Jo Belfield Photography featured in PC Plus!

Jo Belfield Photography is delighted to have been featured in the latest issue of PC Plus Magazine (issue 296, July 2010) in a feature by Jon Thompson on how photographers and other creatives use the internet to boost their businesses.

http://pcplus.techradar.com/latestissue/

If you arte a photographer or other creative and you want to know how to use the internet to boost sales and to make managing your business easier watch this space as I am hoping to put together some workshops focussed on helping you to harness the power of the internet!

Jo

Pretty House

I took this photograph as I knew the owner was interested in seeing any photos I came up with, but I hadn't been happy with previous attempts. I like this faux watercolour version. I am also going to do a black and white version on another one of the photos - I just haven't quite got round to it yet! I hope the owner likes it!

Jo

"Spy" Lens for Candid and Street Photography

I love candid photography. Far more than any that is posed. I love street photography for this reason. just catching those gorgeous moments an people in their natural environment being, well, themselves. As soon as you stop to ask people if you can take their photo or they spot a camera pointing at them then that naturalness is completely lost and the photo unobtainable. That is why I love this nifty gadget though I have yet to get one and try it out. I do think calling it a "spy" lens is really misleading. I have no intention of spying on people with it. It just makes you less obvious and the arty, beautifully composed, carefree shot / candid slightly less likely to be ruined by being observed!

Jo Belfield

Dancers In Light and Dark / Dancers

Tom Hardwidge's blog has got me thinking - how do you know when a photo is good or not? There are some that I think "yes that's exactly it!" but others where I wonder if I have pushed the bounderies a little too hard, gone a bit loopy with the post-processing and I truly have no idea if it's any good or not. These are 2 photos that I feel that way about. They remind me of pen and ink drawings (I was a huge fan of Mervyn Peake's pen and ink drawings when growing up) but I wasn't sure whether I had just gone completly over the top! People liked them when I put them on Flickr - what do you think?

Jo Belfield.

The End of the Fair

The recent fair at the Bollington Festival provided me with an unexpected treasure trove of photos. But perhaps the most valuable treasures were the subjects themselves. As it happened I was there as the fair was quietening down, the queues pretty much gone and the stalls starting to pack up. Suddenly I found myself with a handful of willing models who moonlighted as fairground staff.

The images this impromptu photoshoot produced - candid, down to earth, unexpected, slightly skewed by the transformation of gaudy colours to grainy black and white - are some of my recent favourites and I hope to revisit theme sometime in the future to explore it further.

From the ordinary to the extraordinary......

It took me 33 years to discover that I was a photographer. A happy accident that arose out of a chance encounter with some awesome amateur photography on www.flickr.com and the rescuing of my used-for-holidays-only point and shoot from under 2 years worth of clutter in the dresser drawer. I went outside to have a play and take a few creative photos and started on a journey that has absorbed me for the last 10 months. I haven't travelled alone by any means. I have met many fantastic photographers allong the way - some virtually and some in person - some in my village and the surrounding area and some on completely different continents. I am grateful for how talented, supportive, enthusiatic, nurturing and generous with their advice, praise and criticism these people are. I am also grateful for the support of my hubby and kids - who only occasionally get crabby that I take twice as long to walk anywhere now that I am constantly stopping to take a photo or complain about their portraits being taken every five minutes.

I am continually gobsmacked by how the lens can transform the mundane in our world - the buildings we ignore because we're not going there we're going HERE and the flowers, weeds, debris and tiny details that we'd miss if we weren't looking for them. At the minute I am generally quite limited in the geographical area I shoot in. I don't drive and I have to be back home for nursery andd school runs so there isn't a wide area for me to shoot in. So my Canon D450 has become my constant companion. My everyday haunts are then photographed and then photographed some more, and finally when the obvious angles have been done and dusted there is the looking for something else, the looking for the tiny too-easily-missed details, the looking for something extraordinary in the ordinary. I am surprised the little things I find, the things that I would never have noticed if I hadn't been looking for something beyond the bricks and mortar and tarmacadam we pass everyday. Constantly amazed, constantly challenged, sometimes thrilled, sometimes disappointed and certainly always learning.

Jo Belfield http://www.flickr.com/photos/29171103@N05/