A new me / February 5, 2015 by Ed Walker

So as of the start of February 2015 I’m going freelance, I’ve done this before but for different reasons, this time I’m doing it because I want to readdress the balance in my life and buy back some time. I’ve been a Digital Designer for nearly 20 years, in that time I’ve launched a Print Design company, a Digital Agency, a music dot com, I’ve also worked in e-learning, live music, publishing, finance and, just recently, communication companies. I’ve also been freelance a few times before. But this time it’s different.

Ever since I left my job at Immediate Media a year ago there has been something nagging at me and photography has been a massive part of that. I’ve always thought I was a pretty good designer but never great and I’m ok with that. I’ve never strived to better myself in any extraordinary way, just what was needed at the time and situation I was in. However, when I re-discovered photography that all changed. Suddenly I had found an art form that I was fully comfortable with, I can hear my voice finally, something I never have been able to do with design. When I joined Immediate Media after a month I very nearly left the company because I didn’t feel like I was doing very well and I also watched this video:

http://vimeo.com/39578584

Now I don’t want to make massive wet plate photographs, although that would be cool, but I want to commit myself to my art like this guy is committed to his. I will always have a backup because I can go back to work, what I do is actually very much in demand at the moment and I’m good enough to get a job at reasonably short notice but in many ways I don’t want that, I want no backup, I want it to be this or die.

It’s taken my recent experience with my last job, where the whole company has to hot desk, the equipment is poor and the tech support even poorer, the whole organisation is a mess and no one really cares to make me realise, life is too short for this.

I don’t know why I take the pictures I do, I don’t know what pictures I could take if I had a lot more time to devote to it and that is much more important to me than earning enough money to buy a house. I need to get to the bottom of why I’m so drawn to the images I make and the only thing I really want is to find out how great I could be at making pictures, where that could take me and how much better my life could be as a result.

To do this I’m thinking of doing an MA in Photography, the project needs to represent a further understanding into my process but also look at another aspect of my work and I’m not sure what that could be yet, but I’m working on it. I’m also going to travel and shoot in different places, interested to see the difference in responses and reactions to my style and my approach. It’s going to take a lot of networking, something I really find hard.

The ultimate goal is to find a way through my passion to a satisfactory result. The best thing about that is I have no idea what that result will be, it’s also scary but there is nothing I love more than a clean sheet to start again and make something new. A new me.

Four edits / January 31, 2015 by Ed Walker

There are only a few common pieces of advice I take stock in when it comes to Street Photography. With so many photographers out there trying to come up with regular blog posts you often get bombarded with do’s and don’ts that are just nonsense. But one of them will absolutely improve your photography, edit your work like a beast. I have a process, it’s very simple and it removes a lot of the hand wringing you get when trying to whittle down your work. I call it the four edit process.

Stage 1. Import

In the import screen don’t just import everything. I used to do that and would carefully go through each image looking for something that I could use in each one. But some shots are not even worth importing and your hard drive will thank you for getting rid of them right at the start. Make the thumbnail size large enough to weed out the missed, out of focus and just plain rubbish shots.

Stage 2. Process.

Now go through your images and decide which ones to process. If you’ve done stage one really well you should be processing most of the ones you’ve imported because you’ve deemed them worthy to live on your hard drive. The ones you thought might be ok but when looking at them large won’t cut it should be deleted completely.

Stage 3. Export.

Now of the processed images decide which you will export to jpg and at this stage in Lightroom you could probably lose a couple. Once they are in your folder on your drive open them in your image viewer and go and weed out the ones that aren’t as good as the rest. Be vicious, you’ve got this far so be really strict with yourself and even if you think a picture has potential, if it doesn’t stack up to the others in the folder, leave it behind (but don’t delete it).

Stage 4. Publish.

My online platform is Flickr, it’s where I put everything and see how it performs. I upload the images to my account but set the visibility to just me. This gives you another opportunity to view them in context with your other images in your photostream and every morning I set a new image to public and post it on my Facebook, Google+ and Twitter streams. The result of this is that some images never get published, they stay in my photostream unseen because I shot something better the next day.

The result is you publish the very best of your work but you get to contextualise it with the stuff that nearly makes it but not quite, which I think is sometimes the most valuable comparison.

Check out my Flickr page

My photography in 2014 / December 30, 2014 by Ed Walker

A year of new projects, new cameras and new focal lengths.

During December 2013 and the early part of 2014 I was looking for a new job so my photography took a back seat. I'd also just bought a Fuji X100 and was struggling to get anything other than out of focus rubbish.

I found a role in Edinburgh and moved up there in February and during my first weekend Enna took me to an underground car park in the city centre. We walked down the stairs to level -4 and when we went through the doors I knew I'd found my new project. Taking place, far underground, was a car boot sale.

