On Friday there had been a hard frost and heavy fog hanging round almost all day, perfect photography conditions in my eye, and while I got to enjoy them whilst walking my daughter to school that was the extent of my opportunity to get out that day.
The forecast for Saturday was similar so I set my alarm early.
Read More »Frosted
Last weekend was the launch event for Connected Exhibition, something I’m very lucky to have nearby and get involved with every year. One of the highlights for me is always trying to organise a shoot around my local area on one of the mornings, with a few other photographers who travel here for the weekend of talks.
This year we headed out on the Saturday to Sherwood Forest, where else would I take people? We met in the parking space near Budby South Forest, the big area of open heathland where I shot much of my Sherwood book and got lucky with a decent bit of fog. Less than there had been on the drive over, not quite heavy enough to shoot in amongst the dense woodland, but still some serious atmosphere on the heath.
Read More »Sherwood Borderline
Is there a consistent aesthetic between the music you listen to and the images you make? It’s a question I’ve asked on Twitter before and resulted in some really interesting discussion, but I felt like it would be good to write down some of my thoughts on it.
Music has always been a huge part of my life, in my teens I played guitar in awful punk bands with school friends, I did a degree in music production then spent the first 8 years of my career working as a sound engineer in a local venue before now working for a company who make audio products.
Read More »Music and Photography
Update November 2018: Unfortunately it appears L.Type have closed down, this is a real shame as the quality of the printing and service was outstanding. I’m leaving the review up and if they do open again I would continue to recommend them, but please don’t try ordering or using the voucher code.
Read More »L.Type Prints
On Friday I was at Kew Gardens for the launch of the IGPOTY exhibition, more on that in a future blog, but I decided to take my little Fuji X-M1 with the fantastic 27mm 2.8 pancake lens along to take a few snaps of the exhibition, plus I’d left myself a couple of hours extra before my train in case there were any photo opportunities.
A lot of photographers would relish the opportunity to have a couple of hours in London with a camera, but I couldn’t be more uncomfortable at the thought of street photography, architecture isn’t my bag either and flat midday light plus a wide angle lens isn’t what I’d usually choose for photographing trees.
Read More »Palm House
I like writing these yearly reviews as much for myself as anything, looking back through the previous ones is a great way to track your progress both in terms of favourite photos from the year but also thought processes and achievements, hopefully they’re of some interest to others too.
Read More »2017 Year Review
Having just returned from a week in Northumberland I thought it would be worth a quick write up alongside some of my favourite images. I don’t often get out of Nottinghamshire with my camera, so a trip to the coast was a big change in subject for me – I was looking forward to the challenge of doing something different. It was a family holiday so most days I wasn’t concentrating on photography but I managed to squeeze a bit of camera time in.
The first day was spent over on Holy Island meeting up with some more family, I just took my little Fuji X-M1 which is my walk around camera for when I don’t want to carry the big Canon, perfect for these sorts of occasions. I had a bit of a play with my body cap pinhole at various locations, but didn’t get anything that quite made the cut. To be honest I wasn’t expecting much photographically from that day, but in early afternoon a sea fret came in, I quickly grabbed a few shots including the two below before all visibility was gone.
Read More »Northumberland
So nearly the end of the year and time for the traditional blog based round up of how my photography has gone over the last 12 months.
In 2015 I started to try and take photography seriously and this brought my first ever publication and first ever print sale, but I didn’t actually take many photos and I took almost none of my local area. I set some resolutions at the start of the year to try and fix this, basically take more photos, experiment more, enter competitions and a more personal one to capture more family moments – I think I’ve done pretty well at all of these.
Read More »Year in Review – 2016
There’s been a lot of discussion on Twitter recently about the merits of photography competitions, in a way it’s been done to death, but having been involved in a lot this year I wanted to put my thoughts across, including my motivations for entering.
Read More »What's The Motivation?
Recently for some reason I’ve come across more than the usual amount of comments online complaining about photos being ‘photoshopped’, often it seems to be based on a complete assumption and in reference to shots with no actual photoshop work, just basic and tasteful adjustments. One instance of it seemed fairly insulting to the photographer in question and made me rant a little bit to my wife, I’m not sure why I thought she’d be interested but I just felt like having a moan, so reckoned I’d try and write up my thoughts on why these comments and the ensuing arguments wind me up so much.
Read More »Why The Process Should Be Irrelevant