Shooting the Barwicks
Joanna and I had the pleasure of meeting our friends Dan and Bekah and their son, Jeb, for lunch today at The Plough on Lordship Lane. I don’t know how many nut roasts that place sells on a Sunday but it’s a lot. Nice grub, and the nuts didn’t bring me out in a rash.From [...]
Shooting for free
On working for free to build my business
I’m really happy that my offer to shoot weddings free of charge for most of 2010 is paying off. So far I have three confirmed bookings (two in Scotland, one in Croydon) and one tentative booking (in Rome). I have also had to turn down three [...]
Winter shooting
The snowy weather in Scotland at Christmas provided some great photo opportunities – I’m sure Flickr is bursting with newly-uploaded images of us Brits dealing with “The Big Freeze”.
The bird table in my parents’ garden was abuzz with starving robins, chaffinches, blue tits, great tits, sparrows and even two pheasants (one of which was black [...]
Guinea pigs
I need to make something clear: I worship our two pet guinea pigs, Jeanie and Carmela, and love taking photographs of them, to the point where they just have to be the most photographed rodents in South London.
I’ve shot these pigs in a similar way before but over the weekend I decided to go again, [...]
New Canon 24-70mm lens
I took delivery of a Canon EF 24-70mm f2.8 USM lens yesterday, from the increasingly market-friendly Ian Kerr on eBay (username: kerso).
It was dark last night and I was shuffling about in the 1600-2000 ISO range, but I did take a nice couple of shots with the 430EX II on top, pointing at the ceiling [...]
Street photo
I was walking to work this morning and happened upon this scene of a man behind a long red and white tape cordon, cleaning the flagstones in Westminster Catherdral Plaza with a high pressure hose. With such gloriously strong backlight from the sun, the spray looked fantastic so I stopped and whipped out the 40D/50mm, [...]
A bit of black and white
A good way to stimulate creativity is to manufacture some sort of restriction or boundary. Sometimes limitless choice makes choice impossible.
So, having read some advice by David duChemain I have decided to shoot in black and white for a while. While I’m at it, I’m going to stick to using fully manual mode on [...]
Self Portraits
I am slowly building up my kit.
Yesterday I took delivery of a couple of Westcott umbrellas, two Manfrotto Nano light stands and the various cleats and spindles you need to attach it all together with your Speedlights.
I can trigger the EX580 II and EX430 II combo with a Canon ST-E2, so ETTL is a piece [...]
Bread
Bread is universally accepted as a good thing; we’ve have lived off it for thousands of years. It’s basic, it’s cheap and it smells great when its fresh. It looks great too.
As this batch of freshly-made rolls cooled on top of the oven, out came the 40D, the 70-200 f4 lens and the 580EXII with [...]
