Michael's Blog

Base33

2010-02-22T10:16:00.005Z

Recently, I was asked to photograph the grand opening of the newly renovated facilities of Base33, a Witney charity that helps local youngsters who come from difficult backgrounds. Although a photographer from the local newspaper was also attending, I stayed for the whole event to capture a series images that I donated to Base33 so they can use them in their publicity material for the future. You can read about the event in the Witney Gazette by clicking here.

Colour Temperature

2010-01-23T19:51:00.000Z

I run a little photography club at the charity that I also work for to help and encourage folks to take better pictures. One way of doing that has been to introduce a little photo competition where the members choose the theme and then they all try and capture that idea in a photograph. 'Course that means that I have to step up to the plate as well, but I'm not allowed to actually enter the competition. The chosen theme this time is "Winter", and the obvious subject material would be stuff like snow and ice... just one problem - we don't get a right lot of that here, so when we do get some you've gotta be quick :-). Well, we got a fair old amount the other week so I braved the freezing temperatures to see what I could find and here is one example from that cold-nosed walk...

It was not exactly the best time of day as the light was failing and the cloud cover, albeit receding, negated the possibility of a glorious sunset (which was what I was after). What struck me about the images was how "cold" they appeared despite the evening light, you could shiver just looking at them. Perhaps "feeling cold" becomes even colder when the light is cool too? It certainly felt that way when I was out there in the snow, puts a new perspective on the photographic technicality of "colour temperature" I can tell you! :-)

2010-01-12T09:15:00.003Z

Hello and welcome to the new Michael Allen Photography website. For a little over a year now I had been looking at possible solutions for a new and improved website for my photography business that would allow cool stuff like password protected client areas, secure image proofing, online stores and contact forms, not to mention the boring bits like - reliable, easy to use, good value and well supported. But above all it had to look great, because lets face it - photography is a visual art and you could have fabulous portfolios of photographs but if your website doesn't do them justice it's a bit of a waste. I'd gone through several ideas over the year, including building the site myself, but finally settled on a purpose designed web service based in the USA that offered all the cool stuff I was after (and more too) not to mention the boring bits as well. I'm sure you'll like it... M