Dan Goodwin's project log - Photography

My friends Victoria and Gordon asked me to take along the paparazzi camera to a naming party they were having for their son Sam. The idea was for me to take some candid, reportage style shots as well as a few posed ones (for example some shots of all the babies who were at the event who were lined up specially). It's the first time I'd done the reportage photographer thing at any kind of ceremony.

I shot three rolls of colour film and overall was very pleased with the results. Vic has distributed some of the prints to party attendees. Someone made it very easy for me to get some "aaahh!" (not "arggh!") inducing shots of kids and babies by bringing along a bubble machine (that's one to remember!).

I'd definitely like to do some more of this and will look out for more opportunities to build up a portfolio of these type of shots.

I attended a stills portraiture course with the folks at The Oxford School of Photography. It's something I'd wanted to be able to do more of, particularly to take shots of bands etc.

The course was very good with advice on how to make your subject feel at ease when directing and posing them, lots of information on how to use light (indoors, outdoors and in a studio) and plenty of practice through assignments and group discussion.

The course was geared towards both film and digital and there was a good mix of attendees using each. I'm still shooting on good ol' fashioned film myself.

I took my film SLR on a snowboarding holiday for the first time in January with the aim of trying out some high speed shots and using the 3 fps thingy (which makes me sound like a proper paparazzi snapper) to get some good shots of my buddies in mid-air.

The results were pretty average overall (people didn't really look like they were going very fast, some shots were badly underexposed...) though I did get a couple of good ones of Edward looking gnarly.

Whilst struggling with the GIMP to do my photo manipulation stuff, I'd been looking for a course to learn Photoshop (one which isn't really expensive as most of them are) for ages. I finally found one at City Lit. So that meant that I had to trek from Oxford to London every week, but the course was conveniently on Saturday mornings and only cost about 140 GBP for 7 weeks tuition.

It was fantastic. I was the only techy there - all the other students were arty types so it was great to see Photoshop being used in really creative and exciting ways. I finally learnt how to do all the things I'd wanted to do with pictures (and not just being able to stick my mates' faces onto other people's bodies).