New York - February 2016 Pictures / March 4, 2016 by Ed Walker

I flew back to New York at the start of February after spending three weeks back in London. I didn’t really shoot in London too much because, well I’m not really sure why, I only really got one picture I liked at Brixton Tube, but it was a good one.

Coming back to New York was strange, after such an amazing two months before Christmas in which I stepped out my comfort zone, framed my shots differently, pushed the button at times I normally would never have; my photography felt fresh again.

So that’s the good news, after such a good first trip, settling back in on my return was hard. The first day back it snowed which, obviously was fabulous, but it didn’t result in anything amazing because I was having too good a time in the snow.

It was a full week of mediocre shots before I was on Times Sq on a very windy afternoon. With the light in front of me a woman confidently walked towards me and I fired off at least six shots and she passed me smiling. Her coat, lit from behind, her expression and her confidence made the shot.

The following days images were good, I tried to step back, widen my view and capture groups, people alone in the city and more than just my standard close up portraits.

Then it snowed again.

This time I was ready and made my way to Times Sq, I’ll do a separate post about Times Sq because it is very interesting simply for the fact that New Yorkers hate it. The snow was stunning combined with the electronic billboards lighting everything up. So many people were there, taking pictures and enjoying the weather that it was very easy to grab shots.

The next 6 days were relatively uneventful, I feel like I fall back on a standard image type and more and more become unsatisfied.

Because New York is on a North facing grid it means that as the sun moves from East to West it creates fabulous areas of dark and light. Walking Northwards up 7th or 8th Avenue in the afternoon creates an effect not unlike the work of Bruce Gilden, who shoots with a handheld flash. It’s similar because the subject is lit brightly by the sun but the background is in darkness and the result made me excited again, something fresh for me.

March looks like a very interesting month.

Street Photography in New York City / January 25, 2016 by Ed Walker

Almost to the day 12 months ago I blogged about how I was going freelance, changing my life and embarking on a new journey, one which would bring my photography to the fore and reorganise my priorities (if you haven’t read it read it here).

Well a year is simultaneously a long time and also no time at all. A lot has happened over the past year and yet I’m still shooting, seeking out new subjects, exploring different projects and striving for essentially the same thing. What has changed is that I am no longer aiming for a Photography MA, although this possibly could happen in the future, it’s unlikely. I won some great freelance clients and survived the summer up in St Albans but money was tight, I started to take on contracts and did a couple of great stints at Pearson but the game changer was in November when I became homeless, put all my stuff in storage and flew to New York for two months.

I had no idea what to expect, New York was nothing like San Francisco, which was the only other city in America I had visited. In some ways it was just how you see in the movies, in other ways it’s just different enough from the UK to make it odd. The tourist areas were incredibly touristy, and that was fantastic, Times Square was like shooting fish in a barrel and fantastic for every manner of citizen of the world, all wide eyed looking at the astonishing electronic billboards. The hipster areas like Williamsburg are so hipster it really puts Shoreditch to shame. The handlebar moustaches, wide brimmed hats and waistcoats were very plentiful.

The result was a breath of fresh air for my photography. Not only was New York immensely enjoyable to shoot in, it was easier to find the kinds of people I look for. I love well dressed and interesting people, generally young but occasionally older, I seek out the dapper members of a crowd and New York has them in spades. Wandering down Broadway, 42nd Street, Grand Central Station all resulted in characters and situations that I could only dream of in London.

For the first couple of weeks I was jumping at the chance at any shot I could grab because I was so scared of not finding what I wanted and this expanded my shot range and then when I realised the cool people were absolutely everywhere I relaxed and utilised this wider, more experimental approach with everyone I encountered.

On the 5th of February, exactly a year after my original post, I’m flying back for another three months, this time efforts are going to be taken to a whole new level, galleries will be sought, photography clubs and meetups will be attended and new projects undertaken, this is New Me 2 ‘Coming to America’.

