Following my post on Wedding Roundography, I recently found a couple of wedding blogs with little features on it as an inexpensive way to add a bit of quirkiness to a wedding album. This amazed me as I have made no effort to publicise the idea as a service outside this site at all (and I have made no effort to publicise this site), so I thank Intimate Weddings and Yay, I Do heartilly for their very kind mentions.

(I have removed all adverts from the website previews below, partly for simplicity, and partly because I don't want a load of random adverts in my site)

What amazed me even more is that some have taken the time to criticise it too, largely for perfectly valid reasons, which come down to personal taste in the end of course. I found the comments in this forum on the lovely website Easy Weddings (I'm getting married myself later this year so am skimming through it this afternoon...) quite illuminating. In general, I only ever hear good things about my images, because my commenters are necessarily a self-selecting group of people: they come to my site and contact me because my style appeals to their own sense of aesthetics. Other people either don't come to my site at all or leave immediately.

These wedding images however have found a sort of life outside my site so have been brought to the attention of people who would never see anything else of mine, and here expect to see proper (you know what I mean) wedding photographs, and many of those people don't find my style appealing at all. It does me good to get a sense of the sorts of objections people can have to my images. Not that I'm going to, or could, do anything about it...

One of the commenters didn't like the fact that the images are artificial, that is to say, not straight photographs. This is the principal reason why my style of photography in general divides opinion, even my straight landscapes are, and look, very heavily processed. This is a reason why, as I've said before, I wince slightly when I describe myself as a Photographer... I simply don't have a better word at the moment...

I was recently contacted by a photographer from China who paints at an art class as a hobby and wanted to show me a painting they've been working on. I followed the link and was thrilled with what I found!

Click on the image to go to Bess' personal blog, there are some lovely posts there.

The painting is upside-down compared with the way I orientated it, but I like the fact that Bess had different ideas.

The orientation of a roundograph is completely arbitrary, I either decide which way round it should go because I find it more pleasing one way or to throw the focus on a part of the picture. Either way, it's open to anybody else to decide differently.

In this case, I chose to focus on the building, but when it's turned round like the painting, a whole different set of features become the subject.

I suppose there's no right way round :-)

I came across a post about my roundographs today on a German blog called Interweb 3000, always nice, thank you Herr Doktor Katze!

I am extremely proud and happy that my site has been featured in this week's guest edit section of The Good Web Guide! I am featured as Lady Crafthole, which is my usual internet identity.

The Retronaut, Chris Wilde, is this week's guest editor, and had previously featured my roundographs in his wonderful (I cannot stress that enough) site How to be a Retronaut . He is soon to appear as a TED speaker when the conference comes to Oxford in July.

Here's what he said:

Lady Crafthole - Roundography. Like photography but round.  Lady Crafthole aka Lucy Martin is the expert in capturing planets and wormholes (that's the two types of roundographs. Keep up) The great thing about Lady Crafthole's pictures is that (like all the best art) they look almost nothing like reality. Or as she puts it: "Far from simply setting down moments as we see them, photography has the power to reveal the ordinary world in ways never possible before". She's right. A photographer of spectacular talent.

*blushes* Many many thanks to Chris!

I have uploaded a series of pictures this last week taken on a beautiful weekend trip to Robin Hood's Bay on the North Yorkshire coast. We camped with friends overlooking the bay for just one night and did our best to fit as much of a summer holiday into our two days as possible. We did cram a lot in, but managed to keep that supreme feeling of relaxation you can only get from paddling in shallow sea water all the time we were there.

Mostly I wanted to produce roundographs. I tried one on Whitby beach (from more or less the position in the image above) but it didn't really work: everything was rather too far away and came out too small in the stitched image. The beach at Robin Hood's Bay proved to be a better and more interesting image. Note Poor Alan standing as still as he could in the coldest water we've experienced in quite some time.

I managed to get a decent one a little earlier in the day also when the tide was too far in to allow access to the beach. This took two attempts, I was too foiled by milling people the first time I took the photographs and had to return a little later for these pictures.

Why have I made one a planet and one a wormhole? I don't know really to be honest. I often try a roundograph both ways before deciding on one, but in these instances I really liked the outcome of the first one I tried and kept it.

As an aside, these were not in fact the images which most pleased me from this little holiday. We spent our evening playing games and, when the light failed entirely, stargazing. Our friends brought their telescope along and we saw the rings of Saturn for the first time. I got out my camera and did a bit of star trail photography and was beside myself with excitement (see my other blog for a post about that).