Sam Taylor-Wood is a contemporary british artist specialising in the areas of video, film and photography. Her work is based around the human emotions, life and death. Perhaps one of the most famous British Artists of this time Sam has worked with celebritys such as Elton John, David Beckham and Keira Knightley. Sam was born on the 4th of March 1967 and has won countless awards for her work, aswell as battling cancer twice.

Below I have included some of my personal favourite images and videos by Wood.

Self portrait suspended

Bram Stoker's Chair

Escape Artist

Ghosts X

Link >> Footwear Ads

This footwear advert post by Paulo from Abduzeedo caught my attention this week and is definately my favourite post of the week. The post features a range of unique and quirky designs from various footwear manufacturers such as Fila, Converse, Puma and Nike.

This is an excellent post and well worth a look, my personal favourite is the Scholl manhole advert pictured above, which is yours?

You can view the full article here

After seeing several pictures of ‘HDR photography’ I decided to learn more about it and gather some of my favourite HDR images so far. HDR stands for ‘High Dynamic Range’, HDR images basically span the whole tonal range of real world scenes. HDR images can be created by taking several pictures of the same subject using different exposure rates, these can then be combined using software such as Photomatrix and even Adobe Photoshop CS2.

HDR images are so different than other photographs because of the tonal range they offer, this makes them seem much more life like and unique.

Below are a selection of some of the best HDR images I’ve found so far.

Architectural HDR by ‘fulmination‘

Broad Sky HDR by ‘robertgilbert86‘

Architectural HDR by ‘mauswe‘

HDR by ‘stevenarens‘

Beach HDR by ‘petervanallen‘

Tree HDR by ‘paulobrandao‘

All you need to create HDR photographs are

- A digital camera (with ability to change exposure)

- A tripod

- Appropriate software (Photoshop CS2, Photomatrix)

So why not give it a try! There are various articles on the internet about creating HDR images, this is the best on I’ve come across so far.

>> How to create profesional HDR images

Give it a go and have fun!

Today I thought I’d post some images of the fireworks we had for bonfire night. I was suprised how hard it was to take a couple of pictures of fireworks, the main problem was my camera (Nikon S200) does not have a fast shutter speed which is why I’m thinking of upgrading to a DSLR.

Here is a selection of the best images I took, you can use them for anything. Enjoy

Here’s the latest brush I’ve been working on. I created the brush on Illustrator CS with a bit of help from Photoshop.

To download the brush click here

To view a larger example of the brushes click here

Link >> 10 Tips to avoid designer’s block

To start off my first ‘weekly favourite post’ I have a chosen a post from the GoMediaZine. This insightful article was posted by Bill, of the GoMedia family.  The article has 10 ideas to get inspiration, with some really nice illustrations included.

This is a brilliant article to have a read over to help get those creative juices flowing! You can read the full article here.