When I think about my photography it's all based around people standing and waiting on platforms, perfectly lit by spotlights with loads of texture and depth around them. I pull people out of the crowd and freeze them; constantly fascinated by interesting and unusual faces. With my Nikon I'd been getting closer and closer to my subjects on the London Underground but when I bought my Fuji it's focal length was 24mm and the autofocus was much slower. As it turned out the underground car park was perfect for the new camera, I was stepping back and observing so a lightning fast autofocus wasn't always needed, also the wider lens actually brought more to the scene. Each bay was lit by a spotlight and also down the centre of each corridor, this meant that everyone was steeped in light and shadow which made for some excellent shots.

I went back to the car boot sale every Sunday morning for four months, I played with using my Fuji on numerous settings, took the Nikon a couple of times and eventually bought a Sony A6000 but the best shots were taken on the Fuji on almost auto settings. It brought back my days at Borough Market but enhanced by the months and months on the London Underground building up the nerve to shoot people who were looking straight down the lens of the camera.

After 4 months I felt the project was finished, I’m not sure why but it had come to a close. I used a website called The Newspaper Club to create a newsprint tabloid of the project and had 10 copies made, I sent them to various magazines and in early 2015 my shots will appear in Amateur Photographer.

The Sony did allow me to get back into close up work on Princes Street in Edinburgh, my Lunchtagram project was a combination of the new super fast autofocus on the Sony, it's Wifi function to send a shot directly to my phone and Instagram. I had wanted to get back into using Instagram for a while but never saw much point because the camera on my phone was just not easy to use. When I got the Sony suddenly I could go out at lunchtime and have a shot up on Instagram as soon as I got back to my desk at work in the afternoon.

During my time at FreeAgent Roan Lavery asked me to take some pictures for him as an Australian magazine called Offscreen was doing a piece on him. They gave us reasonably strict style guides and we shot lots of pictures around the office, in coffee shops and the back streets of Edinburgh. The resulting article and shots looked fantastic. It's also reignited my curiosity in taking portraits.

Coming back to London in the Autumn ment back on the Tube! I had missed it so much and now my commute involves going through two major stations, St Pancras and Paddington, and using a very busy tube line. Using the 35mm lens on the Sony means my shots have been wider and much more like the car boot shots. I’m hoping to build another portfolio of tube shots that are less portrait and much more about the life of the commute and find some interesting scenes. I’m also looking for another project, something like the car boot sale that I can regularly go to and build up over time.

So overall this year has been excellent, I feel I’ve grown and expanded my work while still maintaining the overall themes and style.

Car boot sale newspaper / September 4, 2014 by Ed Walker

I’ve been going to the Edinburgh Omni-centre Car Boot Sale every Sunday for about 5 months, in that time I think I must have taken hundreds of pictures but at the start of August I felt that I had come to a natural and logical close to the project.

I’ve been looking around for different types of ways to present my work and for a while I’ve wanted to experiment with a tabloid newspaper format. A company called The Newspaper Club digitally print onto newsprint and in this case I felt the subject matter suited the newspaper format perfectly.

The results are great, naturally the newsprint sucks some of the depth out of the images and I don’t think this is something I’d do on a large scale but as a promotional item to send to magazines and galleries it works perfectly.

Strictly limited to 10 copies, signed and numbered a copy is available for £9.99. If you would like one drop me a line on the contact page.

Lunchtagram / August 7, 2014 by Ed Walker

There are two things that really move your photography forward, new technology and a new setting. When I moved to Edinburgh one of the things I was most worried about was the lack of Underground system to shoot my close up portraits on.

When I started shooting in Edinburgh I went to the underground car boot sale for my low light stuff but it wasn’t the sort of environment that I could practice my close up portraiture but then two things happened. I rediscovered Instagram and I bought a new camera, a Sony A6000. It was only the super quick auto focus and WiFi connectivity of the A6000 that allowed me to get back into the close up work.

Every lunchtime I go out and walk up and down Princes street taking pictures of tourists and locals; practising my technique of walking across their path or quickly darting in front of them to get a close up shot. I love the work of Bruce Gilden but don’t quite have the courage to get right in the face of my subjects like he does yet, however I managed to get some quite impressive shots of the unusual and interesting women who populate the city centre. It’s not the perfect time of the day to shoot, in the midday sun, but I was surprised by the results.

Instagram evolved earlier this year to give you much more editing power over your pictures adding vignetting, sharpening and much more control over your colour as well as the standard filters it’s always had, this allowed me to get the type of results I always look for. In addition the WiFi connection between my phone and my camera allowed me to get my pictures into Instagram immediately resulting in an ever growing set that allows me to scratch my itch of close up work once again, let me know what you think.

