About Jimmy

Born in Windsor, England, Jimmy moved to Houston, Texas at a very young age and then again to Moscow, Russia and again to Brisbane, Australia. After which he became quite dizzy and needed a lie down. Then he got up again and moved once more to Melbourne.

New York is ok…I guess…

Lately it seems like all my fancy trendy friends are heading to the big apple, New York city. whenever I ask them why they are going there it’s always the same answers:

1. The culture
2. The SHOPPING
3. The buildings

New York does have some pretty amazing architecture, but so does Melbourne!

This was taken down just one of the many alleyways here. I love cobblestone, I wish there was more of it because it looks great in photos but I know that it’s not so great for women in heals, so I’ll forgive Melbourne for not having more.

If you’re after art-deco buildings then look no further than the corner of Elizabeth and Lonsdale! Mitchell House is one of the coolest throwbacks in town!

If, like all my friends, you’re curious about flights to new york then click that link and start planning your trip! Happy travels partner!

Got a thing for taxi’s? We have those too! Sure, not as many and they have in New York, but you know…the more isn’t always the merrier…

Or maybe you just love seeing the sun set reflecting off all the windows and steel of the city. It a picture of poetry that you don’t have to fly to the other side of the world to see…

Oh who am I kidding? You can’t compete with New York. The city is iconic! Every movie that revolves around fashion is shot there. They have Time Square, Central Park, Grand central station, Madison Square gardens, The Chrysler building, the Empire State building, the UN and the Statue of Liberty! How can anyone compete with that? And it’s not just the amazing buildings, the museums like the metropolitan museum of art, the museum of natural history, you can go ice skating in rockefeller centre, go see the animals in the bronx zoo, the shopping on fifth avenue or even better on madison avenue. Catch a game at Citi field or time your trip right to catch the macy’s day parade. If anything there is too much to do in New York, that’s right, I said it, there is too much to do. So there.

Winter Queen Photoshoot

A couple of months ago I did a fashion winter-themed shoot that I have been planning for quite a while. I got some great shots out of it and lucky for you I filmed the whole thing in a series I’m calling “Start To Finish”. Once a week for the next three weeks I’ll be posting a video about how these images were created so you can give it a go yourself!

The first video is about how the hair and makeup was created and can be seen here:

The second video will be the photoshoot it’s self with lighting diagrams and the third is about post production and how to clean up skin. If this sounds like something you’re into, then subscribe to my youtube channel to be kept in the loop!

Sponsored post – Car Hire in the USA

It was my birthday recently, thanks for your present by the way, I use it all the time! But back on to topic, I got the game Gran Turismo 5 and have been completely thrown back into being car-obsessed again. It’s been quite a while since I’ve owned or even driven a car now and I feel like and alcoholic who’s just fallen off the wagon. I LOVE driving and one of the best holidays I ever had was driving across America. Thanks to our friends at Holliday Autos It’s now more affordable than ever to hire your own car for an American road trip, so if you’re on a search for car hire usa, click the link! If you are looking for things to do while in America I suggest watching a show called “man vs food”. It always makes me REALLY hungry and miss the various restaurants that had “food challenges”. Everyone here is too health conscious. The only place that I have seen that does have any kind of food challenge is at a place called “Big Chief Burgers” on the way to the Gold Coast from Brisbane. these are some of the best burgers I have EVER had and the “Challenger Burger” is 4 patties, 4 slices of cheese and bacon. The patties aren’t small either, much bigger than a McDonalds quarter pounder. Now I’m hungry!!!!

Back on topic, Man VS Food to plan your trip around america. highly recommended. We plan on having a food tour of the states when we go. Food and shopping, but we can’t spend toooo much because Japan is on the way back from our fictional world tour. Hopefully we can fund our trip by buying items for people while we’re over there. Shopping services do quite well over there since you can’t get ANYTHING here in Australia. It would be great if we can do this though because I could get some GREAT photos. Speaking of photos, some of my more recent photos!

How to make a Cinemagraph – the FAST way!