My photography in 2015 / January 1, 2016 by Ed Walker

2015 was a year of development, being published and taking pictures of people playing Pianos. It was also a year of taking what I had learned in an underground car park in Edinburgh and applying it to my street work. It's also the year I move my work from Flickr to Instagram, a much more vibrant community of varied photographers.

This was the first great picture of 2015 for me, on the Circle Line choosing the right moment to take the picture of this awesome scaffolder. I got on and saw him, hesitated and then someone came and stood in front of him, so I resolved that when they moved I’d shoot, and I did.

St Pancras has these types of scenes all the time but this couple were really going for it, completely unaware of who was watching. The picture is made by the woman in the background.

I rarely stand and wait for people but this guy in Kings Cross looked so good I had to capture him, it took a couple of minutes for him to look up from searching for his ticket to notice me.

This year’s alternative project apart from my street work was St Pancras Piano. When I was commuting every day past the 3 pianos in the station it was clear I needed to take pictures of the wide range of people that played them. Most photographers shot from the back, I chose to shoot from the side. My hashtag #stpancraspiano got picked up by the regular piano players on Instagram and soon lots of photos began to appear by other people using it.

2015 was also the year I started to shoot for Electronic Sound magazine, an iPad mag for the synth electronic music scene, spanning everything from classic Moog to new artists like Karin Park. I was sent down to the venue and told by Neil Mason, the Commissoning Editor, to just do what I do.

My street work has become wider, as in I have stepped back and aim to get a little more context to the photo than just a head a shoulders.

This is my picture of the year. A holiday in Helsingborg in Sweden, a fantastic Air BnB house with a pool, outside eating area and a pizza oven, the lights however were not so good, leading to iPhone lighting and a shot which looks like a Caravaggio painting (and quite possibly a Taylor Wessing entry for 2016).

Shooting Gary Numan was a highlight of 2015, frantic, very stressful and the time flies by like a blur but the result is a really honest portrait, I daren't ask him if he likes it though.

New York! The last two months of 2015 have been spent in New York, I came here to shoot and I’ve been very happy with the results. I was so worried about not getting the shots I wanted that I shot outside of my normal comfort zone and went for subjects I never would have gone for in London.

Times Square is my new favourite place to shoot. With such a varied group of people and lighting to die for it’s perfect for moments like this which look staged but are anything but.

As I raised my camera to my eye I hesitated thinking that this shot was not going to work. However, with all the other people looking left at the traffic, the couple looking up at the astonishing electronic billboards and the only person actually looking at me is the photographer, I think it kinda worked out.

The light in New York is amazing, the grid layout means the sun creates amazing shafts of light while leaving the background in almost complete darkness. This well dressed guy was waiting at the lights, holding his coat closed from the November wind, creating a perfectly lit moment of quiet.

The lighting in and around Times Square creates amazing pools of reds and greens as the adverts wash everyone with colour.

So another year of firsts, new projects, new people, new locations. It feels like I am still working towards something and at the moment I’m enjoying the journey and not worrying too much about the destination.

Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edwalkerphotography/

Karin Park - Electronic Sound Magazine / June 22, 2015 by Ed Walker

Neil Mason is the commissioning editor at Electronic Sound Magazine (electronicsound.co.uk) and approached me about shooting an electronic musician they were featuring called Karin Park. He’s been watching my street work on my Flickr and blog for a while and encouraged me that he wanted me to do a similar style of thing for the feature.

I went to Olso in Hackney with the writer Danny Turner in the afternoon for the soundcheck and met the band which consisted on Karin Park, her brother David on the drums and bass and Juno on the keyboards. I started off by shooting Karin in her dressing room applying some makeup and chatted briefly to her about her music, I find this kind of interaction hard as it's quite intimidating and the whole patter of a portrait photographer something I’m not used to but as a former model she was an excellent subject, knowing just what to do to give some great close up shots of her in a mirror.

The sound check was a great place to get all sorts of shots, with the band being completely happy to have me move around them on stage and shoot completely unhindered from all sorts of different angles, they also had a YouTube music channel there shooting some film for a feature which meant that they did full run throughs of a couple of tracks with full lighting. It gave me one of my best shots where Karin was sat on a stool and the lighting guys bathing her in wonderful blue and purple light.

