Sophie On: Photographing Everything (in this case: Hopton Gardens)

Hi everybody - and a quick shout-out to MUA Jason, my latest follower!

    When I was at university, we had a guest lecturer who was a proffessional Production Designer. For the life of me, I don't remember her name or which films she worked on, but I do remember one piece of advice she gave us - keep a camera on you at all times, even if it's just a camera phone, and photograph EVERYTHING that inspires you. She was always photographing rust and mould, purely for the colours and textures.

    Up until that moment, I had mostly used my camera for taking photos of my friends and family (and pets!). If I saw a nice sky or an interesting building I would often photograph them but then I'd leave them unsorted on my computer or just delete them, whereas my photos of people would be printed out and put in an album or framed. When I set up my edit suite I promised myself that this would be a computer for work related stuff only - and that I would finally have a place for all my photographs of buildings, landscapes and random crap. I do - it's called 'Inspiration Photos' - right next to a folder called 'Inspriation Art' full of Gustave Dore, Edward Munch and Victoria Frances amongst others.

   And I started carrying a camera with me wherever I went. When my camera got bigger, so did my bag. So my Canon Powershot G10 and oversized carpet bag are very happy together.

   I am not a proffesional photographer (although I know some wonderful ones - Rei Bennett, Holly Booth and the amazing Crash Taylor, to name just three), I am not even necessarily a good photographer, but if it weren't for the unnamed Production Designer's advice, I would have never got such random beauties (and I use the term loosely) as these:

   Carrying a camera at all times comes in particularly handy when I'm looking for locations. I often like to go to listed or National Trust houses and they're always inspirational to me for when I dream about having a full, Hollywood-style budget to spend on a location. Or sometimes they just give me inspiration for elements which I can recreate in a smaller scale on a low budget film. I always photograph these places a lot but I pefer to buy post cards in a gift shop - that way, a proffessional has done the work for me and probably got a more exclusive shot.

    The last place I visited was Hopton Hall in Derbyshire and I had a good walk around the romantic rose gardens. Which leads me to really the only reason I did this blog post in the first place - I took some photos in Hopton Gardens and I would like to share them with you. Enjoy!

     My next post will be when the Wasteland trailer is up and I have my behind-the-scenes picturs to show you. Jar of Angels is also filming in less than TWO weeks so I'll keep you updated about my work on that too.

Sophie