Welcome to my blog

Welcome to my blog
I've had other blogs but I figured that since I'm coming to the stage where I need to have a website and to be able to tell people what I'm doing and events that I might be involved in, this would be the best way to get information out but link to my main website.

Getting Myself Out There
I've been on Facebook and Google+ and a few others, but what I like about Google+ is that I can tie everything in at one place. Having a Behance account, I didn't realise was part of Adobe till I starting to link things up. I use Lightroom to catalogue my images and do some of the work on them before publishing them onto the web, being able to automatically upload to Behance is very useful and saves a lot of time.

I've just about finished building my website for people to view my work in a more professional way, this is so that they or you can see what my work is like and if theres something that takes your interest, then we can talk about that.
Anyone that sees my work will know that I don't have a set area that I work in, I guess it's about keeping my options open and having the freedom to look at everything in photography.

As I've mentioned in my bio, I'm currently doing a foundation degree in professional photography that I started back in September last year, and I'm so glad that I decided to make that move as it's giving me the chance to learn new and old skills. In the first semester I did feel a bit of a fish out of water with being the oldest person in my group and most of them being the age that they could be my own children, but there a great bunch and I get on well with them all. I have two tutors and they are great in that they want everyone to not just learn but enjoy and to explore photography in a wider way by learning about photographers that have made a name for them selves and to get us as photographers to push ourselves to try different things and to be open minded to all that photography has to offer.
I'm just about to start my second semester, but the first one was really interesting as I got to work in 35 mm black and white film. Its open my eyes to the world of film and I was surprised that film is still very much used in different industries of photography today. I learnt the processing of the film and then the work of printing images that is a skill to learn how different grading and exposure to light will give an image. A lot of the time is spent doing test strips and calculating the amount of time that's needed to get the brightness and contrast for the final print.
Once the assignments were completed, it did feel a bit nerve racking in wondering if you had got everything that was on the checklist and how the work would be seen by the assessors. Since the other students had be taught in a very different style to how I was taught at school, and their presentation of their assignments where done with a more art feel to them, where mine seemed a bit clinical as I presented it all in a A4 binder and pocket sleeves. I'm glad to say that I passed both assignments and was extremely pleased with the final scores that I accomplished, and that the rest of my group also passed.

So we are in a new year and as I think back to this time last year, I had just made the transition into photography by investing in a good camera (well I think it's a good camera) and number of lenses, I buried my head into my iPad to watch YouTube videos on how to use the camera in a non scene mode and just got out there and snapped away at anything and everything. Today I have the confidence in knowing my camera and have done a fare bit of work in the studio, now I'm just looking forward to the year ahead and the ever growing assignments.
I do know that in May sometime that I will have work that will be part of an exhibition and I hope that friends and fellow photographers may want to come along and see what I've been up to, but I will give more details on that when it gets closer.

Photography by Andy Dubreuil - this is my new website and I must stress that its still in the making stage as I only have one gallery loaded and of course this is the first post, but it's a beginning and we all have to start somewhere, so I hope that you might follow me and visit every now and then to see what I'm up to.

Thanks for reading, AndyD