Spotify Big Chill Sessions Photography Mission

I was fortunate enough to be asked to take some photographs for Spotify for their backstage sessions at the Big Chill Festival 2011. It was a tiny, hot room full to burst with people but I managed to get a couple of shots I was happy with

First Photo In Print

My Photo in Julys' Cooler magazine...

I've got a new toy...

...A 50mm f/1.8 lens that is a cheap way to start playing with wide aperture. Perfect for capturing the kind of shots I love to take, naturalistic, low light still life and portraits. I had the perfect excuse to try it out this weekend at the Featherdown Farm in Herefordshire where we celebrated Phil's 30th birthday.

Convalescence & Flickr

Recovering from my recent op, I'm confined to a chair most of the day but have thankfully unearthed a decrepit old laptop. Its super-slow so not a hope in hell of running any design software but it means I can connect to the internet and I've been spending a lot time on flickr.

I mentioned before I've been doing a photography evening course and learning how to get the best from my digital SLR. I am finding that Flickr is really effective as a platform to display my photos and gain inspiration from others, and its nice to open into dialogue and be connected to a community other than facebook while I'm feeling so separated from the world.

While I chuck all my event, friends & family snaps on Facebook to share with my pals, I'm using flickr more as a gallery for my more considered photography. Alongside photo sets of my travels and college projects, I've just decided to create a set of images I captured in the days before DSLR, or even digital, and above is the first...

Portraiture Project

Every week on my photography course we are set specific projects. This week it was posing people for portraiture. We were set this assignment last term too and I found it one of the most difficult as its much harder than it looks to capture people in a relaxed, natural pose when they feel anything other than that. Here are my efforts on a weekend mountain bike ride with a very long suffering Mr. Phirefly...

Photography Class

I've enrolled in a photography class at my local AE College. I'm not sure if its for me, as I primarily wanted to learn step-by-step how to use my digital SLR, and this course has more of a creative, compositional leaning to the teaching. I'm trying to extract from it what I think will be useful though, and its good in that it gives me the discipline to take the camera off of its automatic setting and try and take better photos every week.

This is one of my favourite images I've made on manual settings on the course so far...

Seaside Photo Fest

I'm back from my holidays and full of inspiration. Last night I enrolled on a photography course at college and I got chatting to the tutor about what it is that I like to photograph. Generally I like to take photos which document my life, and the people and places in it. More specifically though, I love taking photos at the seaside. Probably because I just love the seaside full stop.

On my course, I will be doing a photography project every week so I decided to get organised on Flickr so I would have a place to keep all my projects. I thought I'd start by going through all my old photos and collecting together the seaside shots. It was only then that I realised just how many seaside photos I've taken over the years!