As my birthday approaches yet again…
And the space between years left becomes ever smaller…
I have decided to put my website into a state of chrysalis; temporarily frozen.
A new, streamlined website will appear in its place in time.
salut
As my birthday approaches yet again…
And the space between years left becomes ever smaller…
I have decided to put my website into a state of chrysalis; temporarily frozen.
A new, streamlined website will appear in its place in time.
salut
***grab your chance for a special Heatwave Portait Session offer!**
Book yourself a location portrait shoot in or around London with me before September and you will land yourself the one off special fee of just £300 for an hour’s shoot plus 20+ high resloution digital images on file *as well as* three high quality prints of your choice.
Sessions are limited! So book a shoot before September for a session that suits you up until the end of October 2018.
I can’t wait to meet you and capture your soul…!
To take advantage of this discount price get in touch via the services page on this website.
*please note that a £50 non refundable booking deposit is required to secure your session.
A New Year’s Day walk with a ridiculously big film camera.
Kodak Portra 400 120 film that had been kept in the worst place possible for two and a half years… in the kitchen cupboard above the cooker. Oops. Varying temperatures ahoy! I think it survived rather marvellously.
Film developing and medium resolution scans by the fabulous Ag Photographic. Posted off on a Saturday evening and returned to me on the Wednesday.
It’s the first time in many years that I’ve ordered prints along with the developing and scans. They look gorgeous and it was such a joy to see new photos for the first time in that more tangible way again.
It’s been a while since I got my Pentax 6×7 out to play. I had completely forgotten that I had an adapter to use my massive 105mm 6×7 lens on my regular DSLR (Pentax K3).
I love the quality of this lens. Attached to my K3 it does look ridiculous and it’s heavier than the camera itself. Old film camera lenses retain a lot of their character in digital format. This one gives a fair amount of chromatic aberation, as lenses designed for film often do, but that’s easily rectifiable manually in Lightroom. It’s an exrtremely soft lens and wide open, regardless of the cropped sensor on the K3, it just has a really expansive feel to it.
I intend to drag out the 6×7 for some more film fun soon, and this has certainly whetted my appetite.
I was back in the gorgeous surroundings of All Hallows by the Tower last month
to document the 48th general meeting of The Guild of Musicians & Singers.
Here are some of my favourite pictures from the occasion.
Hurricane Ophelia carried a very spooky sky to the UK two weeks ago. Everything looked orange and the sun turned red in the middle of the day. After ascertaining that it wasn’t in fact the sun dying (that really was my first thought, not that anyone could accuse me of being dramatic…), I thought I should probably take some pictures.
The sunset that evening was also rather beautiful.
I turn forty years old on Wednesday. I’m not having any difficulty processing that at all.
I’m definitely still having fun with one of the most fun photo apps. (HappoCam)
For my first present my mother booked two tickets for myself and my gorgeous friend G to a most wonderful exhibition of photographs of Queen by Denis O’Regan. And a Q & A with the man himself. Top time.
I was asked by the treasurer of The Guild of Musicians & Singers to document their 47th general meeting.
Here are my favourite pictures from the occasion.
They’ve asked me to be their official photographer too which is delightful and lovely so of course I affirmed my willing.
I’ve been experimenting recently with some basic iPhone apps to mess around with images. The apps I have mostly been using are Circular and Tiny Planets.
I’ve mostly been using these two apps combined together to create images and videos, sometimes running an image through an editing process more than once in order to create greater or lesser abstracted images.
The thing I like most about these apps is that you don’t really need a great quality image to start with to create something visually interesting.
Here is a small selection of the videos I’ve made. Playing around with images like this can be incredibly addictive! And if I hadn’t recently lost my phone during the creation of this post, I’d have a majorly larger library of these videos by now.
Of course, I’ve also been building an album of the still images on Flickr.
I took a two and a half hour cruise on my boat this weekend. With my engine newly serviced, and the sun shining, it was a staggeringly beautiful day out on the canals.
This time of year when the sun is so low it can be a bit blinding out there at times. Especially when heading West in the afternoon.
I like to take pictures into the sun. I love the way the light scatters and the possibilities with silhouettes, shadows, and lens flares.
With this picture I wanted to turn it isn’t something it wasn’t. I didn’t want the deep shadows. I wanted the picture to show me what I could have seen had I not been staring into the sun for hours. I wanted to try to create an image that expressed how I felt about the day. The air was still and chilly, but the warm Autumn colours were still out in force. I don’t normally apply such extreme adjustments to an image.
These are the main edits I made using Lightroom:
Colours:
A good friend of mine is holding a fabulous auction on 6th November at The Fiddler’s Elbow in Camden in aid of the National Autistic Society.
He asked me to take pictures of just some of the fantastic items up for grabs, so here’s a little splash of what’s on offer…
After having been roaming the canals around London for a year now, I’ve seen parts of London I’d never even heard of before. The city looks infinitely fascinating from the water and my journey North East from Slough has been beautiful, horrible, and all things in between. But it’s never too noisy. The roads are never too close. The towpaths come alive in some places and are neglected in others.
