Life Update & Advanced Studio Lighting

I realise that I have been a bit quiet lately. Oddly enough (for a person out of work) I have been quite busy recently. In addition to the Landscape Photography course, I have been doing an Advanced Studio Lighting course, taking some pictures for a friend plus trying to sort out all sorts of new Landed Immigrant (Permanent Resident) admin. E.g.

In UK:

• Inland Revenue/Tax

In Canada:

• Customs;
  
• Medical Cover;
  
• Social Insurance Number;
  
• Permanent Resident Card;
  
• Driving Licence;
  
• liaising with the company importing my belongings for me and trying to get the house/my studio space ready for everything to arrive;
  
• tarting up my CV, trying to find out which local recruiters deal with the sort of jobs that I do, worrying about job hunting in a new country and fretting about the fact that I have got so fat that none of my old work/interview outfits fit me; and
  
• shoving my head into the sand about looking for a job, even though my savings are just about dwindled to nothing, and attempting to diet (note: attempting but apparently not succeeding) my way back into some of my clothes so that I don't have to go to interviews looking like an over-bloated blimp.

On that cheerful note, I will leave you with the still life images from my Advanced Studio Lighting Course that I presented during our image critique recently. The inspiration for these was sort of afternoon teatime treats with associated lighting:

Above Exercise: lighting comparision between strobe and constant hot lights

Above: the two still life images that I preferred (both strobe lighting).

Now that I have uploaded these images to Flickr and linked to them from my blog, I am interested to note that all of the colours in these images look a bit grungy and washed out. How odd. I wonder if this is because I have changed a Photoshop image profile from sRGB (web) to RGB (print) recently?

In terms of composition and lighting, my idea and the shots are not quite there yet. However, I have the lights and props at my studio and I'm hoping to have another go at setting this up and getting the images that I want!