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Posts Tagged ‘photography’

A somewhat motley collection of London photos from the past few weeks

November 16, 2010 Leave a comment

Sometimes I get too caught up in the day job and I forget that I don't have to go abroad to use my camera. I have a lot of London shots in my archives and so sometimes it can feel like I am treading over old ground, but then again I am always a slightly different photographer in a slightly different mood with that little bit more experience, or less patience, or more inclination to shoot people today rather than landscape…

More to come, at some point.

In the meantime we have booked a nice little long weekend in Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels, and as it's my fourth time to Bruges I know I will be coming back having done some serious shooting. Must remember to pack the tripod, Bruges all lit up at night is fantastic, especially if you luck into a calm windless night and the canal water is still. Can't wait. 
Categories: London and the UK, Photography Tags: , , , ,

No terror arrests in 10,000 police stop-and-searches

October 29, 2010 Leave a comment

A really interesting article in today's Guardian about the total pointlessness of the Section 44 stop-and-search tactics the police have employed against all manner of innocent people in the last few years – including many, many hapless photographers. Even the Government's own man, David Davis, is calling this what it is: lunacy. 

More than 100,000 people were stopped and searched by police under counter-terrorism powers last year but none of them were arrested for terrorism-related offences, according to Home Office figures published today.

The statistics show that 504 people out of the 101,248 searches were arrested for any offence – an arrest rate of 0.5%, compared with an average 10% arrest rate for street searches under normal police powers.

The figures prompted the former Conservative home affairs spokesman David Davis to call for the controversial policy to be scrapped.

"This astonishing fact of no terrorism-related arrests, let alone prosecutions or convictions, in over 100,000 stop and searches, demonstrates what a massively counter-productive policy this is," said Davis.

Hopefully statistics such as this, together with Home Secretary Theresa May curtailing the police's Section 44 powers, mean that we photographers will be free to move about – and photograph in public spaces – without fear of pointless police harassment. 

 
Categories: Photo and Tech News, Politics / Current Events Tags: , , ,

Yet another silly photo contest / rights grab from the NYT

October 18, 2010 Leave a comment

I was sent a link to a travel photo contest over the weekend – the New York Times’ annual Why We Travel competition. Great, thinks I, I am sure I have a photo or two which would fit the bill here. But a couple of things have stopped me in my tracks. 

Firstly, the opening paragraph contains this proviso (emphasis mine): 

(Please limit your contributions to one or two photos, and do not submit photos that have been altered in any way.)

Really? Not altered in any way?  

So this means that all of the RAW photos I’ve taken in the past few years, that I took at capture time with the explicit intention that I was going to crop, rotate, adjust brightness, and saturation, and remove dust spots, are all ineligible? Really? I don’t do kooky thinks like erasing telephone poles, nor do I composite in things that aren’t there. But I do maintain that the alterations I perform are non-destructive, help me ensure that the final image is as I remembered it, and they are an essential part of my photographic toolkit. Disallowing this sort of basic, minor RAW workflow-type correction of photos just seems silly. 

Besides which, using their logic, if you are a JPEG shooter, does the fact that you typically override camera defaults for sharpness, saturation, white balance etc, invalidate your photos from contention? And if it doesn’t, what’s to stop you setting the picture style in-camera to Vivid or some other highly stylised setting? 

The second thing I have a problem with is the fine print at the bottom:  

You are agreeing that we can use your submission in all manner and media of The New York Times and that we shall have the right to authorize third parties to do so.

Ouch. So by submitting, not only are you giving the NYT the rights to make all kinds of money off of your work (with not a penny to you) but you’re giving them the right to then redistribute your work to anyone else they want! That’s just cheeky. 