You can see the full set here

Sony A6000 first thoughts / June 5, 2014 by Ed Walker

So this is not a technical review, specs don’t interest me at all. This is a short piece on my reaction to this camera after one week of using it. If you don’t have time to read it the TL:DR is the Sony A6000 is the best camera I’ve ever used.

I’ve been slugging my Nikon D7000 around for three years and it’s heavy and big and cumbersome. The reason I’ve been doing that is that it performs, no other camera I’ve ever used could match it’s autofocus, it’s low light capability and it’s immense battery life.

For the past 8 months I’ve been struggling, persevering and becoming more and more frustrated with my Fuji X100, a camera which takes amazing pictures but has a glacial autofocus and a dreadful battery life. I experimented with zone focussing but found it just too difficult in low light and I’ve tried slowing down my photography, but I wasn’t getting the results I wanted. I would often go out and shoot, miss shot after shot and find myself cursing it all the way up to the moment the battery died.

The one aspect of the Fuji that I did like was it’s size and weight. Being able to just slip it into my pocket was really appealing so I’ve been looking for something for a while but of all the mirrorless cameras out there I haven’t been able to find one that was the right price coupled with the right performance. I need fast autofocus in low light, it’s what my photography is based on and I can’t compromise on that.

So when the Sony A6000 was announced I read the reviews and after a particularly disappointing evenings shoot with the Fuji I just went ahead and bought it.

I’ve been shooting with it for a week with the 35mm f1.8 lens and it’s speed, accuracy and image quality has blown me away. The electronic viewfinder is bright and clear, the menus are pretty good compared to even the Nikon (and head and shoulders above the puzzle menus of the Fuji) but it’s the autofocus that really stands out as a stunning feature.

With face recognition switched on it locks onto people so well and so quick that it feels faster than the Nikon and whilst I’m still getting my head around the other focus settings, so far it’s performed amazingly well. I’ve been able to point the camera in someones general direction and it locks onto their face and gives and clear sharp image at f1.8 focussed on their eyes.

The low light outperforms the Fuji with far less grain and even at the lowest light levels the autofocus didn’t even blink.

Battery life too is great due to some neat power saving tricks like a proximity sensor next to the eyepiece so the electronic viewfinder only comes on when you look through it. I shot for around 3-4 hours without a charge and still had around 30% left however this is all academic because the A6000 uses an Micro USB cable (like Android phones) so you can charge it from your computer, lovely.

It’s also tiny, with the lens on it’s not quite small enough to put in your coat pocket but taking into account the performance this is still a very compact and light camera which is comfortable to hold and much lighter than my Nikon.

So it’s only been a week but I’ve decided to go all in and sell my Nikon and lenses, I’m that confident in the abilities of this little camera. I’ve bought a 50mm f1.8 lens to accompany my 35mm and I’m looking forward to combining the wider style shots I’ve been getting at the car boot sale with much more intimate close up portraits, I finally feel like I have the camera that can deliver the performance I need without compromise.

New subject, new camera / April 3, 2014 by Ed Walker

One of my concerns about moving the Edinburgh was that my best work has always been in artificial light, tube stations and darker environments. There is something about this ‘stage’ type lighting that I love. Shooting on the London Tube has formed the majority of my work and where was I going to find that in Edinburgh? Luckily on the first weekend here Enna took me to a car boot sale held on level -4 of the multistory car park in the centre of town; perfect.

Not only had I found a great setting with great lighting but also a subject to explore that was different to my work in London. Now I just had to find a way of shooting it.

I’ve been using the X100 for about 6 months now. It’s pretty much been my only camera and I’ve tried numerous different approached to shooting with it. Each week I’ve been trying a different approach to shooting with widely different results.

Week 1 - Fully Automatic : Dynamic ISO - autofocus - aperture & shutter speed on auto with flash switched off but focus light on.

Really just walking around to see what it was all about and shooting to see peoples reaction and what I could get. The result astounded me.

Week 2 - Manual - Dynamic ISO - range focus (set to about 2 to 5 metres) aperture set to 2.0 shutter speed around 125

Disaster strikes, I thought I would try and see if I could get better results with a more manual setting but the shots were often out of focus because estimating the distance is hard and also under exposed. So much so that there wasn’t one good shot.

Week 3 - Semi Automatic : Dynamic ISO - Focus set to infinity - aperture & shutter speed on auto with flash switched off.

There is one thing to be said for shooting with the focus set to infinity, fast, instant actually. You can see why in the daylight, where you can set the aperture to f16 this is a solid approach but it’s a lot more difficult in low light, you have to stay very still because the shutter speed plummets.

Week 4 - Back to fully auto

As you’ll see with the image below with autofocus on twitch shots are really difficult, I came to the conclusion that it was time to see what the Nikon could do.

Week 5 - Nikon d7000 - 50mm f1.8 - Auto focus but manual everything else. Settings changing shot to shot.

