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).
Wet day so photos indoors. You don’t get much more indoors than a box garage several floors underground.
Sunday rowday on the Thames between Putney and Hammersmith. A squad of two rowing eights, the oarsmen wearing Oxford University kit. I prefer light blue but they're rowing in style and making good speed back to the boathouse on an ebbing tide.
Trying to represent in a photo that peculiar autumn pleasure of kicking through dry leaves. These leaves are from the London plane trees crowning the Thames embankment at Bishops Park since its opening in 1893.
And two cute vagabonds, grey squirrels looking cute and cadging for food.
Two pictures of Derwent Water between this week’s storms. The level of the water is high enough to submerge the wooden piers and, despite the ray of sunshine, there’s another shower driving across the water from the “Jaws of Borrowdale”. These are images in natural colour, ie as the image comes out of the camera, but the colour is subtle.
Ghostly shapes of cranes constructing Rampion Wind Farm as viewed from Brighton. The pale silhouettes on the horizon of the Channel seem to represent visually the future, ie renewable energy production, compared to the stark shapes of the familiar, traditional, coal and gas burning power stations.
Rampion’s 116 turbines are located between 13 and 25 kilometres offshore. Total peak capacity is expected to be about 400 MW. As comparison, a coal fired power station with eight cooling towers produces more than five times this amount, 2116 MW, such as Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in Nottinghamshire, which we visited as part of my degree course.
A group of photos exploring contrasting shapes, patterns and textures. The low angle sunlight highlights grain and textures in these objects that have subtle natural colour as part of the character of their surfaces. From today’s walk through Brighton Marina.
