bikes and things

I often get asked this and my reply usually is “How much do you want to spend?“. The discussion inevitably ends up with a Nikon mid range DSLR camera with a crop sensor. But then at this price range the kit lens is always going to be completely crap. I’m not the only one who thinks like this it seems.

I’d go further and suggest that you shouldn’t buy an SLR if you only ever plan to use its kit lens or an inexpensive zoom lens. Kit lenses and low-end zooms produce blurry, distorted, drab images — they can look decent on blogs or phones, but the flaws become apparent when you see them on big Retina screens or printed at larger sizes.

I always recommend that people buy a 35mm prime lens, which is roughly the equivalent of a 50mm lens on a full frame camera. Before I went full frame I had a D300 which I used a Nikkor 35mm ƒ1.8 which is a complete bargain at £150. It’s sharp, compact and unobtrusive, fast and is one of the best ways of improving your photography in my opinion. Whilst it suffers from a little vignetting wide open and a tiny bit of pincushion distortion these are both easily corrected for in the latest version of Lightroom with the tick of a box. It’s also one less thing to distract you from actually taking good pictures. Zooming around trying to improve the composition seems to be fatal to progression. Zoom with your legs and just take more bloody pictures.

A photography client recently asked for a file at higher res to use in a brochure. Sure no problem, just zip it, drag it to my DropBox public folder and then paste the link into an email for them. Then sit back and wait for the email saying thanks.

Except that didn’t happen.

Thanks for the email. I may be getting confused here but the link seems to take me to a guinea pig being interviewed…is it the wrong link?

The cold realisation of my stupidity dawned on me, followed by uncontrollable laughter. They must have thought I was mad as a box of frogs. Here’s the video in case you were wondering.

There’s an awful lot of crap on our streets. This and the fact that they’re dug up all the time and not repaired drives me mad. Superb series of images from Dave Morris highlighting quite neatly how it impacts on a street.

I recently started putting together my best images for a meeting with a potential client. I usually use the iPad and flick through but then all this recent online copyright stuff got me thinking about having a beautiful printed document to put in front of people. So I got a little portfolio from the London Graphic Centre, which conveniently is in a 5×4 format which suits most of my prints. I’ve just got back my first test prints from the Printspace on Fuji Matt paper and they look great. Going to decide which other images go in and then find someone to show it to to pitch for some more work.

Something strangely beautiful about this sequence of images for a time-lapse I’m working on.

I recently headed up to Chester to shoot a small installation by BAT Studio as part of the Rogues Gallery series that took over a series of empty shops in the high street.

As visitors enter, microphones are listening… As soon as a visitor speaks, their words are transcribed by a series of machines dotted around the room. Every time someone speaks, the devices immediately reel out the words, printed onto streams of paper.

The streams will continue to flow and throughout the course of the festival, every spoken word will be recorded.

Communication can be considered the transfer of data. This installation both records and mis-records data, and through doing so creates a spatial and sculptural experience. Visitors will be able to return during throughout the festival and see the scribe’s interpreted verbal history of the space.

Speaking into the microphone set off all of the thermal printers in the space with the translated words being printed out. The interpretations of the spoken words were highly amusing at times and surprisingly accurate at others. Such a great idea but a tiny space unfortunately. Hopefully they can repeat it in a larger gallery space at some point. We also set up a time-lapse for the week it was on which will be uploaded soon.

A fantastic image from the back page of a book I caught sight of recently; Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography. Think this book might be on the pay day trip to Amazon tomorrow.

I love the generous size of the studio and the patchwork like background that has been assembled around the model. Would love a set of continuous lights to work with rather than flashes, oh and a big studio too.

I recently took some time off work to go up to the University of Bath to run a series of lectures and workshops with the idea of showing 1st year Architecture students how to take better model photos. We split a year group of 88 into four groups of 22 to enable a smaller group for the workshops. It meant that I had to repeat the lecture and workshop four times but enabled a far better experience for the students.

Rather than just cutting to the chase and giving a brief idea of how to shoot models, I prepared a 35 min lecture on a few wider topics. Firstly the idea that you should take more photos and perhaps try a 365 project as well as why it’s a good idea to have another way of seeing through a passion for photography. Then a bit of a recap of who’s who in the Architectural photography world followed by a discussion and critique of some of their images including understanding the language and rules of photography and how you might then break them. After that we discussed what a bad model photo would look like along with what a good model photo would look like along with a few top tips of how you might go about achieving this.

I tried to stress that you didn’t need all the gear to do some decent photos and that a £3 hot shoe mounted spirit was the best investment you could make along with a tripod.

We then followed up with a review of a series of books and the photography contained within. Some architectural, some purely photographic and some that spanned both. Most of them seemed to enjoy this bit and seemed to have a good appreciation of them too. I was hoping to install an idea of critique of the images they see in these books as well as on sites such as Dezeen and ArchDaily. I’m going to do a list of the main ones we talked about soon with links to Amazon which I’ll update this post with. We then had a coffee break and began to set up the practical session.

Each group of four had a tripod, a black background to install and a piece of white and black foam core. Whilst the lighting wasn’t amazing they all got the white balance right, got the camera level and set about shooting their model. The white was to bounce light in and fill in shadows and the the black was to modify any reflections or reduce glare.

We talked about elevational shots and getting low down into the model rather than being higher and looking down as this is unlikely to be a viewpoint you would ever experience if it was a building. Once we’d spent some time with everyone’s model we went through some basic editing tips, including discussing the benefits of RAW processing, in this case Lightroom with some basic Photoshop work after.

The whole experience was great but thoroughly exhausting and I kind of bored of the sound of my own voice after a while. Hopefully we can do it again next year.

Just another afternoon in Peckham Rye park.

Quite hard to comprehend really. Seems weird to see images of the surface of the planet as well as the robot roaming around it. There’s many more incredible pictures coming out of NASA on their Astronomy Picture of the Day site.

This remarkable self-portrait of NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover includes a sweeping panoramic view of its current location in the Yellowknife Bay region of the Red Planet’s Gale Crater.