I'm clearing out the cobwebs for one last blog post here on Young Limbs.
I've been busy updating my website over the past few months and in the process, I've decided to move my blog over to my portfolio. Alas, Young Limbs is no more, but I'll be leaving my archives here for you to re-read as you please.
Please update your subscriptions to my new blog. I'll be posting musings about life, photography and social media and I'll be updating it very regularly.
So I forgot to tell you something super important in my last blog post...
I FINALLY GOT MY DRIVING LICENSE!
And it only took me two-and-a-half years after my eighteenth birthday to get it.
Hurrah!
Last weekend, Paul and I took a little road trip to Bendigo for my friend, Molly's 21st birthday party. Whilst I had my DSLR with me, I didn't take many photographs with it and opted to use my mobile instead. I'm really lazy sometimes, ok?
To be honest, we spent most of our time in Bendigo napping. It was Paul's first weekend off since the beginning of May and my first weekend since the start of June. When we felt like leaving the comfort of bed we walked around the Bendigo CBD, admiring the beautiful architecture.
We visited a Buddhist temple and lit incense. The temple worshipped the goddess of mercy, Guan Yun and there were thousands of paper cranes and a whole table filled with tributes of food.
We also visited this little cafe that had a coffee machine inside a caravan?!
The coffee was excellent, the hot chocolates were literally heaven on earth and the food was delicious as well!
Paul had a burger, of course, and I had Canadian waffles - you just cannot pass up bacon and popcorn with ice cream all on the same plate.
We had an amazing night hanging out with many of my old friends from high school in Wangaratta. Molly ate a scorpion after downing some tequila! I had to stick to sipping lemonade because I was driving, and a boogied to some country party classics.
We were also graced with a reunion performance by Not The Spice Girls. To fill you in, when we were in year nine, we all performed in a musical that centred around a talent show akin to Australia's Got Talent. At the end of the show, 'The Spice Girls' performed Stop for the crowd. Ever since then, it's been a party favourite amongst my friends.
Tom, Molly's brother was guest performing as Posh Spice.
Over the past couple of months, I feel as though I've been pushed over a cliff and I've been left hanging by the skin of my teeth on the edge.
Life sucks sometimes, I'm aware of that, but I keep thinking to myself, how many bad cards am I going to be dealt time, after time, after time before I get a good hand?
Everything seems so hard, so complex. I'm not sure I like adult life. I just want to curl up on the couch and watch cartoons all day without having to worry about finding money to pay my rent, or the fact that I haven't done a photo shoot for literally months.
So yeah, that's how I'm feeling at the moment. Now, let me fill you in on a few other details that have happened recently.
2. I started an internship.
A super cool internship with a little web development company called Digitalsmith. They have plans to take over the world and I am entirely okay with that. I've been writing blog posts, taking photos, going to meetings about secret projects and running their social media twice a week. It's fun, and I'm so grateful for the amazing opportunity Leighton, Rob and the team have given me.
3. I started back on campus at University.
As some of you may know, I've been completing my undergraduate degree online. But after a year and a half of sitting in front of a computer studying, I got a little lonely and wanted to make some friends. I'm now on campus twice a week and so far, I am loving it! :)
I'll be posting a little more frequently over the next few months now. I have more time to conduct photo shoots and I'm required to do a lot of blogging for my university subjects! I'll be sharing a lot, but not all of it will be photography related.
We're going to Bendigo this weekend for a 21st birthday. I'm hoping to take some photos as well as maybe creating a little film to share.
And that's my life at the moment.
Let me know what you guys have been up to - I haven't had much of a chance to read any blogs in quite a while!
Throwing it back this lovely Thursday to a wedding I shot for my friends, Galit & Claude, back in February. I find the wedding photography industry notoriously difficult to break into. In fact, this is only the second wedding I've photographed in four years. I'm always thankful to friends and strangers who reach out to me and trust in my skills to capture important life events.
I'll probably never get to photograph a wedding like this again. We trekked over sand dunes to get to the secluded location where Galit and Claude said, 'I do,' in front of only eight people, including myself and the celebrant. The wedding certificate was signed on top of my camera bag. To celebrate, we all had a drink and cheered as the bride and groom cut into their Minion cake. The night concluded with a gathering at a local bar with other friends and work colleagues. The evening was perfect, the lighting was serene.
Ps. For the horde is a reference from World of Warcraft, for those who don't know :)
When I wrap up a shoot, I'm normally itching to get home and begin the editing process. I love reviewing the images and seeing them almost come to life with the colours I inject in Photoshop. But there are also times where I'll come back from a shoot only to find that I'm really disappointed with the images I created. Sometimes I don't experiment with angles enough; sometimes I find that an image I thought was in focus is, in fact, blurry; sometimes I just didn't think things through and went a bit snap happy without really thinking, 'hold on, what am I actually trying to do here?'
In this particular incident, I was really disappointed with how I handled the lighting. In an ideal world, every photo shoot would be conducted at either sunrise or sunset. Sometimes, when you have to travel a fair distance to a location, you don't have that luxury. Shooting in the midday sun is challenging for most photographers. Sometimes the harsh contrast will enhance your photos and sometimes it will hinder them, majorly. I so desperately wanted to share a couple of images from this photo shoot that didn't make the cut purely because I wasn't thinking things through when I was snapping the images. If I had of taken the time to go through my usual process when crafting an image, I would have had two amazing images that probably would have been my best portraits. Alas, they are now on my hard drive never to see the light of day.
