My cat is very much an old lady. She’s about 16 (we don’t know her exact age because we got her as a stray but she was about 4 when we got her) and only within the past 4 or 5 years has she actually become a nice, pleasant, friendly cat. Whe For YEARS she would scratch, bite and hiss at every opportunity. Mostly she was fine with me (and, slightly less so, my brother) but still she hissed and bit. Until she became old and lazy. Oldness has made her a lovely, friendly cat to be around and my bffs! She’s like a dog with me, she does what I say and she nudges me and sits with me when I’m sad (not for food because whenever she does I try and feed her and she doesn’t eat it).

ANYWAY, I didn’t mean to turn this into an “about my cat” moment. BUT old age has made her deaf and a bit special. So getting her to sit in a shot was quite a challenge. It took me quite a long time to get anything vaguely usable. To prove this here are just a few shots of my epic quest to get my cat to sit the fuck down. I couldn’t even just click whenever with my remote because I was using a flashgun and there’s nowhere to put the reciever. D: Sucks.

haha my eyes

FINALLY.

There are more pictures of my woes but these will do

I’m sure you can guess which is before and after This is made up of about 16 images. I only have 3 polaroids so I had to spread them around (I could’ve taken more but I’m saving them haha) and drop them and whatnot.

The overall colour editing was a bit of an experiment and I like how it turned out! Success overall!

I forgot just how much I love photoshop. I’ve been struggling through with GIMP for almost a year now with only the occasional use of photoshop on the college computers. I’ve had this picture sitting in my self-portrait folder for about a month now. I knew I could do something with it but no matter what I did it wasn’t how I wanted it to look. On top of that GIMP takes forever to do everything so I got impatient when I was editing it and usually just got frustrated and shut it down.

Now I have photoshop again I’m absolutely loving it. That’s not to say GIMP isn’t good. I adore it, it’s served me well not to mention it’s completely free and completely legal!

Anyway, with the original I hated that everything was far too bright. Usually I shoot a stop lower but for some reason not today. And this looked ok on the camera screen but it just annoyed me every time I looked at it! Haha. I also usually love a yellow-y tinge to my photos which is why I set the white balance to shade or cloudy during sunlight (or even indoors if there’s a good amount natural light) but here it’s just too much. I suppose because the forest was already yellow and green anyway. So I went craaazy with the amount of blue I added in selective colour and took away a lot of the yellow and green. I also darkened it a bit with selective colouring, curves and a bit of a vignette.

Then I wanted there to be this kind of pool of light in the middle so I did a lot of dodging and burning on the original image as well as erasing that area on the layers I’d used curves and selective colouring.

Not too sure how I feel about the light rays but it seemed like a good idea at the time! I just copied the original image, put the contrast waaaaay up using levels desaturated the layer as too much of the red from my dress was showing then made it more yellow in colour balance. Then I used motion blur at an angle and set the layer to screen!

I think that’s everything I did to this photo. My only wish is that I was wearing wings and a crazy dress in this photo Maybe I’ll do something similar with that at some point. I bought a huge vintage green dress on ebay recently so I might so a wee photoshoot with that! Also if I had mad Rosie Hardy-style skills I would’ve stuck another tree in there haha

Eilidh

I have no idea why I’m showing you how ugly I look without a huge load of blur and clone tool! Haha

Latest self-portrait. I’ve had those flowers (the thing I’m holding, it’s not very obvious what they are) lying around for two years. Our class were given them when we left school. So I thought I could do something with them. Also, the crown is one I wore at a Lady Gaga party Sadly it broke during the taking of this photo and is now mostly duct tape.  You can barely see it in this shot but I spent ages backcombing my hair. Never mind. I was going to wear a black or blonde wig but I thought that would be too much so I left it.

I did want to go outside but I was tired and lazy so opted for a blank wall inside. Had a rather amusing and pathetic attempt at a studio which involved a desk lamp pointed at me, balanced on an upturned bin underneath my tripod.

