bikes and things

So that didn’t go quite to plan in terms of updating this site every week with images as per my last post here in the first week of January 2019. That was also my last post on here since then. As always it’s another ‘starting again’ and ‘I promise to write more here’ post. Maybe our current lockdown and isolation situation will help with wanting to write more.

A few things interested me about the whole 365 project and process but perhaps before reflecting on that too much more it’s worth looking back at the rules I set myself in an introductory blog post last year. The idea was to have a few constraints to work within and anyone who knows me will know that I like rules and structure. So the rules I set are below and how many I stuck with…

It’s got to be taken on the day – obviously. No cheating. 

Same as 2009 and again I managed to stick to this one despite it taking a while to get into the habit but definitely got easier after the first few weeks. There were a few moments where I almost forgot to take a shot but once I got used to it again it became second nature. I got into this weird habit of tapping my back pocket to check my camera was there the same way we all check for our phone, keys and wallet. What was even weirder was the panic that set in in the first few weeks of 2020 where I panicked when it wasn’t there.

No iPhone! Must be shot with a proper camera, currently a Ricoh GR II or Nikon D700 / D810 + various film cameras.  

This one is interesting as I thought I would be out with the tripod all the time looking at interesting things to take images of with the ‘proper’ camera (and shift lens) doing really architectural shots. I only used it once. No iPhone shots were used and they were all taken with the Ricoh GR II which I really grew to love over the year. Almost all of the images were landscape orientation

No selfies.

Well this was fairly easy but ended the series on 31st December with a selfie self portrait.

No work photos or commissioned work. 

Again no real issue with this and stuck to it but there were a few nice shots I would have liked to include and the trouble is that when you’re on a shoot all day your attention is very much away from thinking about taking 365 photos. So these days it felt like the non-paid for photo was a bit lame. Anyway, rules are rules.

Minimal cropping or editing. I have an astigmatism in one eye so all my pics come out wonky by 2 degrees. I’m allowing myself some straightening and cropping. 

I think this was a good rule. Try and keep whatever you originally captured in the frame but allowing for some straightening and cropping a tiny distraction out. I got some dust on the sensor later in the year and ended up having to crop this out a few times on more complex scenes where spot cloning was too tricky.

No wholesale image manipulation. The only one I’m going to allow is stitching two images together with a shift lens. But no comping of people / birds / cloning etc. 

There was something important about this one. Felt a bit like shooting with film and a basic scan and trying to keep it simple. No images had any brush work applied and did what I could with the basic sliders in Lightroom. It’s still possible to do a lot through this method though. I found my shots getting darker and moodier throughout the year. Lots of lower key processing.

Upload them all to Flickr each day to an album. 

I did manage to upload to Flickr also but there never seems to be much engagement there these days. I gave up on Flickr almost entirely towards the end of the year and only recently finished uploading the full set.

Post a weekly summary to Instagram and this blog. 

I posted them all to Instagram each week on a Sunday evening which was enough admin / work in itself. The last thing I wanted was yet more admin to do on a Sunday whilst getting ready for work the next day. It was hard enough choosing images each day, editing, sorting and then prepping for Instagram. I had a bit of a wobble during the year personally and stopped posting them but later resumed.

Maybe I’ll post next about what I learnt and what I got out of it.

First week in the bag. It’s been harder than I expected remember and I’m trying to train myself to not forget each and every day, adding it to muscle memory if you will. Living in a an occasional and slight state of fear of missing a day or timing out on being able to record an image. So far so good though apart from sometimes struggling for inspiration as well as falling into the same old cliches. That’s the idea though, to take more pictures and edit down.

What’s great about it is that it does really make you want to get out more and see the world around you. From wanting to attend that art gallery with the show that you really like but is soon to close to simply just scanning every single part of a street as you walk down it. Sadly I’m on foot / tube / bus at the moment due to injury but I can’t help but think how much easier this would be on the bike. That will come soon though.

So far it’s been ok though and have enjoyed carrying a camera around a lot more. This article in the Guardian on street photography was really helpful this week and encouraged me to shoot from the hip rather than always raising the camera to my eye. All pics this week are shot with the Ricoh GR II with the night shot being taken on the D810 and 24mm PC-E. Image 001 was already posted on New Years day so here are the rest…

I started to take a keen interest in photography again around 2007 and wanted to develop my skills a little further. At the time all I had was a little Fujifilm FinePix F31fd which was an incredible camera for its compact size and sensor. I soon upgraded to a second hand Nikon D70 and got quite obsessed with learning how to use it. I had also got quite obsessed with Flickr and sharing of images and the community based around it.