It took me six months to edit these photos because I was so annoyed at myself for those two photos. Sometimes when something doesn't go to plan, you can lose a little bit of inspiration. I edited about twenty images from this day and only two really made me feel unhappy, and that's a pretty good result, in hindsight.
I've presented the images today in reverse to the order they were photographed. Most of my work is narrative based, but it's fairly rare that I will take such a large body of work to be presented as a story. I'm really interested to hear what you all have to say about what you think the narrative may be.
Sometimes I forget that my blog is separate from my other social media accounts. I know that a few of you follow me on my Facebook and Instagram pages, but I also know that a lot of you don't, so I'm just going to take some time to update you all on a few things that affect this blog.
This year, so far, has been absolutely crazy.
At the beginning of the year, Paul and I started looking for our first rental home. It was a very exciting, scary and nerve-wracking time. We began looking for our own place because we had just accepted new jobs, (that at the time were going to start imminently) and we wanted to be closer to work.
Well, almost three months have passed since we moved into our little abode, and only now are we just starting at those jobs!
For those of you who are wondering, we are working at a new restaurant called Millars which is opening up tomorrow in Lara, VIC. Paul is going to be the sous/pastry chef and I'm running all of the social media, taking all of the photos, making coffees and pretty much helping out in the café wherever I'm needed. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram!
This new job is both immensely exciting and dead scary to me. It's my first full-time job. I'm going to be at the same place every day for five days a week and then I'm going have to come home and tackle my university work every night. Yes, I'm attempting full-time work whilst I'm also studying full-time. Not to mention I'm still continuing with my freelance photography job. Someone just kill me now before I fall into a heap of exhaustion.
As I type this, Paul and I have both been awake since 4:30am. Paul's up and in the shower, getting ready to make the frosty, five-minute bike ride to work. He has a very long day of prep ahead of him, getting everything ready for the opening tomorrow. I've been editing photographs I plan to share here shortly and I'm about to get up and do some exercise before hammering out some uni work before heading into the restaurant. This is probably what life is going to be for us now. No more Netflix binges (I'm more sad about this than I would care to admit) or a lot of down time to just 'surf the web'. I'm going to be a hive of productivity - which will actually do me (the queen of procrastination) a lot of good.
This isn't to say that I won't have any time for new photo shoots. Admittedly, I haven't been creating as much for my own personal gain because I've been more preoccupied with my studies this semester. But it does mean is that I won't have a lot of time or energy to write a significant amount of posts on here. In no way am I abandoning my dear blog, but my posts will be a little more sparse and I won't have as much time available to read all of the blogs I follow.
Being busy sucks but as my Mum/other adults in my life would say, it's part of growing up.
Whilst I acknowledge that Easter is a very religious time for most people, my Easter focus for the past few years has centred around enjoying time with family and learning to embrace change.
This year, my Easter break was consumed by a lot of studying. Back during fashion week, I thought it would be a good idea to take a week off to get all of my photo editing done...I was wrong. So very wrong. I've since been behind in all of my work, which made completing the few assignments I had much more difficult as I had to race through my coursework before I could even attempt writing out an essay.
So I've spent this week catching up on three weeks worth of media relations and the week before that focusing on feature writing. My pile of work seems endless, but I'm happy to report that I'm up-to-date and ready for week five. Bring on mid-term assignments! To keep me motivated I've been browsing the studyspo tag on Tumblr...you can thank me later.
A rare, candid shot of your's truly ;)
I did, however, manage to get away for a few days over the Easter weekend. We visited family in Wangaratta on Easter Monday and Tuesday. Easter/Autumn is my favourite time of the year up in the North East and High Country. The colours of the leaves turn a rustic golden colour and the crisp, cool weather is so refreshing. I also love the faint smell of burning off in the valleys.
We left Geelong at 5:30am to reach Wangaratta by mid morning. We drove all the way to Lake Mulwala, just outside of Yarrawonga to take some photographs of the lake. My younger brother is in year 12 this year, and for Studio Arts he is exploring the notion of fear. Needless to say, the dead trees that litter the lake create an eerie vibe.
During our adventures, we came across four very friendly donkeys who came over to the fence to say hello. I've never actually seen a donkey before, weird I know, and I was so overjoyed that I was able to pat them through the fence. We affectionately gave them names and quoted Shrek to them, which I think they enjoyed.
On Tuesday morning, we drove up to Myrtleford, Bright and Mt Buffalo (we didn't go up the mountain, much to my dismay). I always try to visit this area whenever I have some spare time because the countryside is always so beautiful, no matter what the season may be. During Autumn, Bright especially is known for its glorious fall leaves. They're so golden and float across the sky as the wind blows. In between stopping for Patrick to take photographs, we also stopped at a few of my favourite locations for capturing autumn leaves. I was in heaven.
I'm planning on going back to the area on ANZAC day weekend to take some more photos. Hopefully, I'll be able to find someone to model for me!
Here are a few photographs I also took on my iPhone during our trip:
On a side note, if you haven't noticed, I've updated the blog layout, colours etc. Please let me know what you think and if you like the new design! There are still are few things I would like to tweak! I've also added Disqus (finally) so that we can have actual conversations, and so that you can be notified when I reply!!
Let me know what you got up to over the Easter holidays (if you were lucky enough to have some)!
Hi, I'm Carolyn! I'm twenty years old, I photograph things, I study media communications, I'm a barista and social media manager in my spare time and a tech geek. These are my thoughts, adventures and photographs. Read more...
All content is created by Carolyn West unless otherwise stated. Layout and content have been created solely for Young Limbs. Please give credit to anything you use from this blog :) 2009 - 2014
Currently: Geelong, Australia
