bikes and things

I’ve just put the final touches to my book showing all the 365 photos from the project. The 700mb PDF file might take a while to upload to Blurb, the online shop that does the printing. Fortunately I have been full of cold and cough since Christmas day I’ve had plenty of time to tinker with it especially the cover as you can see below.

Blurb do a number of different sizes but I’ve gone for the “Standard Landscape” size which is 10″ x 8″. It’s a hardback book and the cover image gets printed on the card. I’ve read lots of reviews and the quality seems to be pretty good. I think it’ll work out at about £40 for the book which I think is pretty good for a book with almost 400 pages.

The layout is pretty simple. Just full bleed images and the number of the day as per below. I’m not sure if anyone else will buy a copy but who cares. It’ll be good to have a physical reminder of the year.

That’s it! All done. 365 days all recorded. It’s been fun and now it’s over. Lovely.

I thought it only fitting to end on a Portrait of myself as my next project will be about portraits.

The 365 project is coming to a close. Only two more days left now which is good. One of the most enjoyable things of taking so many pictures is that I’ve had to develop ways of being more creative about what I take pictures of. I’ve been trying to look around and spot things I wouldn’t normally see wandering around in the little Andy sized bubble of mine.

I’ve started collecting these different themes together on Flickr and trying to collect a body of work in each theme. So this is what I’ve collected into sets so far.

Sillhouette

Night

Street

Abstract

Relfections

Portraits

Urban

Shadows

Bokeh

Black and White

and of course not forgetting..
Architecture

That’s enough for now I think.

Emma kindly bought me one of these today. Looks in amazing condition. Loaded a roll of film and now off to get some batteries for it then wander around town before dinner tonight at the Anchor and Hope. Awesome!

Finally got round to shooting a few shots of the Heygate Estate at Elephant & Castle with Aaron from Part 3. A little colder than I had hoped at around -2 so spent a lot less time going around setting up shots. Anyway, below are a few of my favourites. I shot a few more on the Olympus but will have to wait until I process the film for those.

The Lumix GF-1 is still looking very attractive. This review hasn’t done anything to dampen that.

I also spent a bit of time wandering around the edge of the Heygate Estate today as the 168 bus was no-where to be seen. It’s completely empty and I guess it’s due to be pulled down soon. I’m thinking of going back with a tripod and trying to record the place before it disappears. Perhaps with the Olympus and a B+W film or maybe the D300 and practice the Architecture shots. Either way I think it would make a great series of images.

It certainly felt odd wandering around it all boarded up and empty. One for next weekend perhaps. Here’s a few images from today though.

I’ve put a few rolls through the Olympus OM 20 recently. I finished one another film off today and dropped it in for an hour processing. Unfortunately the first 2 haven’t arrived back from Genie Imaging yet due to the Christmas post. So here’s a few of my favourite shots. The film is some of the expired film stock I bough – this one is a roll of Fuji Superia 800. Some of the shots from today are a bit dull due to the flat light but I like the texture and feel of the film.

Sexy snowman, originally uploaded by Andy*Matthews.

So I took this shot earlier in the year when the UK had it’s snowstorm. Each day it seems to get quite a few hits from Google and Yahoo with people looking for the term “Sexy Snowman”.

Strange what people look for!

A brilliant set of images documenting the death of many of the American Malls by photographer Brian Ulrich. I studied the idea of the American Mall when I was doing Diploma. I was looking at public and private space in terms of cities. Not my favourite of spaces it must be said.

The images as well as an interview are here and the headline quote taken from the article below.

Landscaping overgrows, walls develop mildew, ceilings cave in — a building can be shut down, but that doesn’t make it go away. Brian Ulrich’s photographs of closed-down malls and big-box retail stores reveal the potential ghost towns lying inside successful shopping complexes all across America.

Edit: The full set of images can be seen on his website. Looks like they were all shot on a large format camera.