I’m not quite sure how I found out about the idea but I ended up starting a 365 project in 2009. The idea being that you take a photo every single day for an entire year in the hope that you get better at taking / making photos or just a nice way of reflecting on what happened that year. My images were all uploaded to Flickr at the time and remain there. What started off as a fairly lame set of pictures quickly improved resulting in a complete obsession with photography. It also resulted in purchasing all sorts of cameras and equipment as well as going on a course to learn all about MTB photography. I also learnt how to use my tools – Lightroom, Bridge and Photoshop, although I’ve since toned down the processing by some considerable margin.

One of the nicest things about the process was looking back and seeing themes develop – these included angles, shadows, night photography, some architecture, more abstract shapes, street photography, riding shots and also the occasional portrait once I’d begun to understand off camera flash.

There were also some pretty desperate times running around trying to find something interesting to take a picture of at 11.45pm after getting back late from work. Can I make this towel rail into an abstract image? More often than not, yes!

At the end of all of this I made a book with Blurb and have a copy of it at home still. I use it once a year to show students at Bath University why you should consider a photo project.

Fast forward ten or so years and I’m still taking lots of photos and have a successful Architectural Photography business. When I say I take loads of photos I mean with a phone (iPhone X as of writing) and the chances or reasons to take a compact camera are reduced. Most of these photos find their way to Instagram after a quick edit in VSCO on the phone. Other photography is often work related and I felt I needed a reason to pick up the camera again and have it with me all the time and be more creative with photography and experiment a bit more.

As with all these things I’ve made some rules to consider:

It’s got to be taken on the day – obviously. No cheating.
No iPhone! Must be shot with a proper camera, currently a Ricoh GR II or Nikon D700 / D810 + various film cameras.
No selfies.
No work photos or commissioned work.
Minimal cropping or editing. I have an astigmatism in one eye so all my pics come out wonky by 2 degrees. I’m allowing myself some straightening and cropping.
No wholesale image manipulation. The only one I’m going to allow is stitching two images together with a shift lens. But no comping of people / birds / cloning etc.
Upload them all to Flickr each day to an album.
Post a weekly summary to Instagram and this blog.

And then there’s the things I want to start looking at:

People, friends, candid shots.
More street photos – be braver and more confident!
Documenting my local environment, the things everyone else walks by and misses. The oddities and wonderful things around Camberwell and Peckham.
Go to new places on the way to work / home from work. Break out of that bubble.
Use it as an excuse to shoot new and interesting Architecture on spec in and around London.
Documenting more interesting buildings, Brutalist, Art Deco, PoMo.
Low key / high key shooting / processing.
Shadows / form / texture / angles – the favourites!
And of course recording more cycling imagery but better than ever before.

And here’s image number one taken at the early hours of this morning of another photographer capturing the fireworks over London. Just got to try and not forget a day and get this back into my daily routine…

Finally managed to upload all my 365 images to my portfolio site. Been uploading a few each lunchtime and now all finished. Good to see them all in one place too. Think it shows the scale of it quite nicely. The page might take a few secs to load for obvious reasons

andymatthewsphotography.com/project/365/

Trying to find someway of displaying all the 365 images in a website. Here’s a slideshow format. Not sure it’s what I want really and I might have to do something a bit more labour intensive.

I’ve just put the final touches to my book showing all the 365 photos from the project. The 700mb PDF file might take a while to upload to Blurb, the online shop that does the printing. Fortunately I have been full of cold and cough since Christmas day I’ve had plenty of time to tinker with it especially the cover as you can see below.

Blurb do a number of different sizes but I’ve gone for the “Standard Landscape” size which is 10″ x 8″. It’s a hardback book and the cover image gets printed on the card. I’ve read lots of reviews and the quality seems to be pretty good. I think it’ll work out at about £40 for the book which I think is pretty good for a book with almost 400 pages.

The layout is pretty simple. Just full bleed images and the number of the day as per below. I’m not sure if anyone else will buy a copy but who cares. It’ll be good to have a physical reminder of the year.

That’s it! All done. 365 days all recorded. It’s been fun and now it’s over. Lovely.

I thought it only fitting to end on a Portrait of myself as my next project will be about portraits.

The 365 project is coming to a close. Only two more days left now which is good. One of the most enjoyable things of taking so many pictures is that I’ve had to develop ways of being more creative about what I take pictures of. I’ve been trying to look around and spot things I wouldn’t normally see wandering around in the little Andy sized bubble of mine.

I’ve started collecting these different themes together on Flickr and trying to collect a body of work in each theme. So this is what I’ve collected into sets so far.

Sillhouette

Night

Street

Abstract

Relfections

Portraits

Urban

Shadows

Bokeh

Black and White

and of course not forgetting..
Architecture

That’s enough for now I think.