Sky in the Baubles - OcUK Photo Comp - September

Septembers theme was Curves. I found this one to be extremely difficult as curves are such an arbitrary thing and again prone to cliches. The ones that stood out the most to me were roads, cars light trails and women. I was tempted to head down the women path but having never done portraiture in anger nor having a large pool of knowledge when it comes to the lighting of such subjects I was somewhat stumped.


I had an idea of attempting to emulate and photograph the results of a couple of paper folding/cutting artists that have a presence on Flickr. Those of Richard Sweeney and Jen Stark.


Richard Sweeney - Icosahedron

Jen Stark - Over And OutLuckily, both for my sanity and that of my ever tolerant Fiance, another opportunity came up.

Kim, whilst walking down Piccadilly, spotted something that she knew would take my interest and it did that in spades! In the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Art on Piccadilly, London there is a central point where there is often a piece of installation art in place. For the time being it is a piece by a modern artist called Anish Kapoor. He is most famous for the Cloud Gate in Millennium Park, Chicago and I guess not having the massive space needed to emulate that in London he's taken a different path.

Tall Tree And The Eye:"Outside the Royal Academy of Arts in the Annenberg Courtyard, 74 stainless-steel spheres will appear to hover miraculously overhead. Look up, and the sky will be framed by thousands of shining bubbles as each element mirrors its neighbours ad infinitum."

This is a shot of the full sculpture:

This is my final entry for the comp that I titled - Sky in the Baubles:
This months subject is 'Energy'... I'm not sure what direction to take on this one - I think there is a bit of thinking involved!

Photography jiggery pokery

Inspired by my recent win with the TNT I decided to challenge myself a little. On one of the photography forums I regularly visit run a little monthly photo comp with the aim of pushing you to develop your skills. The month just gone theme was "Only the Camera Can Capture". As always these are open to interpretation and so I decided to take a different lean that everyone else was. The general idea was that it would be things like macro shots or long exposures. My take was a little more elaborate.

I had recently seen the website of a guy who had a thing for chucking things in the air and then taking photos of them. The end result was, in my opinion, quite clever.


I decided to take it a step further and came up with a concept inspired by the laptop shot above. I was going for something a little more complex and also a totally different take on the 'Camera can Capture' theme.

So at around 9:30am on a Saturday I and my lovely assistant Kim headed down to Russel Square with two laptops kindly lent to me by work (they were getting thrown out anyway) and a couple of wooden spoons. The idea was to make an image that was purposefully incongruous and a bit fun. Rather than try to explain the image I will just show you the end result and then some shots of the process involved.

Laptops Among the Pigeons

The Process - Take one laptop - remove hard drive bay - insert wooden spoon and hand over to beautiful assistant. Once the individual photos were taken we went home and then there was a fairly lengthy editing and compositing process where I combined 20-25 photos of the laptops and using a blank photo of the background painted Kim out. End result - Flying laptops!

Christmas - Devon and Saunton Sands

Merry Christmas and all that - formalities aside it's always nice to get out of the big smoke and see some of the country you're living in and spend some quality time with friends. This year we headed out to Devon. It was a fantastic trip and the weather was spot on the whole time. I managed to get some shots off and since I haven't had time to update this I thought I'd put them up here.

Photography around London

Me and a good friend of mine recently went for a bit of a photo mission. Our early ideas were to head out east to the grimy parts of London and see what we could find. Turns out that we didn't make it that far as we got rather taken by the London City (The Square Mile) architecture. I personally am not overly blown away by English architecture as I think it can lack imagination however there is a periodic anomaly or blip in the blandness. Cases in point are buildings like London St Pancras Train Station, The Houses of Parliament including the stunning Big Ben (which is actually St Stephens Tower - it's just the clock that is Big Ben) and the Millennium Wheel. They, and a few others, make for an interesting break from the endless lines of samey buildings, the likes of which are commonly seen at the start of East Enders

The end result were some photos that I rather enjoyed taking. All the shots were taken with a Nikon D80 using a Sigma 10-20mm lens and a Cokin P ND Grad filter. More of my photos can be found on my Flickr site.

Shakespeare Tower - Barbican

30 Cannon Street

The Lloyds Building

A random Building around London Wall