I’ve seen a few way to make cinemagraphs and a few of them involve copying and pasting individual video frames into seperate layers and just doing things in really round about ways. Photoshop CAN work with video now, you just need to import and then export it in a specific format and it’s MUCH faster. So enjoy this video on how to make this cinemagraph!

Challenge Accepted! Sydney

So Violet had a photoshoot and interview for an upcoming project and once again we got flown to sydney. Trip from hell. Storms, both flights were delayed, planes stuck on the runway, HUGE taxi rank lines, took nearly 2 hours to get from the hotel lobby to our room at 2 am and then had to be up at 6am, no breakfast etc. etc. Typical for us, every time we got to sydney it’s a disaster. Something about that city really hates us. But the BEST part of the trip was the photoshoot!

Full production number with MUA’s, hair stylists, set dressers, wardrobe people, the works! It was like heaven for me, everyone was incredibly nice and didn’t seem to mind me getting in the way. I shot a lot of video so I’m going to edit it together sometime soon, but after the shoot we had 8 hours to kill and nowhere to be so we went to The Galeries in town to grab some lunch and visit Kinokuniya. Unfortunately that only took all of about two hours, leaving us with 6 hours and nothing to do. Violet wanted to meet up with a friend who may or may not have been awake, so we sent out a text message and waited at a table for an hour. During this time I was so pumped from the photoshoot that I decided to set myself a challenge:

Take as many different kinds of photos as I could without moving from my seat using only my 50mm lens. 

Started with the obvious: my favorite person to photograph!

This guy couldn’t keep his eyes open

I was hoping to capture these people looking alone and then again when they finally met up with whoever they were waiting for, but they never came.

Violet couldn’t keep her eyes open either. If you haven’t tried it already, put your camera in B&W mode and try taking black and white specific photos.

For this one I switched back in to colour and set the exposure for 1.6 seconds, held it as still as I could for a second, then pointed the camera at the lights above and swirled it a bit for .6 seconds.

Some structural shots.

A new self portrait.

This one is only set to 1/3rd of a second and rested on the table to keep a sharp background.

And we end on a split toned B&W.

All of those taken from my seat, I took some images pointing directly upwards but the sky wasn’t particularly interesting. I also wanted to do some HDR stuff, but with no tripod it’s harder to do. Next time you’re stuck somewhere, take a look around and see what you can photograph!

Sponsored Post – DIY Travel Tripod For $2!!

When you go on vacation, you want to take as much gear with you as possible. But then your wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend/life partner/significant other/puppy starts yelling at you because  you took THEIR shoes out of the suitcase to put in YOUR backup tripod and you’re like, seriously Violet, you’re taking like…TWO pairs of shoes!!!! Why do you need more than the ones you’re already wearing!?!?! Then you duck the first shoe thrown at your head and feeling pretty cocky about your cat like reflexes you gloat with your eyes closed, only to remember in a very painful manner that shoes come in twos as the second one hit you square in the nuts. It’s a story as old as time, but no more!!! I give you the bottle top tripod!!!

The clever little diagram I made is fairly self explanitory, but all you need is:

• 1x 1/4″ Bolt about an inch long
• 1x 1/4″ Nut
• 2x Washers
• 1x Softdrink bottle lid

Step 1 – drill a 1/4″ hole in the top of the lid of a softdrink bottle. The lids for the tops of softdrink bottles are usually interchangeable and there is rarely a time when there isn’t a bottle of coke or pepsi or whatever available, so that’s why this is perfect for this.

Step 2 – Put it together in the order of blot, washer, lid, washer, nut. Tighten it up.

Step 3 – Make her open the box (just kidding, but if you get this reference then a digital hi-five for you)

That’s about it. It’s about an inch and a half long so you can always have it with you and when you need a tripod just find a bottle, switch the lid for yours and attach your camera. Make sure the bottle has some kind of liquid, sand or ballast of some sort so it doesn’t fall over. Also, I wouldn’t suggest you attach a DSLR to this one, simply because a long heavy lens might topple it over, so keep this one for the point and shoots/mirrorless cameras or micro 4/3rds.

Speaking of holidays, if you’re looking for the Best Deals On Hotels, click that link! Thanks for reading!