Last year I set about and completed a 365 (366 as it was a leap year) project. You can see the results of my efforts at http://edriccross.foliopic.com. For those unaware this is a project to take a photo a day over whole year. For such a project some people may follow a specific theme and others such as myself have the challenge of finding something to photograph every day.

This may sound easy but because of the time constraints of a full time job most photos were taken after work and many were sometimes rushed snapshots of not very good composition or technique. I did however, through the pursuit of this project, discover that I have a passion for photography and a desire to take or construct better photographs.

This year I plan to develop my photographic eye, learn and practice photographic composition and push myself out of my comfort zone.

To assist my photographic study I shall be writing this blog not so much as an instruction to others but as a place to gather my thoughts and record my progress as I research and develop my technique.

A week ago I had the good fortune through a friend of mine to photograph a Burlesque group as they themselves were having a promotional photo shoot. I was very pleased to be allowed along to photograph them as this was the first opportunity I have had to photograph people with professionally applied make up.

I felt a little awkward arriving amongst a group of people that I did not know and without a preconceived plan of the shoot. Their shoot was being held in a local themed bar so fortunately a suitable background was easy to find. With a simple lighting set up consisting of a strobe and soft box to camera left and a bare strobe set to half the power as a fill on the right I obtained a decent collection of photos. The most significant problem I had was keeping the master flash on the camera communicating with the fill flash, however this provided some moody shadows which has provided a variation in the shots acquired.

I can understand now how important a good makeup artist must be as few of the faces needed anything but the slightest of work in Photoshop, in fact they mostly only needed tweaking in Lightroom.

With luck I may be able to find further opportunities like this.