Welcome to my photo blog! My aim is to put a new post up every so often. If you click on a blog post’s title, you’ll find a place to  comment at the bottom of the page - I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Lovely to have been able to take photos of Rev Kiran Lotay - both in church, but also with him doing some of his performance poetry in a local park.

Lovely to have been able to take photos for local vicar Rev Charlotte Cook; some ‘environmental’ portraits taken outside and inside one of her churches.  A great day for portrait photos - a bright sky, but not too sunny - nice to be able to use natural light including for some of the photos inside the church.

I’ve just had some fun creating a video out of photos I’ve taken of artists - a slightly different way of seeing the images compared to a static page.  

It’s been really good looking through all my photos from 2020 - I thought that I’d have more meagre pickings to look through this year, and although quite a lot of events that I would have photographed were cancelled, I was surprised by how much I had been able to do.  I’ve put some of my favourite photos that I’ve taken into a book - you can download it here.

Lovely to have been able to shoot a wedding just before Christmas - with lockdown rules meaning there were only 15 people there including the couple. But still a great day, with the service in a small church and reception at a local hotel.  Some grey-scale photos from the day here.

During lock-down it’s not so easy taking photos inside.  So for a violinist friend we went to a local park. We chose a time with only light cloud, and early(ish) in the morning so that the sun was at a nice angle, and had some fun with a wide variety of different poses, close-ups and wider shots, and some silhouettes.  It was a bit windy - never good for hair! - but with a bit of patience things worked OK. 

Lovely to do a pre-wedding photo shoot for a young couple, on the beach at Felixstowe.  It was a little windy! - but we had a fun time, and they were up for quite a variety of poses and sorts of photos.

It’s been really fun doing my Active Ipswich project - a chance to meet local people and chat about their exercise - walking, jogging, dog-walking, etc - particularly relevant during the current Covid-19 situation.  The project was featured in the Ipswich Star newspaper this week, and it was also published in the sister paper the East Anglian Daily Times, and on the publisher’s website (where they used almost all the photos and their captions).

I’ve loved photographing people outside my house who are exercising over recent weeks during the lockdown period.  I’ve been missing doing people photography during this time!  And I thought it would make an interesting project to capture how people are exercising.  A few examples are here, but all the photos are shown on the Active Ipswich page on this site.

I’m giving a very small talk tomorrow, at Wolfson College with the other photographers who are exhibiting there at the moment: ‘Behind the images - photogaphers talk photography’.  I thought I’d use the book photos I’m showing to talk about hard and soft light.  

The two photos below are of sunlight shining through the pages of a book to produce a shadow on the wall behind.  They were taken a few seconds apart.  When the upper photo was taken, the sun was covered by diffuse cloud.  This has the effect of spreading the light over the clouds, effectively making the light source bigger.  When the lower photo was taken, the sun wasn’t covered by cloud.  In the upper photo, the shadows are less distinct; the line between shadow and non-shadow is broader - the shadows are fuzzier.  The lower photo, on the other hand, has much sharper, more distinct shadows with higher contrast between the shadow and non-shadow regions. The light in the upper photo is said to be softer than that in the lower photo.  Soft light is produced by larger (nearer) light sources; hard light by smaller (further away) sources.  

Both hard and soft light have their uses: hard light can produce dramatic portraits - rock stars on stage, for example; whereas soft light can produce gentler portraits.  There are examples of both hard and soft light portraits in the ‘people and events’ section of my photos on this site.

Lovely to have just done pre-wedding photos for a couple about to be married in Lincoln - a bit of a windy and cold day, but nice and bright, and we had a fun time!

It’s great to be part of a 2-month exhibition in Wolfson College in Oxford with 8 other local photographers.  The photos I’m showing I’ve called ‘Light Reading’, and are a images of books employing light and dark, sunlight and shadow, to reveal details and create effects. The original images were taken for a publishing services company (www.wordsbydesign.online) for their website and brochure to help show the craft of producing printed materials.  

This is a little different from the people and events work I normally do.  But it was an interesting project to capture details of books. And thinking about the details is always part of capturing an event or the story of someone at work when I’m doing those sorts of projects.

The exhibition is on from 19 Jan - 14 March 2020.

It’s been really good looking through all my photos from 2019 - and reminding myself of the events, people, portraits and places that I’ve been able to enjoy photographing through the year.  I’ve put some of my favourite photos that I’ve taken into a book - you can download it here.  

(photos are reduced in resolution to make the file size manageable).

My favourites from photos I’ve taken this year

A fun evening in the Half Moon pub in Oxford, trying out my new(ish) lens and taking photos of the bands in rather dark conditions (in case it’s of interest, my new lens is the Canon 85mm f1.4, which is great for low-light).  (PS: I thoroughly recommend ‘Country for Old Men’: https://www.facebook.com/country4oldmen - pictured here doing their thing). 

