.com/

This blog was originally made to host the images that a number of us, who went on a University day trip to Manchester, had taken. However, I have decided to post the images that I took on my own personal blog, as the work closely relates to the my own photography practice.

During this trip to Manchester we were asked to focus upon some photographing methods, such as; shooting from the hip (holding the camera at waist height and simply taking an image when it feels right), and a method for which we had to ask members of the public that if we could take a straight on photograph of them.
Some of the images that I took are only available on my link Flickr account due to the size of the image files. The images are in a set titled, 'Street Photography', linked below:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarah_smiff/sets/72157626892949714/