Photography
My photography
I use photography to show something about where I’ve been or people whom I’ve met. As well as trying to see the beauty in a scene or situation, I’m also trying to convey ideas and feelings. My photography is about me and what I do, who I meet and where I go. All my photography tries to be contemporary and creative. I’m resistant to being fitted in to a taxonomy by categorisation such as “travel” or “conceptual” or “nature”. All image-making is political simply by the act of selection and hence exclusion but I am not campaigning for any particular point of view, except to try to see the positives and to live life to the full.
I use 645, 35mm and DX formats plus a handy little digital compact that shoots RAW files. I’ve experimented with non-lens photography - do ask!
I first worked in a monochrome/silver wet darkroom at age 7, helping my Father with scientific prints; I’ve used colour negative materials since age 21 and digital since 2005. I use Photoshop (Adobe) and Photopaint (Corel).
Just three chimneys left in the row of terraced houses at Birling Gap, Sussex. Sea erosion has claimed a lot more of the white chalk cliffs between Brighton, Beachy Head and Eastbourne in the past few years. Once there were a dozen dwellings in this terrace row, houses for the coastguards; the first was demolished in 1972; erosion has been continuing since to claim about a metre of cliff per year. The chalk washes away but the flints remain on the beach, rounded by the wave action.
The apparently off-the-cliff viewpoint of my photo, ten metres up from the beach and ten metres out from the cliff, is not because I have received a drone for Christmas but simply the view from the handy steel staircase accessing down to the beach; the latest in a number of such conveniences installed by the National Trust, the previous ones having been washed away by storms.
Moment of realisation when Duncan realises too late that wave is going to drench him. The real force of wave erosion is suddenly going to hit him, just as it shaped the rocks behind. All part of the fun on this BSGS Geology field trip at Serrado on the north coast of Madeira.
Lambeth Bridge from Vauxhall Bridge. No longer any tugboats or barges but the cranes building up the London skyline are reminiscent of the docks’ crane jibs of years gone by. And the clean, clear air and stark winter light is totally different from the smoke celebrated in atmospheric paintings of similar views thick with fog or smog by J.M.W. Turner or Impressionists such as James Whistler and Claude Monet. Even the bright colours and superb detail of Canaletto’s painting from 1746 of Westminster Bridge does not feature such clean, clear light. But, this photo is from midday so no hint of sunrise or sunset: the brown haze near the horizon indicates pollution of nitrous oxides combining with particles, this is the air we breathe.
See also London skyline
The morning after the neighbours’ noisy all-night party to celebrate the end of exams, the smokers had been drinking outside despite the freezing December air, inured by the lager, not noticing in the dark the dilapidated surroundings and wonky table. The music has been closed down but still neither the pigeons nor the mice have eaten the remnants of the students’ pizza. Stamped-out fag-ends on the floor. More cans and glasses than chairs: this is the reality of a “Patio garden in Fulham”.
Compare and contrast After the party
Really good show of Christmas illuminations in Keswick making it what we might like to think of as a "typical" Christmas shopping scene; not only are the shop windows featuring Christmas displays, some of them animated, many of the shops and inns are featiring illuminated Christmas trees as well as the lights strung across the street and the Merry Christmas feature across the entrace to Market Square. The decorations continue in streets well beyond the square. Seems popular: today, market day in Keswick, the town was thronged with visitors, many shopping.