I love finding good street art when I’m visiting a new place.  And of course, I photograph it.  So it’s quite easy for me to end up with lots of pictures of street art which, for someone who likes street art, might be interesting.  But they’re not necessarily interesting photos – if you see what I mean.  It can be a challenge to take interesting photos when the subject itself is interesting – to resist the temptation just to take a photo of the thing and have done with it. How can I make the actual photo interesting? … So as I was walking around Palma in Mallorca recently, finding fun street art, I tried to take photos of it which were more than just recording the piece of art.  I decided I’d try to get some context of the art – its surroundings, or the people nearby.  Here are a few attempts – do they work?!

I’ve just had a nice few days away in sunny Palma, Mallorca.  The low 20s temperature in November was a nice contrast to the chillier UK weather.  A couple of the days had very bright sun - lovely holiday weather, but not always a photographer’s choice.  Strong sun can produce harsh shadows and strong contrast which can be difficult to deal with - it’s not always ideal photography light.  But it can be put to good advantage, using the shadows to create more dramatic images, using reflected sun (or even shooting into the sun - though be very careful how you do this) to produce nice star patterns (perhaps shooting at high f number, e.g. f22 - small apertures - to produce this effect).  Below are a few images I took using these sort of effects - they often work well in greyscale to show the contrast up to best effect.

I enjoy trying to take ‘Environmental portraits’ - portraits of people in their environment, that give them some context and help to tell their story.  So it was nice to find, in a rather higgledy-piggledy second-hand bookstore, a book of photographs of people at work taken over many years by Magnum photographer Eve Arnold (you can learn more about her here). The book has 150 images of people in their working context in China, Egypt, England, Canada, the US, South Africa and many other places.  The shots are natural, candid, largely unposed, and primarily of ordinary people (with a few celebs thrown in). Most look to be taken in natural light (something Eve Arnold was noted for), and those that are most striking, for me, are those where the light is highlighting the face or producing nice ‘chiaroscuro’ contrast on the face. A great collection of environmental portraits that show the characters of her subjects and the world of their work.

Eve Arnold / Magnum photos. Vatican, Italy, Rome, 1967

The setting is a dark church.  It’s well into the evening - night outside - so no light is coming in through the windows. For ‘ambience’ most of the main church lights aren’t on either - a few giving some pools of light around some musicians, a small number of very select other lights scattered around.  People are seated at tables throughout the church with various activities - some music, a short talk or two, a small drama - taking place during the evening to publicise a charity working in Africa and to raise money for it.  It’s a very friendly atmosphere - but not so great for a photographer!

How to take photos well in this situation? Not so easy. I still want to aim, as much as possible, for nice images. For me, that’s about still making sure I think about composition, and looking at how light is falling.  And trying as much as possible still to get sharp images, without motion blur. Oh, and I’m trying not to use flash - just because it disturbs people, draws attention to itself, and isn’t great when people are giving talks or doing drama.

So what do I do? I’m sure others will have their own methods, but here’s my recipe!

- Fix the ISO setting on the camera.  It’s going to be quite high - 1600 or maybe even 3200.  But for me, the key thing is to fix it and not let it run wild on auto - that way lies potentially very noisy images.

- I then tend to shoot in shutter priority mode.  I want to control the shutter speed, because if it goes too low I’ll struggle to get sharp images with either me or the people I’m photographing moving.  I find that, using my 70-200mm lines, I fix my shutter speed at around 1/100th of a second.  I might sometimes see if I can get away with 1/80th or even 1/60th, but I’ll need to prop myself against a pillar in these cases, try to take shots when the subject isn’t moving too much, and make sure I’ve got several shots under my belt so I can pick the best one sharpness-wise.

- I let the camera pick the aperture. I could be in full manual mode, but might not have time to adjust things when taking candid pics.  Very often the camera will default to the widest aperture - and so be it!  That can produce nice depth of field effects anyway.

- I’m fortunate in that my 70-200 lens has a widest aperture of f2.8, so lets in a reasonable amount of light.  I like this lens as I can stand a little way back and not disturb people.  But if I need to, I’ll use a ‘faster’ lens which can let in even more light through having a bigger aperture still (I’m fortunate enough to have an f1.4 85mm lens - but Canon do a very good and inexpensive 50mm f1.8 lens). Oh, and image stabilisation on, if your lens or camera has it.

- and then finally, take care in processing not to sharpen images so much that the noise comes out.  Ideally, you don’t want to brighten too much either, as this will also bring out the noise, but it sometimes can’t be avoided.

Well - that’s what I do.  Any thoughts on this? - what works for you?

A flautist doing his thing in low light! Canon 5dMkIII, 70-200mm lens at 200mm, f2.8, 1/100th s, no flash.