Category: website
Thames Walk
I’ve been transferring my photographs from my website to my Behance profile, mainly because of the freedom I have to put together themed collections.
The most recent one I’ve made is for the river Thames, between Erith and Greenwich.
Living in south east London, I have visited most spots between these two points over the years, photographing them on film and digital. It’s good to see them all together.
My hope is to get bigger projects made, not just collecting photos around a theme, but making them also: travelogues, that unify place, point of view and style. But for now, I’ll be collecting place by place.
Portfolio
After using Adobe’s photography editing products, particularly Photoshop and Lightroom, I’ve been uploading selected images onto their Behance platform.
Behance is a portfolio site, where creatives can upload projects containing photography, video, graphic design, product design or any form of artwork to enhance their profile.
I’ve enjoyed using it so far because it’s enabled me to collate completed projects, like photo stories or studies of a particular subject, in a way that gives me more control than any other platform I’ve used.
While it seems I can only use Behance as long as I’m paying for Adobe’s products, this isn’t too onerous: I’ll be working with Photoshop and Lightroom for a while yet.
My Behance profile can be found here.
TikToking
The social media platform TikTok, with its short form videos displaying stunts, humour, music, politics and mischief, has amused and fascinated me for some time, so I’ve decided to make a few short films for the platform myself.
While the features of the platform allowing you to upload and edit phone videos are straightforward and simple to use, some content creators have done some fantastic work with transitions and camera moves: all very inspiring.
Most inspiring for me are the people I’ve come across on this platform. I’ve learned about design, architecture and cooking. I’ve listened to varying views on politics, economics and cinema. I’ve been fascinated by historians and polemicists. All these individuals, with their interesting, at times irreverent but always well put together videos.
Every social media platform seems to have a “moment”: Facebook’s first flurry in the early part of the century; Tumblr’s glow up a few years later; Twitter’s intersection with politics and culture a few years after that. All these moments have been extraordinary, and all have soured somewhat, whether with content problems or algorithm issues. Even as the platforms themselves have gone on from strength to strength financially, much of the same user affection from those earlier highs evaporates.
TikTok is having such a moment, with users trolling the former president and content creators building careers off their micro-short uploads: maybe bigger moments are to come. But in the meantime, it’s great fun to use.
New Light through Old Windows
To clear space on my computer, I’ve been going through every file to find RAW images. Thorough searching has turned up a plethora of files, containing RAW images from as far back as 2010. I’ve been editing them and exporting them to jpeg files and the space cleared has been phenomenal.
Tower bridge in 2014
I’ve learned a lot from this process. My image editing speed has risen and I’ve become more organised in my photo collating: over the years, files have become organised by date and place, rather than subject, titles, moods and whatnot; I hope to find an ideal filing system in future, but for now, my filing has never been more organised.
The main aspect I’ve learned is in my ability to edit an image, especially when I come across photographs that I have edited some years previously. Like shining new light through old windows, my editing vastly improves on what I have done before. I’ll be printing some of these new images soon.
This last aspect has left me wondering about when an image is complete. I must have felt that I had done a decent job editing some years ago, only to supplant those efforts more recently. How may I edit those photos in a year’s time? How do I know when an image has been edited enough? When will a photograph be “correct”? And what is a correct image? One that represents an event with perfect accuracy, or one that lives up to one’s personal memory or expression?
I have also been wondering more about how I use editing programmes. I recently wrote about taking a deeper dive in using Photoshop: part of that deeper dive concerns thinking about what kind of images I want to create. There are many photographers I follow: snappers, artists, portraitists, fashionistas; they all have their own way of looking at their worlds. They all worked towards their particular view, so in my new photographs, I hope to experiment towards a view of my own.
A writing adventure
The finished product
It started with a tweet.
Earlier this year, Amaa_Official tweeted some advice to creatives on writing an instructive ebook. Her thread broke down the stages into manageable chunks, from choosing a subject, through writing, to presentation, sale and promotion.
I’ve written books before as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge, but I had never thought of doing something like this, so I set to thinking of a subject to write about. Of all the subjects I considered, I chose photography: an interest I’d pursued for years, in which I had wide experience with cameras, shooting and printing.
