grahambinns.com

I want to explore "simple" in photographic terms.

I spend so long thinking of interesting, intricate ideas - how to light this, where to stage that, what outfit the subject needs to wear - and I'm starting to forget the basic reason why I love doing what I do; capturing moments, feelings, glimpses of the strangers that live inside each and every one of the people I know.

Simple portraits. A conversation, window light, simple background. An exercise in talking and listening and trying to capture a moment in the subject's life. Lose the falsehood of smile-for-the-camera; just wait for the right moment.

And I'm not pretending that this hasn't been done, that Avedon didn't do this with every one of his subjects (and do it magnificently, too). But it's a challenge to me.

Dear all... Kindly disregard my last post. It shouldn't have appeared in the feeds.

Besides, < 1000ms is not exactly bad for a webapp on a small-assed virtual server. It's the static files (CSS and JS) that are killing load times.

Howdy, campers.

This is the first post in a series that I'm going to tag "Keep Yourself Honest" or KYH for brevity (it's in the same family as GYOA - "Get Off Your Arse," made popular by Zack Arias and others).

The point of these posts is to give myself some targets to meet, in public. That means that I'll not be able to come back to the post later to see whether I met my targets, but because I've made it public it also means that I'm less likely to welch on trying to meet those targets in the first place (one of my big flaws being that I find it too easy to listen to the lizard brain).

So, to the point at hand.

I'm planning a photo shoot in some woodlands near where I live. I've already put a casting call up for a model and a makeup artist on Model Mayhem (to which I've had several responses, rather surprisingly), and hopefully by the end of the week I'll be in a position to choose which model I want to work with (though I've inadvertently managed to offend one of said models by misphrasing "there are several people interested" in such a way as to make it sound like "I want someone better than you," which is especially galling when you consider that this particular model has a really interesting portfolio).

Anyway, in keeping with the spirit of KYH, I'm going lay out what I intend to accomplish here:

1. Try out some lighting techniques

Specifically, lighting a background for texture.

I've been itching to try out some of the stuff that Drew Gardner demonstrates in his Location Lighting DVD, and this woodland shoot is the ideal way to do that for that.

2. Practice shooting with a model

I know I've shot with models before, but not many. And let's face it, Katie Green is a gift to a photographer, otherwise she wouldn't have been doing the sessions at which I had the pleasure of shooting her. Whilst I'm expecting whatever model I work with to be professional, having them be someone with whom I've never worked before will put me slightly outside my comfort zone, which is always a good place to be.

3. Produce three different looks from the same location

Basically, I want to produce the following looks in the woodland location where we'll be shooting:

• Natural light only, daylight, quite a warm, woody, spring-like feeling, without adding any flash. I'd like to do some fairly close-up portraits and mid-range shots in this look.
• Natural light + flash, using the flash to add texture to the image and give it a slightly more artsy-feel whilst still using the natural light as the main light. This is what Bert would refer to as "flambient light". I'd like to do some wider-angle shots with this look.
• Minimal natural light + flash, using the flash as main, with the natural light as minimal fill, also using flash to selectively add to the background (which is pretty much what you'll see in the image that goes with this post). I'd like to do a range of wide angle to close-up shots with this look.

So there we are, ladies and gents. I've thrown down the gauntlet (to myself). I've no date for the shoot yet, that's obviously dependant on availability for both me and the model and the (currently hypothetical) MUA.

Jono William Aloycius O'Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager and general all-round grand bloke today announced the Ubuntu rebranding. I've known about this for a while, because the Canonical brand is being refreshed too and we as a company were shown the new designs and asked for comments a few weeks back. However, this is a chance for me to say thank you to the people who put together the new logos, themes and so on publicly.

Y'see, thank you is something that I don't think gets said enough in the open source world. Of all the things that annoy me about OSS development, this is one of the ones near the top of the list. Everyone who works on Ubuntu, be they Canonical employees or community contributors, works very, very hard to produce a distro that every Ubuntu member can be proud of. But - and I think this is a basic law of nature - the loudest voices we hear are always the ones who hate it, hate what Ubuntu stands for, hate that it's not free enough (for them), hate that Mark has a vision and is dedicated to pushing towards realising that vision.

What you don't see a lot of - or at least don't see as prominently, because let's face it it's easier to jump on the haters bandwagon than it is to stand up to them - is people just saying "thank you" or "thank you for doing an awesome job."

So, to everyone who was involved in the rebranding work - and that doesn't just mean Canonical employees; the community have been involved in this too (though I don't know the details of who exactly):

Thank you

(And let's be clear, this is in no way intended to diminish all the positive comments that I've been seeing. Also, constructive criticisms are a good thing, especially since the new designs are not completely locked down.)

Hello.

If you've been here before you'll have noticed that I've changed things a bit; moved the furniture around, repainted the skirting boards, stripped the old wallpaper and removed the artex from the ceiling. Hope you like it.

I've gone for a much simpler, more stripped-back look-and-feel this time around. I'm not interested in having a cluttered blog, and I've got plans to add some extra things to this site in the not-too-distant future. The idea is to keep a nice clean aesthetic throughout the entire site, which is going to become much more of a showcase for my photography work than anything else.

Yes, I'll still post about Ubuntu and Launchpad here, but this site is primarily about me the photographer, not me the developer. If I feel that I have a lot to say here about the developer side of my life then I might think about setting up another blog to deal with it.

For those of you who want technical details about what's changed, well, there's not all that much. The site uses a lot more of the Frabjous codebase now than it used to - there was a lot of duplication of code in the grahambinns.com tree, so I've cleaned that up - and I've added a few things to Frabjous whilst I was working on the retheme and upgrade, which is nice and mutally beneficial.

Anyway, I'm aware that there will likely be bugs in the new version of the site that crop up over the next few days, so please do let me know if you come across any.