Jessie J (1st November, 2011)

I went to see Jessie J at The HMV Hammersmith Apollo, and I've got to say - she's fantastic live!

Here are some of my favourite photos from the night:

Boys Village (October 2nd, 2011)

I took a trip down to The Boys Village in South Wales to help out with a photo shoot and couldn't help but take a few photographs. I'd love to go back again.

Life and Death (August 2011 - September 2011)

I love photographing nature – being able to capture that moment in time for that plant/living thing. I also love to watch a plant go through the motions of life and death – budding, growing, wilting/drooping, leaves slowly dying. The same goes with food, I like to see the food at its ripest and then getting to a point of decay. The detail in the decaying of that particular food is what makes the photograph in my opinion.

With this in mind I started to look at Ori Gersht’s work, ‘Blow Up & Time After Time’. He had the same mind set when making the work – he wanted to make nature look destructive, I suppose that’s how dead flowers come across as they aren’t considered beautiful.

The idea of making what is normally considered beautiful into something only certain people see beauty in helped me come across Sam Taylor-Wood’s work, ‘Still Life (video stills)’. The video was originally about watching this bowl of fruit decay. The idea of decay and/or growth from life & death made me want to look more into what Sam Taylor-Wood had done, this kind of work was linked to ‘Vanitas’.

I researched into ‘Vanitas’ and found out that it was a mixture of human achievements and mortality. I liked the idea of the contrast of the two, but was more interested in the mortality side of the theme, more so nature than skulls.

I went back to a previous project I’d done, where I had taken a lily and photographed it twice a day for a week:

I tested out a few things at first; I photographed a rose and a tomato over the period of a week. After printing some of the photos out, the rose portrayed my concept better; it showed more sign of decay than the tomato did.

Here are some shots:

I then photographed a different kind of rose, a banana and some grapes over seven days. Again, after printing out the photos, it was apparent that the flower showed its decay a lot better than the banana or the grapes.

Here are some shots:

I decided to photograph a rose for my final shots; it proved the better subject and portrayed my concept better than the others.

Here are my final photographs:

This isn’t the end for a project like this; I could see it going further. For example; photographing food over the period of a month.