January In Review

SPADE LIST ITEMS COMPLETED -

#21. Create a blog.

(Completed 01/01/10)

#13. Win a fight at karate.

(Completed 26/01/10)

PROJECT 365 PHOTOS TAKEN -

Day 31 - Work Ex Tomorrow!

=D I found my poncho raincoat thingy from Port Aventura today - I thought I'd lost it!! So I spent the rest of the day wearing it, despite being inside. Yes, I am cool. It matched my sunglasses nicely!

Day 30 - Epic Ninja Rolls...

I know that this photograph is nothing to do with the title "Epic Ninja Rolls". This morning, I had awesome fun at karate. We were practicing our agility, and did these fights where you have to tap your opponent on the shoulder or below the knee to win. My good buddy Mich and I discovered the way to win is to epicly ninja roll. On realising this, we started planning our fights in advance - "Okay so you epicly ninja roll, I'll jump/somersault over you and we'll see who wins!" It was a lot of fun! =D

The picture is of the Victoria Square in Belfast. I was shopping today in the afternoon, buying clothes for Work Experience! I'M GOING TO A PHOTOGRAPHERS!!!!!
Wheeeeeeyyyyyyy!! Hopefully I'm gonna learn lotsa epicly cool photography stuff! I'm excited!

Now I shall epicly ninja roll away and sign out. Awesome.

Day 29 - Bill and Ben The Flower Pot Men!

The title? It's a you have to be there moment I guess. Pretty hilarious night at the Oasis anyway!

Taking a photo of the moon is hard. Not knowing my camera very well, I didn't know what setting to put it on. Therefore what I did was try one on every setting! To be honest, they all turned out quite crap, so I just picked one that wasn't entirely blurry - this one.

Believe me, it looked so much awesomer in real life. It was reflecting off the water really nicely and the clouds were a kinda orangey colour and covering the moon in a pretty way. So I made mum stop the car and I took a billion photos. I was raging that none of them turned out right but I got over it pretty quickly 'cause I had a good night.

Hope you had a good night too! =]

Day 28 - You Just Lost The Game.

Yep. You just lost the game.... but don't worry, soon you'll have forgotten all about it!
So today I was sitting in my room listening and dancing to my chavviest music with my brother whilst pondering what to take a picture of for my photo of the day. I wasn't pondering for long as suddenly he stopped everything he was doing, picked up my hair dryer, blew the air into his face and pretended he was a model. He actually let me take pictures of him too. Mostly my brother can be annoying... but sometimes he's awesome.

Colours were edited slightly in these pics to attempt to give them a more vintage look.

Day 27 - Pretending To Apply For A Job That Doesn't Exist

Enough said! I'm currently filling in an application form for a job that doesn't exist and I have never had a proper job and I'm really thinking that I should get one!!

Day 26 - Unimprovisedly Is Not A Word...

Well I guess I can cross one off my Spade List!

#13. Win a fight at karate.

I know what you're thinking... come on Jo... that's not at all ambitious, I thought the Spade List was about doing COOL stuff! Yeah, I agree, it wasn't ambitious. I did win a fight at karate, and it was only my second fight since writing that on my Spade List. I guess "win a fight at karate" is very vague. Maybe I should have written -

#13. a) Regularly win fights at karate.

and/or

#13. b) Fight at national level.

and/or

#13. c) Start fighting skillfully (i.e. use tactics rather than just improvise)

To be honest, I am never going to fight at national level this year, unless I do suddenly regularly win fights (in which I fight tactfully, skillfully and unimprovisedly) at karate. Next saturday (6th Feb) I am going to observe/help out at a national competition so that will be fun! I would also like to take this oppurtunity to wish my good buddy good luck for the European Championships he's fighting at next week - WE LOVE YOU BOOMS! GOOD LUCK!

A highly edited picture of some clouds.

Day 25 - I'd Pick You.

To the people who bother to put up with me every day, who make me laugh and are an inspiration to me... if friends were flowers I'd pick you.This is a picture of my little sister's light, which is in the shape of a flower. I turned the flash off to show the outline of the light around the lamp... it's not very bright you see... but it's pink! I couldn't decide which angle to take it from so I took about a billion or so, and I've uploaded just a few of the nicest ones here.

Day 24 - A Day For Deep Thoughts

I'm having one of those deep days when you think about a lot of stuff... and I'll be honest it's to do with churchy Jesus-y stuff. Story is I go to a different church than usual this morning, and we sing 'Amazing Grace' - no big deal but one line sticks out to me, don't know why - "'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved." Yeah so it just stood out to me. I didn't understand why, but (again being honest here =P, may regret that later) when we were having communion I got a bit overwhelmed.

