Supermarket Sweep!

Finally got my supermarket shot today.  I have wanted an empty car park to take a long shot with the supermarket in the background, but in the end the shot I think that I'll use is the closer one.
It was going to mean a Sunday morning shoot, before 9am, to avoid cars and the chance of being run over.  However, Easter Sunday saw them closed all day, meaning no early start (hurrah) and the chance to get the pictures.
As I already said, I am leaning towards the closer shot, but any thoughts/suggestions would be most welcome.

The last photo is to give you an idea of the size of these models, they are tiny, and very light.  The artist and his easel had to be super-glued down as they kept blowing over!

just messing around

The images below were taken just for fun, although I have pondered a mini-project along similar lines.  These pictures won't be going into the final product but I thought I'd share them anyway!

more little people photos

Two more shots today, really happy with these!

Book styles and printing options

As the finished product from this assignment has to be presented in book form I have spent some time looking at different companies offering the 'photo book' product.  Having had a bad experience with Blurb I am keen to try someone else, and as I had a very nice book made last year by Cewe (via Jessops) I included them in my research.  I also looked at the likes of Bob Books, Lulu, Pixum, and Photobox.

As the project is all about scale I want to produce a small book, the smaller the better, so that was my first criteria.  Obviously price has to be considered, the number of minimum pages (as I am planning on having no more than 15-20 final images), as well as total production and dispatch times.

For each company I noted each of the aforementioned criteria and the basic list I have compiled reads :

Jessops  smallest book is 14x13cm, soft cover photo booklet.  Minimum of 26 pages, from £6.  Smallest hardcover is 15x19cm, from 26 pages again, from £19.  Free delivery is available to your local store and the advised total time from the start of production to delivery is 5-7 working days.

http://photo.jessops.com/cewe-photobooks-small-photobook.html

Bob books smallest book is 19x15cm, hardback is £21.99 and paperback £14.99, minimum of 26 pages again.  Delivery is £4.50 and takes 7-10 working days.

http://www.bobbooks.co.uk/photobooks/prices/hardback.html

Lulu's smallest book is a whopping 23x18cm, hardback costs £13.81, paperback £7.25 with 20 pages.  There is no easy answer for shipping cost or delivery times etc..

http://www.lulu.com/publish/photo_books/9x7_landscape_photo_book/?motif=photo_books&cid=gb_phb_photo_books_lnd

Pixum offers a 19x15cm option also, with hardback costing £17.99, paperback £15.99, and booklet £9.99.  Once more a minimum of 26 pages, with postage costing £3.99 and production taking approx. 5 working days.

http://www.pixum.co.uk/photobook/easybook_small_landscape

Photobox's smallest book is just 9x7cm, with a soft cover at £5.99.  It does have a minimum of 31 pages though.  They also have a small softcover book at 18x14cm, again minimum of 26 pages and costing £14.99.  Delivery is £1.99 and production to delivery takes approx. 4-7 working days.

http://www.photobox.co.uk/shop/photo-books

Of the options I have looked at I will be choosing Photobox as the finished product looks perfect for the project.  I will keep you posted on how it goes!

More little people, and an experiment

 Here are a couple of the little people pictures for my book, I am tackling the more tricky ones later this week.

In my wanderings I found a little miniature English-French dictionary, amusingly enough it is also called Lilliput dictionary.  I have played around with some of my little people and created the images below.  I am pondering putting them into the book also and would appreciate any feedback.

 

 

Just found this, thought I'd share

Great picture of Giovanni Soldini, an Italian sailor who has become famous for lone sailing.
I found this image while researching the photographer Nadav Kander.  It's not the best quality but I hope that you can see the yachts and palm trees on his shoulder....

From Big to Small

This weekend I finished shooting one half of the project.  This half is taking pictures of real people and places and making them look like models.  I have really enjoyed this idea and am really pleased with the results.

I'm not going to reveal the final choices, but here are some more pictures from this final shoot.

Tilt-shift fun

To alleviate Matt's panic about the actual photography side of this project I figured I should post some of my pictures.  As previously mentioned I am making half of the pictures for this project using tiny scale models and trying to make them appear life-sized, and the other half using life-sized scenes and making them look like models.

The latter is achieved by using the digital equivalent of a tilt-shift lens.  Here are the latest three images.  I really wasn't sure if the garage one would work, but I am happy with the result.

Blog sites

Part of this assignment is to look at other blog hosting sites, to compare and contrast.  Blogger is the site we were required to use, and at the very least it keeps us all easily linked.

Having looked at a few different options I personally wouldn’t have chosen Blogger, but saying that I haven’t actually created a blog on the other sites I looked at so they may not be as good as they look…..

Wordpress.com was the one I was most impressed with.  The Home page is clean and nicely presented (although maybe a little cluttered), however one of my pet hates with websites is having to scroll down to see the whole page, so that’s a minus point. 

You can view existing blogs without having to sign up, which is great as you can get a real feel for what you can do with it.

There are Free Features and also Premium Features, but the free features are plenty for the general blogger.  I also noticed that there is no lock-in, so if you decide to leave you can remove all of your content.  I wasn’t able to find this stated obviously with the other sites I looked at.

Another thing I noted which might go against them was ‘To support the service we may occasionally show ads on your blog, however we do this very rarely. You can remove ads from your blog for a low yearly fee.’  I wonder what their definition of ‘very rarely’ is?

TypePad.com is another site which I looked into.  Again the Home page is easy to read, although there is a lot less content.  The Features tab lists all that they offer, but going across to the Pricing shows that it costs from $8.95 per month. 

You can take the option of using TypePad Micro, and this gives something that looks somewhat similar to Blogger.

The only way to look at existing blogs is with the Showcase, but this only brings up a selected example and only in a pop-up window which is a shame.

One thing that I did like was that you can add a ‘tip jar’, to let your readers show their appreciation, quirky!

Thirdly I looked at Tumblr.com, and really didn’t like it.  There is no real way to find out information easily, the layout is horrible, more stumblr to be honest.  I can’t muster the enthusiasm to say much more other than, if I was looking for somewhere to have a blog they wouldn’t be the one!

I realise that the write up I have given Tumblr is a lot less than the others, but there simply isn’t anything else I can say, it isn’t a nice site to look through and nothing about it was easy or made me want to look further.  For me, if I was to choose where to have my blog, Wordpress wins hand down.