Limehouse so far is my favourite spot to moor. It’s not especially pretty, or quiet. [Although it does benefit from being beautifully soundtracked with the quarter hourly chimes of St. Anne’s.] It has a character about it that beckons. I felt instantly at home here.
This is a little ode to Limehouse.
I have been incredibly lapse at keeping my photography, and by extension, this blog going this past year. I liken this to having a newborn. I’ve had to tend to my “boatbaby”, as my good friend Mary would term it.
Consider this a photo diary of sorts for the past few months dedicated to my new addition.
Happy birthday, Endeavour, etc, and now can I get on with life again please? 🙂
The sun was hammering down for this year’s Forest Gate Festival. An absolute cracker of a day out.
I was asked to take photographs at Roger’s 70th birthday bash a few weeks ago and how could I refuse with such a glamourous setting and glamourous guests? Absolutely smashing evening all round.
The icing on the cake* was my ex boyfriend trusting me to borrow the absolutely amazing new Pentax full frame K1 camera from him for the task. Beautiful camera.
Happy birthday, Roger! Hip hip!
*The icing on the cake actually said “Happy Birthday”.
The past five or six weeks have been a srange and busy time. Mostly spent on dry land having various urgent attentions spent on my lovely boat. It felt almost neverending at one stage. It was truly a strange experience to be onboard the same boat with absolutely no movement and climbing a ladder to get in. It’s a slow and tentative sigh of relief to be afloat again now.
I got everything done and fixed that I needed to, except that I haven’t got around to putting the name back on her yet. I’m procrastinating a little over that… But bit by bit, she’s starting to look quite smart.
I’ve had to put my photography on the back burner for the past few months, whilst attending to issues with my Marvellous new home. But of course there’s always room for both.
I’ve dealt with no running water at all on far too many occasions since moving aboard, had to hand pump gallons of water from leaky plumbing every other evening, but now I’ve seen my boat fly…
I wouldn’t exchange life on the water for anything, and yet I’ve had to be taken onto land in order to get back out there. Some jobs just require it.
Her hull is the most important thing and whilst currently out of the water to have her hull blacked, I’ve finally been in a position to confidently sort my disastrous plumbing situation. Maintenance and sprucing up are well underway now.
Exciting and terrifying times. And more to come. Wonderful.
On 5th February I went ice skating at Alexandra Palace with my mother, one of my brothers, and a wonderful colleague for a David Bowie soundtracked evening of skidding about and falling over, hosted by Feeling Gloomy.
I don’t know anyone who wasn’t saddened by Bowie’s passing, and what better way to blow off the cobwebs than such a ridiculous and fun tribute.
I took my Pentax K-S1 and intended to get lots of fun shots of the inevitably Bowie-emblazoned skaters, but admittedly I spent the vast majority of the time enjoying the skating. It’s over 20 years since I’ve purposefully stepped onto ice and I loved every single minute of it.
My brother looked utterly fabulous in his golden spacesuit and I at least managed to capture this for prosperity. He drew much adoring attention both on the ice and during the journey there and back. Even the lovely staff at Pizza Express didn’t seem to mind us applying our face painted lightning bolts at the dinner table beforehand.
Farewell, Starman.
I took my true love for a Valentine’s Day drink. I had a thermos of mocha, and she had her usual tap water.
It’s been a really busy month for me moving onto my handsome narrowboat. I’ve not had much time for photography. But I still somehow found myself volunteering to take pictures for a free online magazine for the boating community called The Floater.
I contributed these two pictures to go with an article about Winter moorings, the first of which I was delighted to see made it onto page one. You can read the December 2015 issue by clicking here.
I have recently acquired a narrowboat which is soon to be my new home. She’s a beautiful vessel and we’re getting to know each other very well.
It’s wonderful to see so much of London from such a different perspective. Here are some of my favourite boat’s eye view pictures so far. As ever, I have more in an album over on Flickr which promises to grow and grow…
I have almost accidentally found myself constructing a series of black and white self portraits with my laptop camera. People who know me well will know that I don’t usually have a problem expressing myself verbally, but recently I’ve found this ability somewhat ripped from me. I always try and infuse my pictures with as much emotion as possible, but rarely turn the camera on myself for this purpose. The low quality images seem to create a barrier behind which (conversely) I can comfortably express more of myself.
I’m editing the photographs in Lightroom and I’ve found that another result of the image quality being so poor, is that it is really freeing up my creativity in other elements of the pictures. It’s turning out to be a really interesting way to experiment with and explore and express different visual ideas, a bit like a sketchbook. I think I’ll continue with this from time to time.
The amount of grain in the images has added interesting textures. They could almost be pen and ink, pencil, charcoal, or spray painted images. The huge depth of field and wide angle view bizarrely reminds me of my pinhole images which I find fascinating considering the ridiculous difference in equipment involved.