ohabioh: life

Sunday, December 06, 2015

Life Update

Hello all!

This post is pretty much just going to be a load of rambling on about my life currently.

I have 0 energy to take any photos, due to me being ill, AGAIN.

So a month ago, I had tonsillitis and a cold. I had to take a week off of work, which sucked. Due to me being a tattooist I am pretty much self employed, so if I can't get into the studio to work, I don't earn any money, simples. So as soon as I got better it as my aim to not catch any germs again.. That obviously didn't go very well as here I am a month later in bed.

My plan was to start eating healthy and kick start the gym sessions, as I hadn't been doing so since around June. I have been really disappointed in myself for not going to the gym. As most of you know, you make up excuses. Some of mine were valid but there isn't any excuse to not eat well & move your body around. The list of my excuses this year have been:

Not having any energy after work due to me starting to work properly (me not being an apprentice sitting around not doing much all day)
Not being able to find 3 hours to travel to the gym via public transport, do a 1 hr session & travel back.
Not having time to do meal preps.
Pulling my hamstring in May which hindered my workouts.

ALL of these reasons barring my hamstring injury are terrible. If you want to commit, you will.

So gradually as the months have gone by, I have noticed changes to my body and the main changes have been, cellulite all over my legs/butt. And the other being my stomach- I AM GETTING OLDER, its official, I have the slight bit of fat at the bottom of my tummy. I have always been very slim, when I was younger I always had a surf board-esque figure & hated it. But as I grew up I had a waist- which is still there but nowhere near what it was a year ago.

A lot of you will think I'm talking total crap, but it is because I hide it well in photos.

We've all done it- stood a certain way, covered bits with clothing draped over, worn certain articles of clothing that hide it etc.

I'm not saying I'm fat or overweight at all. This isn't the issue. My main issue is that my body is telling me I am unhealthy. Slim people shouldn't have cellulite. So it needs to go.

I have been unwell numerous times this year, mainly with tonsillitis. But this time it has been flu. Feeling like I've been run over by a car, whole body aching, fever, snot coming out of my head quicker than I can mop it up with endless Kleenex & the cough is now setting in with the dizzy spells.

So I am now telling myself enough is really enough because I am SO sick of being sick.

My immune system is shot to pieces and I can't take any more time off of work. It is affecting my life in more ways than one.

So my new plan. Is first of all to take action with my diet.

No more takeaways- my main one being Dominos when I am at work. (Its just far too easy)

I'll be doing meal prep the night before, making my lunches, cooking my dinners fresh when I am home from work.

I will be working out most mornings - starting my appointments (tattooing) at 12pm instead of 11am so I can get a morning workout in.

Making sure I eat my fruit & veg because tbh, I think one piece of fruit passes my lips once a week if I'm lucky.

Making smoothies frequently. And most of all- MOVING MY ASS.

I can't stress enough how much just moving about improves your mood & general well-being.

When I was doing all the above things early this year I felt sooooooooooo GOOD!

And seeing the improvements to my body was the best feeling in the world.

These were my progress pictures (left before, right after) after around 6 weeks. I was only doing personal training sessions once maybe twice a week and eating healthy.

*cries*

If anyone else is feeling like I am, then you know what you gotta do. :)

Enough about me feeling shit, I want to talk about the up sides to my life.

This past year has been the biggest thing career-wise that has ever happened to me.

Since I left college in 2012 I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I studied for 3 years there- well 2 and a half & dropped out the last 6 months because I didn't feel like the Art course was beneficial to me & I started working at Allsaints. I worked there for 8 months. Knew it wasn't for me pretty much the whole time I worked there. I was then unemployed for 6 months, searching and searching feeling like I wasn't getting anywhere at all.

I hit a low point.

A big fat low point.

I then realised that I had social media as my advantage. I had a great following via Instagram.

So I decided to open up my own little store selling handpainted phone cases & friendship bracelets. I then eventually expanded & started to sell handpainted trainers. I thoroughly enjoyed doing this. The shop started to get so busy that I was considering taking on an employee to help me with the work load. But right at this point I was offered a tattooing apprenticeship.

This was something that I couldn't turn down. Tattooing has been something I wanted to do for around 3 years but I just kept it to myself because I didn't feel like my drawing abilities were good enough.

I kept my little business running, making my orders in the evenings and on my days off which has been incredibly stressful.

I had been doing the apprenticeship since May, it all moved along really quickly thanks to my boss Rick Wilson. I practised tattooing on pigs skin from the butchers & after a few practises, I then moved onto people & I done my first tattoo a couple of months ago. I have been on apprentice rates while I was getting to grips with everything. Then a few weeks ago Rick said that I was no longer an apprentice. *woohoo* Which was obviously a huge shock to me, but I was so thankful.

So this will be my career now, for what I hope, will be the rest of my life. The passion I have for it is unreal & I am truly happy when I am tattooing.

Not to mention how happy people are when I have created it. It's the best feeling ever.