After the soundcheck was finished we shot quite a few backstage shots in their dressing room and in a small bar area. I found a spot behind the bar which had great lighting and took portraits of David and Juno, testing out a few different settings and getting ready to shoot Karin for what I felt would be a great intimate portrait of an artist just before she went on stage.

When Karin was ready I asked her if I could get a few shots of her and while she was quite busy and clearly nervous she agreed. She said she didn’t have much time but because I had already shot David and Juno there I was all set up and after only ten shots I said ok; which surprised her. ‘That’s the fastest photo shoot I’ve ever had!’ but she was pleased with the shots I had got of her and so was I.

The show itself was full of a really enthusiastic audience and I took quite a few shots from in front of the stage. This was the most challenging aspect of the day as getting a great shot of her live with people all around you proves hard. It really goes to show that getting a really fantastic live shot is a lot harder than you would imagine. The lights are moving and changing, Karin was very energetic in her performance and this made it hard for my Nikon and Sony to freeze her in the action. I never use flash and obviously this is not desirable to the artist while they are in full flow so shooting at f1.8 on quite a slow shutter speed makes this challenging and tricky.

I moved to the sound and lighting booth for some wider shots which encompassed the whole stage and audience and while this made of a couple of interesting shots I can see now why most photographers don’t do this, the intimacy is lost and the shots look a lot less exciting from this far back.

The performance was fantastic and the new album ‘Apocalypse Pop’ sounded superb live, if you ever get a chance to see her live I would highly recommend it. Make sure you check out the article in Electronic Sound Magazine and I look forward to my next assignment!

You can see even more pictures from this shoot on my flickr page

St Pancras Pianos / February 15, 2015 by Ed Walker

Between December 14 and the end of January 15 I was walking through St Pancras Station every day. I noticed people playing the three pianos that are along the walkway towards the tube station and after a few days I realised I needed to be taking pictures of them.

Before my car boot sale pictures I had never worked on a project that had and start and finish, my work was ongoing and I always assumed it would be, but the benefits of a project with a finite life are much clearer to me now. A change of scenery and a different approach is a breath of fresh air after being stuck down those tube tunnels for so long.

If you Google for them you get hundreds of pictures of people’s backs so I decided to get parallel alongside them to capture them in portrait, it also means they sometimes see me and look over. It’s an interesting angle for shooting these pianists as you also capture the bags and personal items they bring with them, the people watching them and the other commuters walking past; it makes for an great picture.

It also works quite well for a square format and perfect for an Instagram project. I’ve been experimenting with growing my audience by trying to come up with separate projects for Flickr, Instagram, Google + and soon Pinterest with only Twitter and Facebook the aggregators, so only subscribers to those social networks get to see them all. I’m not sure it’s going to work but personally it annoys me when I get a Facebook post, Tweet and Google + update which all contain the same content, so I’m trying to get away from that.

So while these pictures are processed in Instagram they are not taken on a phone camera, but on my Sony A6000 and wifi’d over to my phone for processing. This means that I have the original raw files and plan to give them a second life in much higher quality and processed differently in the form of submissions to magazines, exhibitions or a book.

But back to the pictures themselves, I’ve had an amazing response to them I think because there is a story in each one that leaves the viewer wondering what made this person sit down in the middle of a crowded train station and start to play the piano. Where did they learn, can they play well or just a few notes and where are the going? It’s an extraordinary public place to play the piano and while they might shy away from performing in front of an audience normally maybe they feel like no one is listening, although people do.

Some of the same people crop up again and again and some people bring sheet music or play off an iPad so they clearly came to play there while many others just simply sat down while they were waiting to get on their train, it’s a fascinating slice of human life.

I no longer commuter through there so whenever I go into London I have to make sure I grab a few shots as I still feel there are legs in this project and it’s ongoing and shall continue. I hope you like it.

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.

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.