So go ahead, submit your unaltered photo to the NYT. There’s a slim possibility that you may end up in print in their august journal. But there’s 100% chance of you getting ripped off, and every chance you could see your work staring back at you from a motivational calendar in a gift shop. Next to the poster with the kittens. 
Categories: Photo and Tech News Tags: , , , ,

New York City in photos – Sept/Oct 2010

October 13, 2010 Leave a comment

After a relaxing few days in Cape Cod, we headed down to New York City, staying 3 nights in Manhattan and 2 nights in Brooklyn with my sister. As it was my girlfriend’s first trip to NYC, we did a whole lot of walking (and a fair bit of eating and drinking, too) – and it was a good excuse to do a couple of touristy things I had never gotten around to doing, such as go up the Top of the Rock. 

Below is a selection of some of my favourite shots from around Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Yes, some of these are cheesy, but they’re mine and I like ’em. 

I also managed to do a few decent-quality panorama shots while out and about, even getting one off the Staten Island Ferry that I wasn’t sure was going to turn out.

Bizarrely, after all of that intensive photo-taking – I came back with 1200+ shots from NYC alone – it was only on the very last day, in the last few minutes of free time, that I might have gotten the shots of the trip. As we were returning to my sister’s apartment in Brooklyn in a mad dash to collect bags and head to the airport, that we noticed this intense sunset over in the direction of Manhattan. I couldn’t resist and grabbed my camera bag, running up to the roof. I knew the car was waiting so didn’t have time to unpack the tripod, but I still managed to grab some fairly sharp frames of this extraordinary skyline. I have done a little cropping and some minor saturation adjustment, but this is pretty much as we saw it. A special moment for sure. 

These and more shots can be found in my New York City 2010 set on Flickr. 
Categories: North America, Photography, Travel Photography Tags: , , , , , ,

Photos from Cape Cod

October 8, 2010 Leave a comment

In the first instalment of photos from our recent trip to America, I will share some shots I took both around Cape Cod and in the ocean immediately north of the Cape, where we were very privileged to go whale watching. 

Cape Cod – Chatham, the National Seashore and Provincetown

Whale Watching with the Dolphin Fleet in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary
As I mentioned, we were extremely privileged to be able to go on a whale watching boat, not only spotting 12 individual humpback whales, but feeling very lucky to see several whales breaching (leaping out of the water). Seeing bus-sized animals leaping out of the water is not something that one will soon forget…

There are more shots to be found in the Cape Cod 2010 Photoset on Flickr.

Still to come: the post-edit of my New York City shots. And I have some serious work to do….
Categories: North America, Photography, Travel Photography Tags: , , , ,

Notting Hill Carnival 2010 in Pictures

September 1, 2010 Leave a comment

This year we once again walked down from our homes in West London and converged upon the riot of colour, sound, taste, and smells (mainly jerk chicken and spliff) of the Notting Hill Carnival. I love Carnival for the experience and the shooting, and I have learned over the years how best to approach it so as to avoid hassle – basically, I stay around the edge of the route and don’t go into big crowds if I can help it. 

Day 1: Sunday August 29th (Children’s Day)
We approached Carnival on Sunday with a mixture of excitement (at the return of Carnival) and trepidation (at the gloomy weather). The weather was mostly cooperative, except for a quite fierce shower that hit in early afternoon. But overall it was not as cold as we had expected and we even managed to get a bit of sunshine here and there. We managed to get into Good Times in the afternoon only by running the extremely-crowded gauntlet of Sancho Panza. Not sure I need to do that again!

Day 2: Monday August 30th (Main Day)
Today there were just two of us walking down from Maida Vale, slightly dazed from a post-Carnival pub session the night before, and we were after a low-key, chilled Carnival experience that was highly dependent on zero hassle. So we basically stayed on the canal edge up by the Trellick Tower and drifted around. But what a day! The sunshine was out in full force and it actually felt like summer. This meant that all the dancers and all of the crowd up this way had giant smiles plastered all over their painted faces, and the Vibe was Good. We hung out by the parade route for some time as the Burrokeet crew stalled out in front of us, and I took the opportunity to get a few closeups of the mas dancers and the crowd. The Burrokeet MC also donated some free beer to us, which I thought was kind. 