Here are some of my recent pieces:

You can see all of my work here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150599866250716.679353.691675715&type=1&l=57cbf425fa

(scroll to the bottom for recent work)

booking enquries: abigailhack@hotmail.co.uk

So when I'm stuck at home, ill in bed, not working at all. It is making me feel incredibly shit.

I haven't even been able to do any drawing because my creativity levels are -35838. I just need to focus on getting better, so I can get back to doing me.

If anyone has any tips for boosting the immune system or any motivational quotes etc then that would be amazing because I am a mega grumpy cat right now.

Thanks for reading my waffle.

Much love.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

How I Edit My Instagram Photos!

Right, I have a feeling this post is going to be fairly popular like a couple of other advice/info posts I've done. This one is all about what apps I use to edit my photos etc, as I get asked A LOT and it starts to get a bit annoying (I probably will still get it after I've done this hahaha) But anyway, I'll write a bit about the app, and what I do to the photos by using said app. I will also give links to the apple store for you to download these apps just by clicking on the name of each one. I hope this helps you all edge away from horrible instagram filters- really not a fan of X Pro II anymore. Needless to say, I'm not insulting anyone's feed, I just think that with a few tweaks here and there, that your photos can be bought to life a bit more and that way more people will follow you! Your feed has to be visually pleasing.

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First off, here is a screen shot of the folder in which my Instagram editing app's go, so you can see which ones I use! I will then expand on each one, explaining how I use them and so on.

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1. Afterlight - £0.69

This app is probably the best photo editing app I have downloaded in all the time of having instagram, it simply does everything from brightening, adding contrast, adding film grains and textures, light overlays and frames. Perfect for instagram cropping if you don't want your portrait photos to get cropped into a square. I am always reluctant to spend money, even if it is only 69p on an app when I'm not sure what it will do, so I can safely recommend you all buying it!

Step 1- Open the app, clikc the left icon with the logo that looks like the instagram logo and search for the image you would like to edit. Open

Step 2- Once the image is opened it will look like this with all the icons at the bottom of the screen, these are your editing tools!

Step 3- Select the second icon from the left along the bottom which looks like the 3 sliders, then select the Exposure icon which is a half white, half black square with a + and a - on. Slide this up until the photo looks just about right brightness-wise, you can see the difference below

Step 4- Next is the brightness step, you may only need to adjust this a small amount as the exposure may have done the trick the first time around, but if you want it that little bit lighter then select the sun icon under the same menu as the exposure and slide it to the right (up) until you're happy on how it looks.

Step 5- Finally, save your image and you will have a lovely brighter looking photo without the sun having to be out! Avoid making it too bright as you lose a lot of detail and nobody wants it looking TOO bright.

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2. Instastitch - FREE

This app will help you achieve several photos in a frame, or also like the mirror image photos that you may have seen me upload.

This app is great for doing so, the ad's get a little annoying on the free version, but I've managed to put up with it for over a year because I begrudge spending money on something just because of a little niggly thing. So its up to you how much you can put up with!

Step 1- Open up the app, and it will look like this...

Step 2- Once you have selected which framing you want to use, it will open up like this for you to add the photos, click on the + to add your photos in each segment. To get rid of the white border, I hate these, just click shape at the bottom, and slide the top slider all the way to the left so they dissapear.

Step 3- If you want the mirror image effect, select one of the sides (they will both be the same photo in each segment obviously) and click edit, this menu will then come up when you click 'orientation' select the flip horizontal button (the far right) and it will flip the image for you.

Step 4- Here is the final image after flipping, this is the way in which I achieve the mirror look on photos which is a great fix for having portrait photos and you don't either want a white border around the edges (it looks neater when someone flicks through your feed- this is what I personally think, I've seen some lovely feeds with photos with borders too ( you can use the framing in Afterlight for borders).

Here is the final image ready to upload!

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3) Fisheye Lens - eBay £3.96

This little gem is great fun, if you can't afford an expensive camera but want to achieve the fisheye lens look, this is perfect- especially for those of you on a budget! It cost a whopping.... £3.96 (I know its so cheap!) and you simply clip it over your phone/ipad camera, and it turns it into a fisheye lens! I'll add some photos below of what it looks like on/off and what some of the photos look like that you can create yourself.

Here are a few photo's that I have taken to show you what the lens looks like, I've cropped the edges off some of them! (you can see on the first photo that you get the circular effect without the cropping, so I tried to crop it as much as I could in the bottom photo!

A few other apps that I use are PicsArt and Phonto- Picsart is a more creative one, cutting and pasting images together, cropping edges out, adding drawings etc, its one that you really have to figure out yourself by playing around with it so if you would like to have a go, download that too!

Phonto is the app I use to add the watermark's to my photos (to prevent as many people as possible from stealing my photos to make catfish style accounts, its happened before and I really try to prevent it happening again, I don't want to be in the newspaper again as Zayn Malik's girlfriend, the abuse was unreal- directioners need some chill. But anyway- If you would also like to add your username over your photos, the app is really straightforward so go and download that and you're all set for having fab instagram photos!

I hope this has satisfied your editing needs, hashtag #ohabiohediting if you would like me to see your posts on instagram!

Much love.