Anyways so I come home, do homework, then go out to the youth service. Guess what we were singing? Amazing Grace. Guess what the talk was partly on? (Amazing) grace. Just got me thinking a lot.

Day 23 - A Genuinely Good Day.

I love it when after a stressful and not nice week at school you go out at the weekend and genuinely enjoy yourself! School is hard, and is stressful, and usually the weekend consists of me doing work or resting... and if I go out I'm exhausted / stressing over the work I'm not doing! But today some friends and I went out to Tollymore to actually do some schoolwork - filming some experimental footage for Moving Image Arts (like Film Studies). It was a lot of fun, I was filling in for the cast member and I suddenly remembered how much I love acting! =] I haven't done any proper acting since my GCSE drama final last April... a long time ago!

This picture is of my good friend Sophie (hopefully she won't mind me using this photo... I can't remember if she approved of it or not =P) It was taken with my fish eye lense, but I edited out the black circly bit on Photoshop and tweaked the colour and lighting a wee bit to make it look less flat. I "dodged" the edges to give it a nice effect. Like this one =]

Hope everyone is having as good a weekend as I'm having! =D

Day 22 - Splash!!

Not exactly the picture I wanted, but it was the best one out of all my water pics. I spent a good while wandering around the house trying to find the best light source with the best tap... I hope it's worth it!

Day 21 - A Tribute To My Friend Dasha

I have a friend called Dasha. Every morning Dasha draws a face on her polystyrene cup of soup from the school canteen. Dasha has a theory that I am a Japanese ninja spy here to destroy the goverment (this is because I am a black belt in karate and she blames the fact that I beat her in slapsies often on my "ninja skills").

Today Dasha asked me if I wanted to draw a face on her polystyrene cup. I accepted, and drew a Japanese ninja spy.

We called him Stanley.

**Yeah I know this isn't really a proper picture for Project 365, but I did take a picture of Stanley on my phone, and it was such crappy quality that I felt the need to adjust it slightly on Photoshoop. I got a bit carried away.**

Day 20 - 57%

Was sick and off school today, and after I had managed to drag myself out of bed I set up this photo. It reflects my life on my laptop. 43% of the time I'm doing homework. 57% of the time I'm procrastinating*. Procrastinating FTW!

*these figures may not be accurate... but I would feel awesome and very very smart if they were =]

Day 19 - Lacking In Words Instead Today...

Hi. B&W bird feeder. Bye.

Day 18 - Lacking Creativity And Imagination...

If this was a Project 365 for Videos rather than Photographs today would be a good day, as a few friends and I made a movie. A very stupid movie. It sucked =]
However, it's a Project 365 for photos so I took a photo of a lampshade today. Not the most exciting topic ever, but I'm not in a particularly creative mood at the minute so I guess a lampshade is about the best you're gonna get today!

Jo out.

Day 17 - My Jeans Are Muddy.

This picture is rubbish, I know. But I was getting film mostly for school work so didn't have time to get a decent shot. And now I'm too tired to care.

Jo out.

Day 16 - Just To Be Different...

Y'all may have seen the classic cheesy and edited photo of the playing cards that spell out "LOVE". Aww, how sweet. Well today I spent playing cards and it got to about 10 o'clock at night and I realised "CRAP!! I haven't taken my photo of the day!" Seeing as I was playing cards at this point I decided that it would make sense to take a picture of something to do with cards. So I thought, I could just copy this pic... but then I thought no... it's way overused and far too cheesy for my liking. So I put my thinking cap on and instead spelt out another word with my playing cards:

I hope you'll agree that it's slightly less cheesy than "LOVE"... but still, altogether cheesy. At least it's different! *shrugs* any way it made me laugh (out loud).

I think I should close by mentioning that I now understand how to play Hearts. It wasn't on the Spade List... but it has been an ambition of mine for quite some time... YES!

Day 15 - Post-Its =D

This is my Debbie! Well technically she's just 'Debbie' cause I don't officially own her.............. never mind. She came to my house this afternoon and we began messing around with Post-Its and this is the result! I edited this pic in Photoshop for a laugh but we both were uber pleased with the result so it's now my photo of the day! Fun times =D

Day 14 - Birds Are Very Camera Shy!

The more I look at this photo the more I like it. I think it's my best Project 365 photo thus far... in my opinion.

