 Finally managed to get some processing done at last. Thought I'd plough through a couple of dusk and dawn shoots I did in Accrington last month. Shot with D300 and used Nik's fantastic Silver Efex Pro. 
Still no further work of my own to post on here yet I'm afraid. Although I have put some time into formulating ideas for my next project. I've decided that it's going to be along a "Still Life" theme - I've never really done any "proper" still life before, one of the reasons being is that it doesn't really float my boat to be quite honest. But I figure that you never really understand something until you actually give it a serious attempt. I've been looking at quite a lot of work in this area lately, especially the earliest stuff - the work of Florence Henry, Berenice Abbott and Irving Penn. Some of which I was really quite taken with. Here are some examples:
Irving Penn - Cigarette No. 37: 
Berenice Abbott - Soap Bubbles, 1940s 
Karl Blossfeldt - Poppy Seed Heads 
Florence Henri - Composition with ball and mirror, 1930 
I'm particularly impressed with the work of Florence Henri, and considering how long ago she made these and how many images since draw references from her work, they really are seminal works. Finally a couple of news items.
If you're a follower of Scott Kelby or any of the NAPP guys, then you can't failed to have noticed that the PhotoShop World expo is on at the moment. Whilst there, Adobe have started teasers for the new CS4 suite. They're going to do a special webcast on Tuesday 23rd September, and you can sign up here.
If you live up North (in the England), then "Ways Of Looking" - a new media festival kicks off in Bradford and Leeds this weekend coming. There's a whole raft of shows scheduled to run right through to January next year - Check out the schedule here.
 Crikey, what a week! What with the wedding last weekend, my trip to London this week, and the family holiday which starts tomorrow, its all been a bit manic! 
The trip to London revolved around a visit to the Tate Modern to see the "Street & Studio" Exhibition. The trip was worth it for this alone - a tremendous show featuring work from artists ranging from Charles Negres to Philip-Lorca diCorcia and from Brassai to James van der Zee. While I do like a lot of studio work, my heart is really with the street stuff, and trust me there is some fantastic work on show. I was especially taken with Cindy Sherman's Bus Riders series from the 70's in which she photographs herself in a series of portraits recalled from characters she has seen on buses. She makes no attempt to hide that these are staged studio shots, as she has left the shutter release cable evident in each image. Very imaginative work indeed. I didn't buy the accompanying book as I couldn't be fagged carrying it around all afternoon with me, but as soon as I return from my hols, its going straight into my cart.  Whilst in London, I took the opportunity to get as much street and urban landscape photography in as possible - which basically consisted of two 12 hour days! Despite a run in with security and the press office on Canary Wharf (they wanted £200/hour so as I could just get my camera out of its bag), spending the "golden hour" on Wednesday morning getting lost on the tube, getting seriously blistered feet and sunburnt, I had a whale of a time! I filled 2 and a bit 8GB memory cards and I've only just got round to going through them (I've really gotta get my hit rate up - plan to use film again for my next project so as to discipline myself a bit more). I'd post more details of my trip, but I'm quite literally nodding off as I type. Maybe tomorrow if I get the time...  I've been using a trial of Lightroom 2 to process the London and wedding shots, to see if I can really justify the $99 upgrade fee (still quite pissed at this!), and I'm really impressed. The dual monitor functionality, I find is marvelous and makes life a great deal easier. I'm also seriously digging the Adjustment Brush which also improves processing time. It has crashed once on 2 separate XP machines, and there also appear to be some difficulties launching into Photoshop, but its a thumbs up so far. Slightly off topic, del.icio.us have relaunched a new and improved service - see delicious.com/fabfilippini And to finish off the week a few links for you:-
1) Came across this site in Prospect Magazine - guerillaphotography.co.uk. I quite like the concept of this kinda thing, though don't know if I would have the balls to venture into some of the places myself.
2) This week in photography - twipphoto.com - a great podcast and great site.
3) And finally, the Aperture Nature Photography workshops have just been announced, but wait for it, they're invite only..."This is a year-long adventure and TWIP audience members will have the opportunity to enter a contest that might win them more than $2500 worth of prizes and an all-expenses paid trip to one of these parks." Read more here. Can't type any more, zzzzzzzzzz........
 Some more shots of the latest project. Some are a bit out of keeping with the rest of the project, but I felt they were worth posting nonetheless.