I thought I would try taking the Nikon and seeing if the old girl could outclass the Fuji with my old approach and shooting style. The result was underwhelming. I realised the autofocus on the Nikon was only marginally better than the Fuji and it’s size and weight meant it attracted a lot more attention.

Week 6 - Fuji X100 - fully auto

So back to the Fuji and while this week was a very poor show (the clocks went forward which I think might have had something to do with it) the same autofocus problems raises their head.

So what conclusions do I come to? well the Fuji needs more time. You need more to autofocus, and shoot and I can’t manage as many ‘snatch and grab’ shots that the Nikon is better at achieving. But more time isn’t always bad and a new approach is always a good thing for your photography, wouldn’t you agree?

Thoughts on my Fuji X100 one month in... / January 7, 2014 by admin

So this is not a traditional review, I won’t be talking about tech or specs or even pretend I understand all that stuff. This is an account of my experiences with my second hand Fuji X100 after a month of playing with it. However if you want the short answer, it’s awesome (if challenging).

So to say the Fuji X100 is a challenge for my street photography is a little bit of an understatement. My work relies on a split second of engagement with my subject. My Nikon’s autofocus can just about capture the decisive moment I am looking for, the Fuji X100’s autofocus cannot; it’s just too damn slow. To give you an idea of the difference, I think I manage to capture about 25% of the pictures I take with my Nikon, on the Fuji it’s less than 5%

So why did I buy it? Well it was somewhat of an impulse buy. I kept reading reviews of the X100 and the X100s and people praising it’s beautiful image quality, retro looks, great viewfinder and most of all, how great it was for street photography. As the X100s had been on the market a little while the second hand X100 was starting to drop in price and I found an Ebay listing that was just at my sweet spot, I bid and I won it. I knew the autofocus was going to be slow, all the original reviews said so, I’d even played with one in a shop and dismissed it completely. But I still bought it.

So after a couple of days with it I switched to using manual focus, ranging it to about 2 metre, setting the aperture, shutter speed and ISO to auto and seeing how far I got. It took me a few days to even get a shot in focus, nevermind one I liked, however there was one thing that kept me going; it was fast. Faster than my Nikon, silent, it slipped into my jacket pocket and most people reacted differently to it. It’s less intrusive on all counts and eventually I got this shot.

It almost looks like it’s painted, the flesh tones are beautiful and the depth is amazing. Very pleased, I’ve been gradually moving the focus closer and closer.

Because I am used to using a 50mm on a cropped sensor which makes it about an 80mm it was a massive jump to go down to what is effectively 35mm lens. All my shots with the Fuji have been wider and further back. This is something I need to rectify but it’s also something that I’ve enjoyed. It’s been a breath of fresh air to step back even if in reality I’ve exactly the same distance from my subjects.

Another advantage of manual focus is that in very low light the AF doesn't hunt and get lost resulting in you missing a shot, you click and go and be damned with what you get. However it means you can get images like this with lovely motion blur.

So they are all the things I like about it, what don’t I like? The menus are simply horrible, over complicated and baffling. I managed to get the flash to work once, can’t now, not because it doesn’t work but because there is something in the menus that I haven’t discovered. Apart from that (and thats enough, I hate badly designed menus), the battery doesn’t last long enough but worse than poor battery life, it gives you no indication how long you have left before it’s too late. You need two batteries to even make this thing viable. Ergonomically I found it hard to carry before I bought one of the thumb grips. The dial to change the exposure compensation is right on the edge and I’ve turned that by mistake a few times.

Someone (or rather a committee) at Fuji decided the send this camera out with a stock charger which was too big for the battery and to rectify this by adding a little plastic piece that snaps onto the end of the casing. This is classic corporate stupid and it means you need to be very careful when moving the charger around not to lose this tiny piece. I hope they fixed that in the X100s.

None of these things are insurmountable and once you have it set up how you want it its a beautiful little camera to have in your pocket. It feels like it has a personality and after one month I can’t even begin to say I’ve got to know it, it took me over a year to learn my D7000 so I predict this will be just as long, however right now it feels good.

As Ken Rockwell says, no one needs this camera, it’s a luxury but it’s a lovely luxury and even though I’m still not 100% sure that I will completely retire my Nikon for street photography, the Fuji X100 definitely has something special about it.

My photography in 2013 / January 1, 2014 by admin

What a horrible year, miserable, frustrating and the biggest let down I think I’ve ever had creatively. It’s 2012’s fault, it was such an amazing year and I expected it to keep going. But it didn’t.

