By standers

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

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

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.

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Victoria Line

Tate Modern (2)

Borough Market (1)

Angel (2)

Borough Market

Brick Lane

Northern Line (2)

Northern Line (1)

London Bridge (2)

Seaside

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

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

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

“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.

Canada Water

On Sunday evening I visited Canada Water to grab some images during the golden hour. I would never describe myself as a wildlife photographer, the wildest thing I usually shoot are ferrel kids in Brixton.

Situated near Rotherhithe, Canada Water is a fresh water lake with a small canal leading to Surrey Water. It’s all that’s left of Surrey Water docks and is now surrounded by flats.

I’m interested in London wildlife and how it co-exists with us in such a large city. With so much park land it seems odd that anything would choose such a scrappy bit of water. Admittedly there weren’t a great deal of birds there but the ones that were had nested in unbelievably close proximity to human life. I could have reached from the edge and taken a Coots chick quite easily.

The image I am most happy with is the Pigeon, with the city background and the pigeon looking straight at me. Unlike most London Pigeons this one looks relatively healthy and provides a nice juxtaposition with the old 60’s tower block on the left and the new development being build on the waterside to the right.

Street Selection

After emailing my photography tutor and asking for a project, he set me a Street Photography assignment studying Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and other famous street photographers. I was to read up and write a short piece on the street scene and then go out and take some pictures. That was a year ago and I've been shooting street ever since, I love it.