Lucy And The Lens

Category: Isolation

  • Magazine published

    I’m not normally one to brag. If you’ve followed me for a while you probably already know that I have a masters in photography but if you don’t I’m gonna shout about it. But here’s something you might not know as we were all sat bored during lockdown figuring out what to do, I did lots of creative challenges but I also got magazine published for the first time in 2020. So I’m going to shout about that loudly and proudly. #mibmarathonday15

  • Goal Setting

    Most people will have set goals at the beginning of the year of what they plan to do through the year. A lot of these goals might now be unattainable due to Covid19.

    But your year doesn’t have to stop with Covid19 you can refocus your goals changing them up for the current climate. As Dani Barker Media (Social Media Strategist) says “we can then treat post covid as a 2020 take two setting yourself brand new goals when the time comes”.

    But first think about what you can do during this pandemic to improve your business. You might be thinking you can’t do anything, but there’s always something you can do.

    I think that goal setting is important because:

    • It focuses your attention on something.
    • It raises your self-confidence when you achieve them.
    • It motivates you to do more.
    • It gives you a sense of purpose.
    • It gives you more control of your future.

    In terms of goal setting I like to set my goals on the last day of every month.

    Each month provides me with new goals. Some months I have a week or two set out for a course I’m taking part in. Other months I use a structure I created when I did probloggers 31 days to build a better blog course and sometimes I do both.

    If we weren’t currently in lockdown, the first thing I would do in a typical month would be to check what I have booked in and right that down in both my calendar and my bullet journal which I use to create the schedule.

    As currently lockdown is the only thing that is happening , I’ve been thinking about what I can do with my social media content and web content as a change of focus because I can’t do photoshoots right now.

    In the month of March there was a 7 day content sprint with problogger. But this month looks a little different.

    I have a main goal set for the month of may which is to finish the podcasting course I’m doing which is a course on the future learn website called the power of podcasting for audio storytelling. I am also hoping to launch the podcast later this month. So this is what the month looks like for podcasting:

    • Week 1: Complete the podcasting course.
    • Week 2: Podcast Wednesday: plan the next month of podcasting.
    • Week 3: Get podcast platform ready.
    • Week 4: Launch podcast

    The podcast isn’t my only plan for this month though. In March I did a design sprint day which helps you work towards your long term and short term goals. So on the 11th of every month I will be doing a design sprint task day implementing some of the techniques I learnt. I will also be doing an idea generation day on the 15th of every month to help me think of ideas in all aspects of business. I have also scheduled in my zoom meetings in order to work around them.

    In the month I usually have one or two rest days per week which I call a do something different day where I do something completely unrelated to photography.

    When I’m planning my website content for the next month I have days set to do certain types of post for example a lust or review post. I may also have days to get someone who hasn’t looked at my blog before to analyse it and days to ask readers questions.

    I also have goals for everyday some are due to lockdown and others I want to implement even after. These are:

    • Spending some time on social media to post, comment, share, like and engage.
    • To do daily walks and workouts most days.
    • Listen to podcasts most days.
    • Read for at least an hour.

    Finally on the last day of the month I do two things:

    • Goal setting by planning a schedule for the next month.
    • Checking google analytics to see how my website has performed for the month.

    If you enjoyed this post why not set goals of your own and share them in the comments.

  • 8 Photography Techniques To Try While In Isolation

    Today I’m going to talk about some effects I have tried during isolation and rate them in terms of level 0 being the easiest and 5 being the hardest.

    The first effect I tried was the twirl effect. This is where you turn the landscape or portrait into a twirl pattern. It’s a quick and not too difficult technique. I would give This a 2/5 rating.

    Next I tried the dispersion effect which took me hours. It’s where you warp part of a photo and turn it into particles. I would suggest you might struggle to attempt this if you have never used Photoshop before as for me it was 4.5/5 in difficulty.

    Thirdly was a shoot with the model over FaceTime. I’d seen a few photographers on Instagram doing a full model shoot over FaceTime, so I decided to try it. This works best on an iPhone as there is a special FaceTime photo button which will take you out of the equation and only show the model when the images are taken. After the shoot I did a few quick edits in Photoshop express to enhance the image using highlights, contrast, clarity and sharpen mostly. I’d give this 1/5 because I feel a beginner photographer could do this type of shoot even without using the photoshop to edit.

    My fourth effect was creating tiny planets. For this all you need is a 99p phone app called tiny planets and you can create them yourself out of any photo. Some photos work better than others like I recommend using landscapes and Street shots for this kind of technique. As this is easily accessible and you aren’t required to be a photographer, I would say in terms of level this is as zero out of five stars.

    Number 5 is the orb and has to be the easiest one I’ve done on photoshop with only 4 steps you only need to spend 2 minutes on it. So, this one gets another 1/5 for me.

    The next technique is the optical art face portrait which actually turns a face and pixels. A series of little geometric squares all the way across the image. As this one is a many stepped tutorials and I did end up re organising some of the layers to fit the overall look, that I wanted for the end results. I also decided to move the layers for side to side in the second image to see what would happen. I’d suggest that this should be a 4.5/5 stars in difficulty.

    The optical art text effect is by far the most difficult. It has 22 steps and it doesn’t always work. For example, you have to make a word cloud on the website it wants you to use to generate this isn’t compatible on every single computer. So, I had to traipse around the Internet to try and find another website that will allow me to create word clouds to the same effect which took a lot of time. Also following the 22-step process itself takes many hours And I feel you need to be a relatively avid Photoshop user to give this one a go. This one is getting 5/5 on the difficulty level.

    Lastly, I tried the double exposure technique which is where you merge a portrait with a landscape or seascape. This one should receive another 5/5 as I think its not easy to get it perfect.

    If you enjoyed seeing these effects why not subscribe to my blog and try some of your own.