Fairly obvious what editing I did. I was going for the dead look and since my makeup skills are shit I basically had to redo it all in photoshop Any normal person would’ve edited the reflection off the sequins and crown but that’s the one thing I didn’t notice when I was editing this. And now I’m attached to the shininess. Added a vignette (duh) and a texture by Les Brumes. I’m pretty crap at textures, can you tell D:

Eilidh

Felt like a weee self-portrait today. I had to steal my parents’ couch as everywhere else had rubbish lighting or had other things around it. I had to take down 3 paintings behind the couch and move a wierd excercise machine they have next to it. Wasn’t reallly sure what kind of effect I wanted from editing so I just get changing things until I got something I was happy with.

An effect I really love but I’m pretty rubbish at recreating is the light leak that comes from film photos sometimes. Rubbish example but something like this:

(that would actually be a fairly easy one to recreate but I have no other examples)

So I was trying to do something with that. Clearly I didn’t do it very well but I got an interesting effect out of it.

Aaand I have nothing more to say about that photo…
Eilidh

Caldwell House is a spectacular abandoned mansion turned children’s hospital. I’ve visited it 3 times before yesterday and I was absolutely convinced the last time I visited (over a year ago, incidentally to get photos for my interview for my current college course in which I now need to take photos of a building I like)  I was absolutely convinced the next time I visited this site it would either barely be there or completely gone. I was actually completely wrong

Don’t you dig that nice point and click photo? This was the first time I visited the house in 2006 when I was a complete newbie to the world of Urban Exploration and wouldn’t dare to even attempt to get inside (best I did was go up a fire escape and look into a toilet ). As you can see the windows are still there and I know it doesn’t look like much but my next visit proved different.

2007, boards taken off and machinery lying around. I wish I’d had a decent camera (and the ability to use it) at this point because there are so many amazing photos I could’ve taken!

This is my third visit to Caldwell House, last year. As you can see it is just a shell now. It was completely gutted to prepare for work to be done to it. Unfortunately the work that was supposed to be done was far too much money and not worth it so it was left. There were no barriers or any sign of development.

2 days ago, however, Caldwell House looked like this. It doesn’t look like much from this photo but you can see from the pile of logs trees have been cut down. There was a barrier all around it I had to climb through and a huge sign warning that trespassers would be dealt with. As you can tell my photos aren’t anything spectacular from this trip and that’s because I was rushed. I was panicking already because they were clearly taking the area more seriously so I didn’t have much time but then I saw a car pull up and two guys talking to my step-dad. He waved me away saying to keep taking photos but I couldn’t really take the photos I wanted because it meant going inside and round the back. So I took a few and ran back to the car. Colin told me the guys were property developers looking at the place (and were acting fairly dodgy but they might’ve just been a bit wierd, they were looking at a giant house in the middle of nowhere afterall).

So maaaaybe it will actually get somewhere this time? Or maybe I’ll actually manage to get decent pictures instead. I might take a visit again at some point to see.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/xashex/sets/72157621866422408/

I wasn’t pleased so I went away to do something more interesting with it. And I came away with this:

Not the height of brilliance but waaaay better than the first one. Truthfully the image is made up of 4. My tripod isn’t very stable so setting it on bulb makes photos very blurry so each one was taken with a 30 second shutter speed. I ran around with a flash gun behind Peter then my step dad flashed him underneath…that was not the right thing to say.

The “stars” are a flash gun pointed at the camera and the aperture is f/22 so the light from the flash gun doesn’t appear to bright on the camera (so obvious I know, but it took me a good 20 minutes of wondering why my photo wsa so bright to realise this). On the last one a piece of card was put in front of the camera in between each flash so the picture would be dark and I could just use the “stars” from it.

And that’s basically it! I love this statue (Peter Pan is my favourite book and story) but I’ll probably have to avoid it for a while because I’ve been far too many times recently

Eilidh

Mmmk?

Eilidh x