So my output this year has been considerably lower, I didn’t enter any exhibitions until the autumn and I’ve had to readdress my approach, what was I doing? why was I doing it? what am I actually trying to achieve? I still don’t really know. My solution was to get back out there and get back on the bus. In fact it’s the only solution, I can only take the pictures I take, if someone doesn’t like them, fine. As I said in my August blog post this isn’t a time limited project, in fact the more time the better because fashion will kick in and these images will start to take on historical importance.

The other thing I did, which I resisted for so long, was to buy a different bit of kit and see if that helped. In truth I was already back on the bus by this time, so maybe this was a gift to myself as well as an investment to try and see how different technology would change my eye and the results. I’m still struggling with it, my second hand Fuji X100, but I love the challenge. For some reason the harder it is to take these pictures the better it feels when you capture something good. I just have to put to the back of my mind the amount of images I’ve missed that I knew I would have got if I had my Nikon in my hand.

So the year has ended better than it started and actually when I look at the crop of shots, they aren’t too bad at all. Not as good as last year but a couple of them show progression and it was nice to be accepted into the Photofusion Salon/13 exhibition for the second year running. Expectations lower, sitting on this bus is maybe what I needed and a reflective year has maybe done me more good that I can, at the moment, see.

Photography on Immediate.co.uk / August 19, 2013 by admin

The new Immediate Media website has just gone live and there is quite a considerable amount of my photography on it, mainly the staff portraits which I have been shooting on and off for the past couple of weeks. This is the first major project I’ve done with pro grade flash kits. I’ve taken over one hundred portraits after having little over a day training. As you can probably imagine it’s been quite a challenge but it’s also been really rewarding because I would have never thought of myself as being able to achieve these kinds of results, nevermind direct the subjects and edit them to be consistent throughout.

I’ve always thought that if I were to attempt portraiture I would attempt to bring some of my street ethos into the studio but with a strict brief like this it’s virtually impossible. Only careful repetition and an almost robot like approach to the technique will give you the results that are needed. One thing is for sure, I wouldn’t want to do this full time, however it has sparked my interest in how I can actually say something with this completely different setup and relationship between myself and the subject.

First half of 2013 / August 3, 2013 by admin

After the being exhibited three times last year, featured on the Guardian website and for the first time really finding my feet in an artistic endeavour that was purely mine (and that was being heaped with praise), the first half of 2013 has been a struggle. Late last year, a female friend made a public tirade against me telling me that I was no better than a man who wolf whistles at women down the street. That was one of the nicer things she said, I won’t go into the other details. Whether she really thought this, was having a bad day or even if she was drunk, it got to me. From November last year to the middle of 2013 my rate of pictures dropped dramatically.

So this is the first half of 2013’s better output and I think it’s telling, I’m not as close in a lot of pictures. I’m choosing my subjects more carefully and I’ve really tailed off from the commuter pictures.

So here it is, this is a re-adjustment, a tweaking of my style and while I don’t think it’s quite as edgy as my output from last year I’m hoping that will return in time. I’ve decided to stop concentrating on creating with the intent of being exhibited and looking for praise and really put my efforts into a long term project thats simple and focussed and solid. I’m not really concerned how long it takes me, I’m imagining it will take me years but I know what I want to say now and I’m going to concentrate on saying it.

You can buy my book "2012, Women" here

My 2012 / January 13, 2013 by admin

2012 has been a pivotal year in my photography. During the previous two years I had plans to be exhibited and published but up until 2012 it hadn’t come to fruition. There is one main reason for this, I didn’t have my thing. In 2011 I spent a lot of time shooting street, specifically Borough Market, and I think this was training me to get closer. The market gets very cramped and crowded and I was finding that to get the shots I wanted I needed to be quick and close with my subjects, it also allowed me to move on swiftly and over the year I was getting bolder with my shots.

Then in January 2012 I decided to buy a new camera. Due to a banking error (PPI related) I could afford to step up my equipment and was deciding between a D7000 and a D700. A friend had a D7000 and lent it to me to play with before made my decision. The same day I stepped onto a tube at London Bridge and shot the most important image of my life. I caught the eye of a girl in headphones standing 3 feet away from me in a crowded tube carriage and as I raised my camera to my eye, focussed and took one frame. She continued to hold her gaze, she posed for me. As they say that the first reaction colours your whole approach, this couldn’t have been better, if I ever see her again I will thank her because it gave me the courage to get closer, seek eye contact and capture intense, personal images that a lot of people seem to really like.

That shot not only gave me my thing, it set off a year of pictures which would see my work being described by the Guardian Camera Club as ‘stylish and uncompromising’, win places in three separate exhibitions and have a follow up photography review with Gina Glover where she heaped praise on how far I had come in the 12 months since I first showed her my work.