Just a quick note today to let you know that I have updated my Projects Gallery. It now contains the Big Issue project I completed in December and some of the Service Stations series I'm currently working on, as well as the "15 minutes" series. Check it out here: www.fillfactorphotography.com/Projects/tabid/273/Default.aspx
Aaagh! Middle lane drivers! Why do these cretins insist on sitting one behind another in the middle lane with no traffic whatsoever in the inside lane? Is it because they're such nervous drivers that they can't face having to pull out of the inside lane to overtake the odd truck? In which case they shouldn't even be on the motorway in the first place. The queues and problems they create incense me, and they're always totally oblivious to the congestion they create! Ok, rant over. I feel better now.....   Anyway to the matter in hand. Clawed my way out of my pit at 3am, on the road for half past to try and continue the service stations project. Headed straight up to Lancaster services where I shot 2 rolls of TMax400, and then up to Killington Lake. The light at the Lancaster services wasn't bad just before dawn, and I reckon there should be a least a couple of possible keepers there, but by the time I'd reached Killington Lake, about half 5, the rain had started. I'd checked the forecast the previous night, and there was a faint chance of a half decent dawn, but alas it never happened. To my dismay the services themselves at Killington were closed until 7am, and I just didn't have the time to sit around and wait for the staff to turn up and open the joint. I shot another roll around the car park and the petrol station, though I ended up pushing the TMax400 to around 3200 as it was really grey and dark and I was conscious of having come all this way only to get booted off if the authorities spotted a tripod. 
Having schlepped 100 miles up the motorway, I was quite disappointed that I wasn't going to get better shots, but hey, that's the gamble. The journey back was horrendous. The rain and spray was torrential and that combined with the endless stream of middle lane morons made for a real pain in the ass journey which took an hour longer than it should have! Developed the films and left them hanging to dry whilst I nipped over to college to hand in my final course work to my tutor. He's really keen on getting me to do the degree course. He reckons that there are 3 or 4 of us that really ought to try and get on it, but it's all a question of time and money for me. If somehow I could make some money whilst I slept, I could probably manage it, but as it is I think it may have to wait 12 months and see if my circumstances change. I'd absolutely love to do it as I've still got a lot to learn and I'm sure that it would really push me, which is exactly what I need. We'll see..... Off topic: Stumbled across this on Robert Wright's Blog
I set off just before dawn on Monday morning to head up the M6 to try and make some more photographs for the Service Stations project, but as I was heading up the M56, the sky suddenly began to turn a deep red. So I figured I'd swing by Manchester on my way. I shot this off the bridge over the Irwell near the Opera House. I timed it pretty well, as no sooner had I half a dozen frames in the bag, the sun appeared on the horizon, and the red glow in the sky disappeared. The latest results from the Service Stations project, being film based, will have to wait to be posted until I get round the developing the film. I don't really have the facility to do any processing at home, film or digital, so they'll have to wait until later on today. Incidentally, I read about a new image search engine which is in private beta at the moment. TinEye enables you to find your photos in use online, attempting to "do for images what Google does for text". The service offers various services which leverage Idee Inc's image recognition technology which finds images in use in print as well as online. Their clients include Getty Images, Jupiter Images, Masterfile and SuperStock from the stock photography market as well as Adobe Systems, Associated Press and Digg. TinEye is the latest application of their technology and one which has massive and broad potential application. Although TinEye’s database contains ‘only’ 500 million images at this time, I was able to find a few examples of my microstock photos in use. It’s able to match partial and altered images. Searches can be made by uploading the image you wish to match, or pasting the address of an online image. TinEye then matches the image with those in its database. I've managed to get signed up, and test the service which is really quite impressive. There's also a very handy Firefox plugin. Check it out for yourselves here: http://tineye.com
_thumb.jpg) Well I've finally finished the football supporters projected I started last year, and its now gone off to the printers. I'm expecting a nice 30cm square linen backed 48 page book on my return from family hols next week. Its taken longer than anticipated but I'm happy with the final image selection.  I've opted to scan the negatives and have the book printed digitally rather than wet print the photographs myself and then mount them. Even though I shan't be printing many of these books, I thought I'd try out a different path. The process has been far simpler than the wet print method, but I'll reserve judgement until I hold the finished product in my hands.
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