Seven Days of Self Day 07 — Motion: So you might be a little confused… there is no motion in the picture above or the one on flickr. This is because they are only a preview of the image you can see the motion in the image below. I’ve wanted to do a cinemagraph for a while & thought this would be a pretty good opportunity. Unsurprisingly they are quite tricky to produce as a self portrait. I am sure I’ll be doing some more of them though. Glad I’ve got through this project finished now normal service can resume (Read: Photos of coffee & other, more interesting, people).

The Motion

Seven Days of Self Day 06 — Desire: de·sire — /dəˈzī(ə)r/ — A strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen. Yep I think that describes how I feel about coffee… Mmmmmm coffeeeeeeeeee…

Setup Shots

Kit Used

Seven Days of Self Day 04 — Wet: Thanks for voting wet for todays photo guys… I think we all knew where that was going…  I didn’t wanna pussy out and go all half assed like Ash did. I was really hoping for it to be chucking it down with rain tonight but for once it really wasn’t. So I improvised a little & used a hose pipe… fuck the ban. I got soaked to the core but I kinda like this sot so it’s worth it!

We still need suggestions for themes for the next 3 days of self portraits! SO GET SUGGESTING!

Seven Days of Self Day 02 — Apocalypse: Since the epidemic things have got a little interesting around here… ahhh well at least I’ve found something I’m good at. I’m now heading for the city, ground zero, I want a god damn twinkie…

This shot took a bit of editing, it’s about 5 photos blended together so I could make it look like a hoard of zombies instead of just a couple. Keep your suggestions coming in for themes for the rest of the week!

Concept Art

Comic

My friend Daniel was one of my zombies today and he’s also a pretty awesome illustrator so he did a little comic about the blood I made them get covered in while I was editing! Awesome!

Seven Days of Self Day 01 — My Other Life: What if things were different, what if I had chosen another path, what if I never got into design or picked up a camera, what if I was a getaway driver. I fucking love a good revenge movie, & Drive is one of my favourites — I couldn’t resist doing a homage to it.

Behind The Scenes

Ashley has done something really different to me for “My Other Life”, you can see it here. I think our different takes on this project is what’s going to make it so interesting. We are still looking for suggestions for themes for the next 6 days & I’ll be launching the voting for tomorrows theme shortly.

We’ve both done this project before so we wanted to make it a little different this time round. So this year we need YOU to come up with a theme for each day. We’ll be accepting suggestions from now until then end of next week. Each day Ash & I will select 4 of the best suggestions & getting people to vote for the best via a twitter poll!

So hit us with your suggestions in anyway you can, comment, facebook, twitter, post, shout at us in the street — however you like ! We’ll be running the first lot of voting tomorrow night for our first theme on Monday.

I’d seen a few people hacking old cameras around to make them into lenses for shiny new cameras around the internet and I wanted a slice of the action. I picked up a Vest Pocket Kodak (circa 1915) from eBay for about £15, I grabbed some M42 extension tubes & a cheap M42 to EF adaptor. Getting it all together was pretty straight forward, the old Kodak had a window on the back that popped right off & you can see right through to the lens. I grabbed the skinniest of the three extension tubes, lined it up & glued it right on the the back! BOOM! That’s pretty much all there is to it — let the glue set, screwed it onto the adaptor and sliped it on my camera.

The Video

Been playing around with After Effects a bit more recently — still rough around the edges but I am getting better at it. My main problem is, waiting for shit to render makes me die inside.

Tools

First Shot

Kinda hard to believe that this shot was taken with a lens that’s around 100 years old… it’s remarkably sharp & even the colours straight out of the camera were pretty good. The bellows give it awesome macro powers too. Honestly though, I was expecting a photo with a little bit more of a ‘vintage’ feel…

The prints will be pretty large — 20 inches wide, which will be about 26 inches (66cm) with the frame. Super limited edition — only 10 of each shot will ever be produced! They will all be stamped signed and numbered for authenticity (on the mount & on the back of the print). And obviously this has got my name on it so the quality is going to be excellent.

Your support for this project by purchasing a print will help fund more projects like this in the future. So if you’ve learned something, enjoyed yourself, felt in any way like you’ve gotten something out of it, or of you like just like seeing my photos then here’s how you can guarantee that I’ll be doing more things like this.

These framed, limited edition prints are on sale NOW from my Big Cartel store at £80.00 (about $125) with international shipping available. So go buy buy buy!

I get asked a lot — “What makes you want to do this?” or “Why would you do this if you aren’t getting paid for it?”, generally my answer is — “Just for the sake of it” but let me expand on that a little more. To me the value of this project is completely inherent in the act of doing it or, more importantly, the act of completing it to a level of quality with which I am happy — I did it to prove to myself that I could.