After that first shot I quickly followed it up with a great portrait of another woman, this time on a bus in Brixton and over the coming months I built up half a dozen close up street portraits. Also in May I moved jobs and my commute was extended to take in London Bridge to Angel and it was here that I captured some great images of tube life. The great thing about tube stations is that they are not only platforms but also stages, lit (in London Bridge’s case) by spotlights and full of subjects from every walk of life. It was these images that caught the attention of the Guardian Camera Club who reviewed a portfolio of 6 images that I submitted to their Flickr group.

It was also on Flickr that I submitted some pictures to a competition ran by The Horniman Museum called ‘The London Look Photography Challenge’ and the first image I took in January was selected out of over 300 images to become one of 14 images exhibited in the Museum.

Shortly after that the tube images that II submitted to the London Independent Photographers member show were shortlisted and they chose two to be exhibited in The Strand Gallery near Charing Cross. Then to round off a great year Photofusion in Brixton chose another close up portrait taken on the Victoria Line for their AMPS Salon show in December.

I want to continue with tube life images and after a brief experiment with Blurb books I want to launch a number of books on different subjects. In addition to the close up portraits, I have continued to shoot London landscapes, street and also experimented a little with traditional portraiture. I plan to submit my work to a lot more magazines and competitions, and to push my style out to as many different avenues as possible. After seeing what I can achieve in one year, and knowing I could do so much more, I can see a creatively prosperous future for my photography.

By standers / July 1, 2012 by admin

Sometimes the people I train my camera on don’t see me, it’s becoming a rarer and rarer event because I now stand very close, put my camera to my eye and wait. Even then occasionally they are too engrossed in what they are doing (usually their phones) or I can see that they have noticed my out of the corner of their eye and are determined not to look at me. Then the stars of the pictures become the by standers, they are watching me looking at my intended subject and I very rarely notice them, it’s only afterwards in processing that I will see a face in the background, watching me.

It’s interesting because they are observing me often without considering the fact they might be in the photograph, they might become the key. I don’t know why I need the eyes but there is something that legitimises a picture when I have a set of eyes staring down the lens at me. Maybe my photography is legitimised by viewers and like in my close up portraits where I get a reactions, all I’m looking for is to be seen. It’s something I have been considering for a while, that the photographer is the subject of the photograph and what the viewer sees are people’s reaction to the subject. I’ve never heard of a photographer taking this position before and it’s something I want to explore further.

My first fashion shoot / April 5, 2012 by admin

It’s that moment when you realise you have absolutely no idea what you are doing, you just have to resort to whatever experience you have gained from the last few years taking pictures without an audience or anyone standing in front of you asking you what to do. I’d said yes to a fashion shoot mainly because I’ve never done one, I work in magazines and I’m trying to get as much experience as I can in as many facets of photography possible. This was a safe environment where I knew the clients quite well, they knew my work and as it was a favour there was considerably less pressure; but there is always that moment when you are there and it’s happening.

I have no experience using lights or flash, to illustrate this I was standing there wondering why the camera wouldn’t go over 250th of a second when the flash was up. Most of you will be facepalming right now but this is the extent of my ignorance. I am busy now watching videos after being advised not to go on a course when I can learn it all online.

So armed with just a reflector, three designers, a makeup artist and a model we went to a run down artist studio in Bermondsey. As the makeup artist was working we scoped out the building and found half a dozen spots where we could get enough light and there was interesting backdrops. There were eleven outfits to shoot and about two hours of light.

The first couple of outfits took far too long, the model was quite stiff and unsure and we weren’t really getting much I was happy with. It took the first hour and a few location changes for the first good images to start to appear and from then on it felt plain sailing. As the sun went down we even got some golden shots with the sun behind and reflected light illuminating the model.

I never quite got the hang of the flash though, but next time.

Getting closer / February 1, 2012 by admin

It’s a piece of advice you’ll hear over and over again, especially in Street Photography: “Get closer and you will get a far more intimate and interesting image.” In practice it can be terrifying to raise your camera when you are within arms length of someone and there will be absolutely no doubt that you are taking a picture of them. I have been experimenting with a cheap 18-55 plastic kit lens that I got with my Nikon D50. Holding the camera against my chest with the lens wide on 18 I can get really close to people and catch them completely unaware, especially when walking through a crowd.

But recently I’ve wanted to get closer and with my 50mm f1.8 and at eye level. I tested a Nikon D7000 before eventually deciding to buy, it’s much quicker than my D80 and also the shutter is quieter, so on a journey home one evening I was getting bolder and closer. On the tube there was a beautiful blonde girl with headphones standing 3ft away. In the shot she looked straight down the lens and it’s safely the best street portrait I’ve ever taken.

The best places to do this are where the rules of personal space have been suspended due to practicality, like a tube or bus. I don’t go out of my way to spark up a conversation with them after I have taken the image, but they would simply have to say they wanted me to delete the image and I would. It’s only happened once and I deleted the image on the spot.