I spent ages wandering around my garden waiting for birds to appear. Being the silly shy things they are, they hid from me and my camera in the trees. So after a lot of trying to focus on them and epicly failing, I set my camera to manual focus and stood directly under the trees and took pictures from below. I soon realised that because it was nearing dusk this created a silhouetted effect and I was like cool!! Having the manual focus meant I could quickly choose a subject to focus on, and so could get the shot of the bird I wanted. I really liked the silhoetted effect so I took a lot more photos this way of leaves and some more birds etc. and I've put them up just for the craic. Hope you like them! =]

Day 13 - Talk Talk Sponsors The X Factor

Inspired by those funny Talk Talk Neon Rainbow Bright Dancing adverts for the X Factor!!
I told you I was gonna work on my shutter priority pictures! I like this one better than my last one... 'cause it says Jo... and my name is Jo!
=D

Day 12 - Technicolour Phase

Tomorrow is my RS module... so I should be revising. Instead, being the cool person I am, I experimented with my photography =] (don't worry, apart from right now I've been revising SOLIDLY)

I wanted to take a picture of "revision" and I came up with this UBER cool idea! This is the result - it's meant to be me highlighting my notes. I was going to write out my "notes" out on a piece of acetate to get this effect, but then thought "there's no way I'm wasting a good bit of acitate on revision!" So instead I wrote out the lyrics of 'Technicolour Phase' by Owl City... much less wasteful! =D... I used my macro lense, which is also a fish-eye lense for some reason... not sure if it's meant to be like that! Meh!

So this picture is more of an experiment with macro lenses and acetate more than anything...

Day 11 - We're Experiencing A Heat Wave!

It's true! Temperatures are rising! Apparantly, on Saturday it's gonna be a grand total of 7 degrees C!! Whey! Time to get your sun cream out!

And so the snow turns to rain. Which is cool because I did mention yesterday that I was getting sick of taking pictures of the snow... so today I took pictures of the rain!! This picture was taken through my car window while we were in a car park. The rain was making awesome patterns on the window so I macro'd it and voila! I do like this picture... 'cause it looks like it's in B&W but really it's in colour... it's just so overcast you can't tell and all those cars were either grey, silver or white!

Big shout out to everyone in school doing modules this week - GOOD LUCK!!

Day 10 - I'm Missing Having Dry Socks.

The snow just keeps on coming, doesn't it? I apologise for how much snowy pictures I have taken! You see anyone in my house who notices that I'm inside will insist that I go out and take pictures of the snow, and usually they end up being my best pics! Okay I promise tomorrow I'll not take pictures of the snow! Well this was the handywork of my father and young sister today... it's a snowman. I decided to use my fish eye lense because I haven't used it for Project 365 before so I thought I might as well! =]

Day 9 - Snow Looks Like Polystyrene!!

Doesn't it kinda look like polystyrene balls? Yeah, I don't have much to say today... Jo out!

Day 8 - The American Accent Is Something Of Beauty

WEEKEND! And I have survived over a week of Project 365! It's surprisingly difficult to come up with different things to take pictures of every day... and I've only been doing it for a week! =P haha hopefully I'll get more into it as time goes on and be able to spontaneously take a picture of anything!

So about this picture - I do like it, it's of my American friend Bill shuffling some Uno cards (I don't know why he was doing this, we weren't even playing Uno!) He knows what makes a good picture (we have the same camera - camera buddies!) so he told me to take a pic of his hands shuffling the cards. I liked that I idea so didn't use flash and it turned out pretty good I think!

Day 7 - A Living Zombie... Is That A Paradox?

Okay, so having to get up for school at the crack of dawn usually sucks majorly and I end up being a living zombie for the rest of the day. Well, getting up early this morning meant I could attempt to take a picture of the sunrise! It was very pretty, just this streak of brilliant orange / red under dark clouds... uber dramatic! =]

Anyways, the problem was my camera was as tired and as grumpy as I was, and so I couldn't capture the true awesomeness of the sunrise like it deserved. So I played around with a few different settings, with various results, and then I couldn't decide which one I would put up, so I've just put them all into one box and uploaded three of the photos. I don't know which one I think is most effective, I guess you can decide that for yourself!! I don't have a sunset mode on my camera you see (or else I think I don't), so I just kinda have to improvise when it comes to this kind of light. I use a Nikon D60 by the way! I probably should have mentioned that earlier on in the blog...

Day 6 - And Thus Begins Another Term Of High School...

