Grimace

This is how I feel about most photos taken of me.

I've recently bought a new flash and tonight was the first night I had both it and my old flash off-camera, with my little box of tricks on the camera firing both of them. Fun!

I quite like doing portraiture - I'd like a bit more confidence in doing street portraiture, or to have more people to practice on that are willing to sit and be my subject. Finding people who (unlike me) actually like photos of themselves proves to be hard though.

Part of good portraiture indoors, I think, is setting up the flashes correctly, hence wanting the second flash and to practice shooting with both flashes off-camera.

I actually started taking these photos because of a competition that iStockPhoto are running in celebration of their 10th birthday. I've always been intrigued by producing stock photography so took notice when they started tweeting today. Their competition runs for 24 hours with various challenges, one of which involving taking a photo of yourself in a hat (party hat preferred). Earlier today at work I folded up a pirate hat with an A4 sheet of paper, slipped into the bathroom and took a photo with my iPhone. I'm going to spare you that photo, but later this evening when the challenge rolled around again I ended up taking and sending this photo in with a couple of minutes to spare. I didn't win, sadly.

The competition rolls on for a few more hours, but it's nearly midnight here in the UK. Dare I stay up for it? I've another photo with a hat, and another one with a tea-cosy I could use.

I think I'll away to bed. Maybe if today's gorgeous weather holds up I'll have an outdoors photo tomorrow, although Alex is borrowing my camera for the day so you might end up with an iPhone photo or my Sony P + S.



See more of my photos over at Flickr.