A couple of days later I found myself opposite a stylish black girl, again with headphones, on a bus in Brixton. This time as I raised my camera her eyes swept across me and settled top left, another perfect shot: full of attitude, style and personality.

This is the way forward. The buzz you get from getting this close, provoking a reaction and walking away with a shot that pops with the very best of humanity in it’s many forms. I’ve gone from taking pictures of buildings to taking pictures of people and wondering why on earth I bothered with buildings at all, to not being happy with wider images of people and wanting to get in so close that not only do I see them, but they see me.

My 2011 pictures / December 30, 2011 by admin

This has been a pivotal year for my photography, it was the year I was published, had my first photography review, started to discover why I take the pictures I do and learnt a lot about how to move forward. The year started well with an image winning a slot in a Dorset Cereal calender. The picture of Jules at the Hot Rod Hayride had been taken the previous summer and started a trend in my photography for a very filmic look, usually at night and using bright, coloured lights to illuminate a scene.

Next an even earlier image of Brixton BMX park was included in the Time Out Cycle guide to London. The picture was a simple image of a BMX in mid flight with a couple of boys sitting in the background on their bikes looking at something out of frame. The image leads the viewer not to really look at what I was concentrating on when I took the image, the BMX in flight, but wonder what was going on out of the shot and create a completely different narrative to the picture.

My trip to America in the summer lead to me moving away from black and white and start taking all my images in colour, I was shooting street around San Fransisco and the sun, vibrancy and colour of the subjects, including Gay Pride, just lent itself to staying in colour.

In July I met Gina Glover of Photofusion for a photography review. I took along a pretty random set of images and she very quickly deciphered the different angles my photography was pulling in and helped me identify and compartmentalise the themes. One of the first things she commented on was that I should work in colour, a great confirmation of something I had already been thinking about. She also encouraged me to start writing about my images as it would help me work out where I was heading. It was then that I started my blog, since then I have been trying to articulate the things that motivate the images I take and it has been incredibly helpful.

It was around that time that Google+ launched. Merging functionality from Facebook and Twitter it was an immediate success for photographers and has been a constant source of inspiration. I try to add images and update as much as possible and so far I am being followed by over 1000 photographers.

Throughout the whole year I have been taking images of Borough Market, solidifying the style of the images, experimenting with the light at different times of the day and really attempting to pull together a coherent body of work. About two thirds of the way through the year I had half a dozen images and decided to try and get some images of the market accepted into the Photofusion Annual Members Photographic Show. The process of entering, collecting together the images, writing the submission and presenting it to the gallery taught me a great deal; despite the fact that I didn’t make the cut. However the process has made me focus on the kinds of images I want from Borough and I have gone on to make some of the best pictures of the market that I now have in my portfolio, so it was very useful indeed.

The year has brought me to some conclusions. I love shooting at night and working with the colourful lights and signs of London streets and I adore shooting in the rain, the harder the better!

The year has ended well with news that two of my images have been accepted into an urban sculpture project called Vertical Gallery in Shoreditch. They called for entries taken on a camera phone and in black and white. I took a number of pictures around the area on two visits and I’m looking forward to seeing my work displayed in 2012.

I like to remain anonymous and step back, my best pictures look like stills from films and are stark and contrasty with lots of black; I love the shadows. And I can see in my mind the direction for my images, I want to create dark narratives but not of cold and empty spaces but with people and glimpsing something that is usually unspoken...

Finally thank you to everyone who has looked at, commented on and guided me this year, it’s been tremendously encouraging to hear about the images you like and the ones you don’t. I couldn’t have moved forward with my photography without the help of people like Dave Hodgkinson, Gina Glover, Tom Gifford, Lucy Bainbridge, Liz Somerville, Anna Hales and many more. Onwards to 2012!

Seaside / October 10, 2011 by admin

When I was a child my parents had a caravan in Norfolk, on the East coast of England. I spent up to 6 weeks a year, every year, playing on beaches in rock pools with seaweed, crabs and cold wet sand. We used to spend a lot of time at the beach, on the cliffs and around the concrete ramps and sea barriers that you can find in every single coastal town in the UK.

I stopped going when I was a teenager and have rarely been back to those kinds of places in adult life but having just spent a weekend in Margate and Broadstairs, so many memories came flooding back. The textures, smells and visuals that I had rarely thought about since visiting them last evoked that feeling you get when something from childhood that you had forgotten about surprises you; so I set about shooting.

Lots of photographers like Martin Parr have shot at the seaside and commented on the uniquely British sense of holiday but these shots are more about my memories and I don’t think they talk about that old fashioned run down feel that so many other photogs do when they cover the subject. I tried to shoot things that were not about where I was, but what I remembered. Some of them are classic seaside shots, but some are much more personal, especially when it comes to the preformed concrete that I spend so much time playing around. It seems so cold and alien to somewhere so soft as a beach but indicates quite how powerful the sea can be.

