The end (of college) is nigh....

I've been working rather manically for the past six or seven weeks, mostly on college work, but also helping out by providing people with my photo skills.

My main project of late has been what is known as the Graded Unit, a project we are assigned at the end of each year at college and are given an actual mark on. Usually with each unit, we fulfill the assignments and we are either marked as a pass or fail as to whether we met the brief that we've been set. The graded unit is where we are actually given a grade. Last year, I did particularly well, and was the first person in my college to receive 100% for the first part of the project. Overall, I got a grade A which was a pretty good feeling given the work I put into the project.

The project last year involved creating a slideshow of 15 portfolio images plus a self-written brief where we had to create five images.

This year, it was mostly the same deal, a slideshow plus a self-written brief, but with ten final images. I handed my work in a fortnight ago, and I should hear by next week what my final result is for the unit.

My self-initiated project this year, was to create a series of portraits based on historical photographs. I wanted my portraits to portray a positive idea of strong women. I based my research on photographs of Lisa Fonssagrives Penn, a model from 1930s - 1950s, who posed for some of the most legendary photographers in some of the most famous fashion magazines.

This project has perhaps been the most time-demanding project I've done, but I managed to produce ten images which I wanted to include in my project.

In addition to the project, we have also held an end of year college exhibition at Wasps Gallery in Glasgow. The launch night, last week was a resounding success, and I'm on duty tomorrow to guard the goods during its last day. I submitted two images to the exhibition, including the one pictured above.

In addition, I've also been busy working on a small portfolio of social photographs in the studio and on location as part of my social photography class. I've also created a series of still life food shots for my location stock class.

Then there's the extra circular work I've been doing. I've had a couple of shoots for some make-up artist students. The favour was repaid when they agreed to pose for my studio social photographs.

Finally, last week I spent a day photographing a bikathon for Leukaemia Research in Glasgow. I'm still in the process of editing the photographs from the bikathon, but it was a brilliant day and a great experience.

I've also recently had a little bit of work experience, with a professional photographer, for a physiotherapy centre. I really enjoyed working with him, and he was kind enough to drive over to the exhibition and take a look at our end of year show.

Currently, I'm still in the process of finishing off a few loose ends of college work, and then next week I'm heading off to London to visit my boyfriend and celebrate his 30th birthday, and the week after I'm heading off to France for a well-deserved two week holiday!

In the meantime, I've updated my website with a range of my latest work. I decided to create a "latest work" gallery to showcase this, before it's filed away in the relevant gallery. You can see some of the images I've spoken about here.

Finally, a little story about today.

I'm a member of a website called JPG Magazine, which is as the name suggests, a photo magazine. The work - articles and photographs - are chosen from user generated content. Last year, they published one of my photographs for which I received $100 plus a free subscription.

Today when I checked my email, I noticed I had several emails from JPG, which turned out to be people adding me as a contact, and updates on activity on my work. Turned out, they'd named a story I'd written as story of the week in their weekly e-newsletter, as well as on their front page. I've noticed a lot of activity on that particular story, and on the images relating to it.

The story is about the top ten things I've learned in the last two years of studying photography, which I thought I'd pass on to others to help them with their work. As well as JPG attention, I've also had an increase in Twitter attention, and one nice guy has even written a blog post about my story which you can read at http://slashmaraud.blogspot.com/

At least it shows the last two years I did pay attention to what I was taught.