I decided from the start I wanted to really make these shots stand out as a series; I wanted to give them all something that tied them together. I love film, & the idea that a single frame can really tell a story so I thought I’d try to achieve that cinematic feel with well thought out composition & post processing. Also, being a designer with a passion for well set type I wanted to add a typographical twist to the shots — hopefully carry on the story telling a little bit.

I approached this project as I would anything else in my life — diagonally. I scribbled down any ideas I had for photos into a Moleskine diary, along with any events, words, people, anything I could think of that might help. Laying it out like this made it a lot easier to get a clear picture of the whole project in my head. I could see the days where I was going to need to do a bit of extra organisation or need to ask a friend for help.

I also wanted to make an effort to document the more interesting setups in the series. Every photo that used off camera lighting has strobist info in the description & I started adding setup photos, which a lot of you will know I already add to quite a few of my prior photos. I also did about thirteen setup videos, a new thing for me; my iPhone 4 made producing them pretty easy & the quality was good. You can check out all the videos on my Vimeo page.

I always suck at summing up projects; I really struggle to step back & look at the project objectively to assess what I’ve achieved. I am probably overly self critical & I rarely like anything I produce for more than 2 hours after I’ve done it. I guess that’s got something to do with why I put together some statistics. I know that most of them are meaningless, especially Explore, but it makes my creativity & skill level quantifiable; my mind likes that.

Regardless of how I feel I have done, I enjoyed the project a lot. I put more pressure on myself this time than in previous photographic challenges & I think I responded well — I only thought about killing myself a few times. So I guess in that respect the project is a massive success? Yeah… cool.

Statistics

As I said above, in some bizarre way, statistics help me quantify my ability as a creator of photographic images. Not on a personal “Do I like this image?” kinda level but more on a global “How well has this image gone down” sorta thing. I put together loads of stats from this project & thought I would share some of them. If you’re as geeky as me you might enjoy them. I wish I had time to make a more in depth info graphic, as theres tonnes of data! But hey, I’ve got a million other things I should be doing!

The Site — FiftyofFifty.co.uk

I built this simple site to showcase the project on it’s own platform. Flickr is great for people to follow & interact with a project in real time but once it’s over, it’s very easy for a project to get buried. I built the site in HTML5 with some sexy CSS3 & also added a really nice iPhone optimised interface for the iPhone, including high res retina display graphics. Oh & if you add the site to your home screen you’ll see a rather sexy icon that John O’Nolan designed for me, what a guy!

So What’s Next?

What a good looking question, thanks for asking — but I’m not telling yet! I’ve got some stuff to catch up on that I put off to do this project, including the next ‘How I Shoot’ post, but don’t worry, my flickr will not be neglected. I have loads in my edit pile to get through & I can never last long without taking a photo or two! But more to the point I have already started planning the next project… it’ll be something a little different but hopefully just as enjoyable as this has been for people. Stay tuned.

The Giveaway!!

Yep! I am giving away a full set of fifty 7″ by 5″ prints from the project to just one person! In fact they are the exact ones I used in my final photo! Cool huh? To be in with a chance of winning all you need to do is follow meon twitter & tweet:

Read about @RickNunn’s Fifty of Fifty photo project & you could win fifty beautiful prints – http://bit.ly/fiftyoffifty

The winner will be picked at random & announced here on the 1st of September 2010.

Competition now closed — the winner is… Rob Barrett!

From the start I knew I wanted something very simple to allow the focus to be on the photos. I jumped into my sketchbook & after about 20-30 minutes I knew the direction I wanted to go in.

Fireworks was my next port of call, I laid out a twelve column grid & brought my sketchbook concepts to the screen. As I went I leaked a few previews to my Dribbble account, which was awesome getting constructive feedback.

Building the site was the easy part, I’ve used HTML5 & some trick CSS3 bits, like box-shadow, opacity, transition & nth-child, this made for some pretty rapid development as well as some beautifully light & semantic markup.

For the image slider on the gallery pages I used the jQuery powered the Nivo Slider which I fell in love with a few months ago & have been dying for a reason to use. With the help of Jamie Thompson, & his ninja JavaScript skills, I customised the slider a little bit to automatically attach the thumbnails for each image to the page, oh I did some ninja CSS to give the images a bit of pre loading before they start running on the slider too, it makes the view experience so much better.

If you’ve got this far through this blog post you are probably expecting a link to the site right now… well I don’t like to disappoint so here – Go & check out my new photo site!

As always I would love some feed back on the site, good bad, black, white, anything goes.

If you are a web geek you might want to have a look at my style sheet, it’s OCD gone mad…