New Exhibition, New Camera, New Pics!

Lots of new developments to tell you about! The main one is of course, the ongoing exhibition at Eccles Community Art Gallery. The first day that was open to the public was the Saturday just gone, so I went down there for the whole day to go and meet people and chat about my work. The gallery was pretty busy, I think mainly because one of the other artists exhibiting was a local man whose family has posthumously put on an exhibition of his work and invited down many other relatives and family friends. I chatted to several of these people, and sold a few prints to one of them, which was great! I also had a steady stream of other people who came and looked at my work over the course of the day, so as usual I had lots of nice chats about art with people, which I always enjoy. I also got interviewed by a journalist from Salford Online. I've just checked the website and it doesn't appear to be up yet - I will of course post a link to it from here when it comes online.
Ok, here's some photos of the gallery and me and my work hung in it:

The gallery as seen from the outside

The proud artist trying(and failing) to strike a natural looking pose

The work

The exhibition will be up until the 8th of February, and the gallery is open Tuesdays (10am - 3pm) and Saturdays (10am - 4pm) during that period. I will be there most Saturdays, probably just for a two hour time slot, so if you're in the area, do please come on down and say hello!

In other news…. I finally have a new camera! I haven't really mentioned it here much before, but ever since I have gone full time as an art photographer, ironically, I haven't had a camera! I dropped my beloved and much used old Minolta back in June, and as it was badly in need of replacing anyway (I'd had it for about 8 years, which in technology terms is about a century I guess), I didn't even try to get it fixed. Instead, I was planning to buy a new one myself when the sale of our house went through and we released some of the equity tied up in that. But, as regular readers will know, that isn't exactly going to plan, so luckily for me my lovely family clubbed together and bought me one as a Christmas/Birthday/You Owe Us Big Time present.
 I wasn't sure what to go for, so I bought a photography mag and scanned all the reviews, and then with a little research I found the shop in Manchester that seems to cater to professional photographers; a place called Calumet. So I went there and they were really helpful and gave me pretty good advice I think, and in the end I plumped for a Canon EOS 70D

It's not like a real serious professional photographer's camera, but I would say it's probably at the top end of the fairly ambitious hobby photographer's range, and I think that's as good as I need for the type of images I take. Because the photographs I take are pretty up close I also splashed out and got a fancy new Macro lens as well, which will hopefully add another dimension to my photography, so I'm really excited about that. I've only had it just over a week, and I haven't taken it for a good long photography session outside yet (hopefully soon!), but just in playing around with it and learning it's basic functions I've already seen how much better it is than my old camera, so I'm really excited about the kind of shots I should be able to get with it!

One of the jobs I've been doing so far this week, is editing and photoshopping the huge backlog of images I have , from way back when I went to Hungary in October. I borrowed my mother-in-law's Nikon on that trip, and took about 300 of my "Photo Abstract" images there, which I've only slowly begun to process, partly because I knew I already had such a large back catalogue of images to use for launching myself on the art scene. But I'm a big believer in keeping things fresh and challenging yourself to do new things, and now I have my new camera I can do that. So, I've made a deal with myself that I have to get these "old" photos processed before I can fully move onto the new stuff.

You don't always know until you do the Photoshop magic on them, which shots are going to turn out to be your best, and I'm not sure whether any of the ones I've processed yet are up there with my very best work, but here are some of the highlights of the 100 or so pictures I've done so far:

Maybe slightly different colour palettes than usual for me; I've noticed blue is a colour that seems to dominate my work a lot, I guess because of the nautical subject matter of some of them. Anyway, these are in warmer, and more pastel shades than is typical for me, which I like about them.
Drop me a line and let me know what you think of them if you like!

OK, there's loads more news to share, but in the name of brevity lets leave it there for now, and I'll be back soon with the rest of the updates.