Yes, today was the first day back at school... and a result of this was that I came home with my brain fried and therefore had no idea what I should take a picture of for my photo of the day. A result of this is this photo -

This... believe it or not... is a car. Two cars in fact! In the dark. Taken on shutter priority at a speed of 30 seconds. I would say that I like this photo, and why... but I don't particularly! It was just kinda an experiment... I need to work on my shutter priority pictures.

Day 5 - I'm Gonna Be Snowed In If This Continues...

There's a lot of snow! I'm sincerely hoping that it snows some more so that I won't have to go to school tomorrow... that would be nice!!

Anyway, about this photo! Project 365, for the 5th of January. Yes indeed! My mum was about to throw out some flowers that she had got a while ago, but I rescued a bunch and took them outside to take pictures of them in the snow! The light was just right for this pic, which makes me smile, because often you just have to improvise with the light there is!

I mentioned in a previous post that I can talk the biggest load of crap ever when blogging.... it's more difficult to talk crap than I first thought!!

Oooo, but here's a link - http://www.dontyoufadeaway.blogspot.com/

She's my Project 365 buddy =] and she's an awesome photographer and she talks a lot less crap than I do... her site's better! =]

Jo out!

Day 4 - More Snow? Excellent!

So I had an AWESOME day out with my good friends Corinne and Sophie messing around in the snow. I like this photograph. Seeing the sunset and knowing it would make silhouettes, I got them to pose - jumping, hands in the air, superhero pose etc. I liked the pictures I got with them posing but they soon got bored and Corinne started tickling Sophie. I got this on camera and I ended up liking it better than the posed ones!

Day 3 - Macroooooooooo

I am a big fan on the Macro setting on a camera. However, usually on my camera, macro plus flash usually equals fail... it seemed to work this time though! I took a picture of this twig because I liked the texture on it. I had my camera on the macro setting but forgot to turn flash off as I usually would, and I'm glad I forgot! The lack of flash created the black background, which I am quite pleased with. The depth of field in the photo is a bit odd, but I like it! Note to self - don't rely on past photo experiences... try something new!

Day 2 - On Blogging...

I've been scanning a few other blogs on Blogger.com. When I first clicked on the big, shiny "CREATE A BLOG" button, I thought "Here, this is going to be hard... I have no idea what I'm going to write about". But then I saw other blogs and realised that you just need to write crap!! Seriously, people with blogs write the biggest crap ever... and now I have become one of them. Why am I doing this to myself? I have a module I should be revising for!

Seeing as there is the whole module very very soon crisis going on at the mo... I will not write a huge amount of crap today. Instead I will post my Project 365 photo and that will be done with it.

The snow is melting away pretty quickly... my snowman appears to be disappearing into a pathetic puddle in the grass... meh I'll get over it!

I'm off to revise! Byes!

Day 1 - 'The Teenies'... that's odd!

So it's 2010... I'm still trying to work out whether it's "two thousand and ten" or "twenty-ten". Maybe just to be more confusing people will start using Roman Numerals all the time and start calling it MMX.

Anyway, before I start rambling over the name of the year...I'll explain myself. I've started a blog (this is it, by the way) for various reasons. Last night, or rather, earlier this morning, a few friends and I composed what we called our "Spade Lists". It's a list of stuff we wanna do before the end of 2010, for example:

#2. Learn to play the ukelele,
#7. Watch the sun rise on the beach,
#11. Buy a cowboy hat (a proper one),
#20. Drive a car.

It's called a Spade List because it's kinda like a Bucket List, except that's slightly depressing 'cause it sounds like we're gonna die at the end of it. So I have a list of 30 things on my spade list. One of them is -

#21. Create a blog.

Hence why I am now talking nonsense in this little space. Believe me, you're gonna read a lot of nonsense here. So this blog is hopefully gonna be about me fulfilling my 30 things on my list, or not fulfilling them. Another main part of the blog is gonna be based on number 26.


#26. Project 365.

Project 365 is a project where you take a photo every day for a year. I guess it's a good way of looking back over your year and how much (or little) you've done. How sentimental/nostalgic! So apparently doing this also makes you a better photographer - that would be very useful!!

So yeah... here's todays photo - if you can't tell it is meant to be the number '2010'. And that is my Spade List underneath it! If you're really sad/desperate to know you might be able to guess at least the first fifteen on my list if you turn your head to the side and meake a well educated guess at what some of the words are. I wouldn't bother if I were you!

So how do you end a blog? Maybe I guess I'll just say "I'll keep you posted"... like you're really interested and everything! Who even reads blogs out of interest??

Jo out.