On looking through my photos, especially the digital images on my computer, I decided to focus on landscape photography. I thought about subjects to cover and the images needed to illustrate them and set to work, writing the ebook on Apple’s Pages and editing the photos in Adobe Photoshop. While doing this, I uploaded old landscape images of mine on social media, with posts trailing the forthcoming ebook.
A little over 5000 words later, with each of the ten chapters illustrated and formatted, I used Canva to make a cover design, adapting a free cover, which I then reduced in size using a trial of Adobe Acrobat. Once I’d placed it on my product page in Gumroad, I linked to the sales image on my social media.
I hesitate to finish with, “and that was all it took!” The process took months: page formatting was difficult; I agonised over the cover. But on the first day I launched the book, it began to sell.
This has been an extraordinary creative venture and one I’d like to repeat: I’m currently thinking of subjects to write on. Thanks to those who have bought the book so far, Amaa_Official, AlyssaColeLit and all those who tweet advice on ebook writing and promotion. Sharing this book has been a pleasure.
Taking stock 2
I have been occasionally selling prints through Alamy and I’ve decided to upload more frequently to this site.
My previous contributions have been a haphazard selection from holiday photos, social gatherings and outings. Looking through them, my main fascination has been with change, especially with London’s ever-changing buildings and skyline.
The evolution of cities has always interested me, from how Manhattanite slums in the late 70s have become exclusive addresses, or how the deserted stretches of the abandoned Berlin wall have become bustling tourist destinations.
In addition to gathering and uploading my older images of London, I’m now taking as many photos of London spaces as I can manage, before the next big changes.
Faces and spaces
“There’s nothing more interesting than the landscape of the human face…” Irvin Kershner.
Portraits, in magazines, newspapers and galleries, have always fascinated me. Representing and interpreting a personality without words has always been a great skill.
I love taking photographs of people, but have done very little formal posed work until now. While I’ve enjoyed taking portraits, I have become more interested in making environmental portraits, like those of Arnold Newman: where somebody is photographed is integral to who they are.
So far, I’ve attempted to capture people in spaces that are important to them. In time, I hope that I can capture a person as much with light, speed and exposure as much as with the space that surrounds them.
London
Over the years, I’ve taken many images of my home city. I’ve sampled a few here as I build up my portfolio.
More performance
On going through photos from recent years, I worked through a crop of images taken at South by South West in 2015.
These were taken with my Fujifilm X-Pro1: I was in full flow with this camera and took it everywhere with me. However I was shooting in jpeg format rather than RAW, so I couldn’t be too creative with image editing, which is probably just as well as I took hundreds of photos.
Tove Styrke
2:54
Autre Ne Vert
James Davis
Miranda and the Diamonds: beautiful voice, but I was too far away!
I’ve been adding to this section periodically, putting in music and theatrical images where I find them. More than any other type of photography, this encourages me to get closer to the subject. More images can be found here.
It’s better to travel…
Over the years, I’ve visited many places: relatives in the West Indies; a camping trip around Europe; and cities, many cities.
On the way to Berlin
I remember my first solo trips: working through cheap film in Tokyo and Hong Kong at the turn of the century; crossing to Paris by Eurostar; photographing a roll of film a day in Manhattan, and many visits to European cities with friends and loved ones.
Pirate’s Bay, Tobago
The cheapness of Japanese film on my first visit to Tokyo in 2001 blew my mind. I subsequently photographed everything: people, architecture, overhead cables, even drains. My week-long exploration of Manhattan Island used ten rolls of film I acquired on eBay. I photographed as much as I could and now I’m reviewing them all.
Fernsehturm (Television Tower), Berlin
I wonder about my attraction to cities. Maybe it’s their transitory nature – anyone can visit a city – that attracts me more than a rural setting (although I greatly enjoy visiting the countryside). There is a familiarity to a city in its roads, buildings and transport. There’s never complete uniformity, even in airports; there’s difference in the details, languages, food and attractions. Searching them out is a delight.
An interesting hoarding in Paris
Right now, I’m working through a plethora of digital and film travel images. I miss using film and thanks to a recently donated 35mm camera, I may experiment with a roll or two on a forthcoming holiday. The travel section will grow in the meantime.
Burning Details 
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