So I hope I’ve captured the beauty of the British seaside, it’s what I remember from my childhood.

Borough Market / August 25, 2011 by admin

Borough Market is well known as being a busy market in the London Bridge area of the capital. Most tourists see it rammed full of people and in full flow selling a variety of produce, ranging from everyday veg to fine pastries as well as lots of delicious food on the go; half real market - half tourist destination. I see it a little bit differently. At 9 am in the morning it’s either empty, if there is no market that day, or busily being set up by the vendors. Vans are parked in areas that will be full of people only an hour or so later, commuters are passing through on their way to work and locals with their dogs are drinking coffee.

It’s at this time that you can pick out individuals, see the workers in action, feel the build up; but it’s also very quiet, most people walking through are wearing headphones. Away from the main road it feels like an oasis.

The market it situated next to Southwark Cathedral in a very old, and relatively unspoilt part of the Southbank, which is also home to The Golden Hinde, The Clink prison, The Globe Theatre and Tate Modern: the mix of people makes for great photos. It might be one of London’s most photographed tourist spots but most of those pictures only tell one small part of the story. I plan to create a more rounded view of of the market, visiting it at varying times, specifically the end of the day and also at different times of the year.

Geometry, shadows and negative space / August 19, 2011 by admin

Last Sunday I helped paint Lucy’s flat, she has an apartment above her artist space and studio and it’s pretty big. Her living space was originally going to be an office, so it’s painted white. When we had finished it looked like a beautiful sea of white like a fresh fall of snow. So I got my camera out. The bannister's looked great, as did the white brickwork and curtain hoops all in white and when I took the contrast down even further they start to look like ghostly images.

Afterwards I was thinking about why I had taken the pictures, it’s not the first time I’ve taken images like this. In fact with an early Kodak digital camera, living in Bristol, it was the first artistic set of photographs I ever took. My bedroom had unusual ceiling plasterwork which created really interesting shapes and shadows. At the time I was going to use them to paint some pictures, but I never did. Since then I’ve shot pictures of the stainless steel ski slope roof at Vauxhall Station, motion blurred images of train tracks and quite obviously there is a whole theme of geometry, shadows and negative space going on in the images I like. Even my pictures of Spaceships are as much about the negative space they create as the buildings themselves.

I suppose my career as a Graphic Designer has a great deal to do with this, as a designer these kind of images are easy to work with if you are laying out copy or designing posters but there is something very comforting about choosing and shooting a geometric theme. The way you can get the same geometric proportions from vastly different scales and find the same pleasing space and negative space from totally random subjects is, I think, why I seem to come back to it again and again. I think it’s like slipping back into a comfort zone while I experiment and learn about new things.

Goodbye Black and White / August 5, 2011 by admin

“Give me something to do”

Just over a year and a half ago I needed a project and spoke to my photography tutor Dave Hodgkinson http://www.davehodgkinson.com/blog/. He tasked me to study Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and other famous and influential Street Photographers.

Since then my focus in Photography has been Street because as soon as I got out there is becomes very obvious quite how difficult it is and how many mental obstacles you need to overcome to get truly amazing Street shots.

As you may or may not know, Street is traditionally shot in Black and White and I duly went about converting my images, and that is the point of this post.

I’m saying goodbye to Black and White.

It’s not because I don’t like Black and White images, it’s not because I think i still have a long way to go before I can create truly great Black and White conversions, even though I do. It’s because I feel more comfortable in colour. It feels more natural to me and after looking at images by nick Turpin and Martin Parr I just feel that moving to colour will give me more reach. At the moment I can’t imagine exhibiting Black and White images. The pictures I’m making are composed in colour and in so many cases an element on their modernity and reality seems to be stripped out when I remove the colour.

This has been whirring around my head for sometime but only really settled whilst I was in California recently staying on my brothers farm. He wanted images he could use on postcards for the people who buy organic produce from him. Obviously these were in colour and there wasn’t even a conversation about whether the pictures should be in colour, the beautiful Lavender, Cherry trees and Sunsets of the farm can’t be represented in Black and White.

However, when I went into San Francisco and shot some Street, I didn’t turn them into Black and White and suddenly felt they spoke to me through the colour. The looked modern, they looked more real and, maybe because I have become more proficient at processing my images in Lightroom, they looked more professional.

So when I recently had my photography portfolio review with Gina Glover it was great to hear that one of the first things she told me was that I was a colour photographer and she thought I should stop shooting in Black and White.

So this is a collection of the Black and White Street shots. Looking back I now realise how far I’ve come but I feel I need to continue this journey in colour. I’m sure it will change what I shoot, I think it already has and I hope it’s going to extend, enhance and expand the images I make.