As always there are more pictures over at Flickr in my Notting Hill Carnival 2010 photoset…. 
Categories: Festivals and Concerts, London and the UK, Photography Tags: , , , , , , , ,

A weekend in London

July 27, 2010 Leave a comment

Last weekend I had occasion to shoot along the Regent’s Canal (again) and around the East End (again) and South Bank (again). I like to think returning to the same locales over and over again means I am improving my technique, but it’s probably just laziness. At least on Saturday we got a dab of culture as we visited the Whitecross Street Festival, which was a showcase of street art, food and a little music. More here…

 
 
 
 
Categories: London and the UK, Photography Tags: , , , ,

(Jet)Blast from the past – Royal Air Tattoo 2004

July 23, 2010 Leave a comment

Recently, other photographers on Twitter (namely @eosnetwork) mentioned that they had been to the Royal Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford, which has traditionally been the world's largest military-only airshow. 

This reminded me that I had some old shots from my own visit to the Tattoo in 2004 languishing on my hard drive. Clearly I never got round to posting them when I joined Flickr about 6 months later. I had a look and sure enough there were some shots there, but far fewer than I remembered taking. These must be the post-edit shots, but clearly hadn't been processed as they came complete with dust spots, under-exposure (common problem with airshow shots) and lots of chroma noise. I had shot these on my first DSLR, a Canon 300D (Digital Rebel) which meant I daren't go above ISO400 for fear of noise, and I was shooting with an el-cheapo 70-300mm zoom. So not my sharpest or cleanest shots, but I managed to rescue a few in Lightroom. There's a Flickr set here, or just enjoy a couple of highlights below. 

Categories: London and the UK, Photography Tags: , , ,

Glastonbury 2010 Pictures: Sunday 27th June

July 2, 2010 Leave a comment

This is my final instalment of photos from the Glastonbury Festival 2010. The Sunday started as another blazing-hot day, but it gradually eased off and by the late afternoon a few welcome clouds brought some relief from the relentless sun. I got back to my gig-going on the main stages and saw a bit of Slash on the Pyramid, Holy F*ck in the John Peel tent, Ray Davies, Faithless and Stevie Wonder on the Pyramid Stage. Oh, and England got bundled out of the World Cup mercilessly. But all in all it was the best weather the festival had seen in years, and Stevie Wonder finishing off the festival made for a fantastic celebration of Glastonbury’s 40th anniversary. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The full set of my Glastonbury 2010 pictures can be found here, or if you’d like to view them in mini-slideshow version then you can find that below (although some of the pictures want to be bigger than this):

 
 
 
 
 
Categories: Festivals and Concerts, Photography Tags: , , , ,

Some professionals shoot Glastonbury 2010

July 1, 2010 Leave a comment

In advance of my last, decidedly amateur set of photos being blogged here, I want to point towards some photos taken by actual jobbing photogs, some of which are just stunning. 

As per last year, Boston.com’s Big Picture (a truly excellent, themed showcase site for press photography) has done a feature on Glastonbury 2010 exhibiting some of the finest pro work to come out of the festival. There’s some truly fantastic work in here. My favourite might just be this one, by Ian Gavan for Getty: 

And as per usual, a significant number of the photos come from Leon Neal of AFP (AKA the Tabasco Kid, AKA @tabascokid on Twitter) who has come out with some absolute crackers. He’s just posted two new blog entries, one focusing on the main areas and concert shots, and one that is more “off-piste” (similar to my own meanderings on my “photo mission” on Saturday night). Leon has been kind enough to correspond with me over the last year or so and it’s been fun to compare notes in the runup to, and aftermath of, the festival. Clearly different approaches, but then my livelihood does not depend on this. 

Annoyingly, Leon has a few shots that are of exactly the same subjects, but executed with just a touch more professionalism, and that’s what earns him an “Utter Bastard” label from me today. Case in point, here’s my image of a lantern sculpture in the Green Futures field:

And here’s Leon’s. Damn him. 

Well, practice makes perfect. 

My final picture post from Glastonbury 2010 will be online sometime Friday. Then I can get on with my life 🙂
Categories: Photo and Tech News Tags: , , , , ,