Closing down!

Posted on July 27, 2011 by markb

Folks

Despite try­ing to keep things going over the last month, I realise I have just too many other com­mit­ments at the moment. As pho­tog­ra­phy is still a hobby, unfor­tu­nately it is the activ­ity that has to take a back seat. This will there­fore be my last post on the site!

It has been a very enjoy­able expe­ri­ence, rid­ing the crest of the X100 wave. I would like to thank every­one who has vis­ited and con­tributed to the site, much appreciated.

I hope the X100 com­mu­nity con­tin­ues to thrive, it really is a sem­i­nal cam­era from Fuji. It has been really inter­est­ing to see that those who were unsure of the camera’s per­for­mance at first, have after more reg­u­lar use, found it to be an out­stand­ing piece of equipment.

I look for­ward to doing my bit sup­port­ing the X100 fan club by get­ting back out there soon with my own X100.

Best wishes

MarkB

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

London Street Photography Festival, July 2011

Posted on June 29, 2011 by markb

With events about to kick off at the begin­ning of July, I received my Lon­don Street Pho­tog­ra­phy Fes­ti­val pro­gramme guide today, excit­ing stuff :-) . If you have not checked the pro­gramme, you can find details at the link below.

There are a whole series of work­shops, exhi­bi­tions and other events. One event I am par­tic­u­larly look­ing for­ward to is the Vivian Maier exhi­bi­tion, in addi­tion to which, John Mal­oof will be giv­ing a talk on Vivian at the National Por­trait Gallery this Friday.

There is almost cer­tainly some­thing for every­one dur­ing July  street pho­tog­ra­pher or not. Sup­port a great event.

http://www.pistonheads.com/news/default.asp?storyId=23839

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Fabulous new X100 firmware and a direction change

Posted on June 27, 2011 by markb

Change direc­tion!

“Hah! So you haven’t been abducted by aliens?” I hear you say. Well, I did watch ‘Paul’, the new Simon Pegg and Nick Frost film recently, does that count? Alas, my story is a lit­tle less excit­ing, although equally tense from my per­spec­tive. It feels like my fam­ily and I have spent the last few years plan­ning for a fairly big life change, includ­ing the kids head­ing off to Uni­ver­sity, relo­ca­tion to the coun­try­side and job changes .…. all at the same time! Yes, I know, we don’t exactly do things by half. Well, per­haps not sur­pris­ingly, it has been all con­sum­ing (and a lit­tle stress­ful) :-o .

How­ever, what bet­ter oppor­tu­nity to get myself back into the swing of things than with the lat­est X100 firmware release from Fuji, and WOW, what a release! I have not had much time with the cam­era since updat­ing it, but it feels like a souped up, reju­ve­nated ver­sion of its for­mer self. Fan­tas­tic job Fuji! If any­body had any doubt whether Fuji could respond to X100 user’s requests for improve­ments, well here it is :-) . There is so much here, that in addi­tion to try­ing out some of the new func­tion­al­ity myself, I will be watch­ing oth­ers com­ment online in case I miss anything.

As to my own street pho­tog­ra­phy, I still may have lim­ited oppor­tu­nity to get out, but I do plan to keep things going with some alter­na­tive pho­tog­ra­phy to street! Yes, I know the site has focused pri­mar­ily on X100 street pho­tog­ra­phy, but neces­sity is the mother of inven­tion, you never know where things might head as a result. Mean­while, in an attempt to hint at such a change, today’s pic­ture shows a street shot I took a cou­ple of months back. Could it be that the sign bearer was a Jedi Knight hint­ing at pend­ing changes ahead!

Posted in X100 features | Tagged | 2 Comments

People also react well to being photographed!

Posted on May 24, 2011 by markb

Street curry

Well I must apol­o­gise for my absence over the last few days, I am ashamed to say that there has been no time for pho­tog­ra­phy with a packed sched­ule of work and home com­mit­ments. I am sure that every seri­ous ama­teur who has to bal­ance their pho­tog­ra­phy with other pro­fes­sional and fam­ily com­mit­ments has the same dilemma. How­ever, there is a sil­ver lin­ing in that when you do get back to your pho­tog­ra­phy you enjoy it that much more :-) .

I will be catch­ing up with fur­ther posts this week, but in the mean­time today’s shot is a happy chap I pho­tographed at a recent week­end high street event, where he was serv­ing his fam­ily curry recipe. We always talk about adverse reac­tion to street pho­tog­ra­phy and yet so rarely talk about the fun we can have inter­act­ing with peo­ple while pho­tograph­ing them.

Posted in Street photography | Tagged | 1 Comment

Vivian Maier exhibition at the London Street Photography Festival

Posted on May 19, 2011 by markb

Vivian Maier

I am sure that by now, many pho­tog­ra­phers will have heard of the recently dis­cov­ered phe­nom­e­non that is Vivian Maier (1 Feb 1926 – 21 April 2009). She was an ama­teur street pho­tog­ra­pher who while work­ing for about forty years as a nanny in Chicago, would get out and take pho­tos in the streets dur­ing her leisure time. Her pho­to­graphic legacy of some 100,000 pho­tos remained undis­cov­ered (and  unbe­liev­ably mostly unde­vel­oped) until a local his­to­rian called John Mal­oof made the dis­cov­ery in 2007.

The Lon­don Street Pho­tog­ra­phy Fes­ti­val is bring­ing the Vivian Maier exhi­bi­tion to the UK for the first time. The exhi­bi­tion will be run­ning between the 1st and 24th of July at the Ger­man Gym­na­sium, Kings Cross, Lon­don N1C 4TB. You can get more infor­ma­tion on the festival’s web­site (http://www.londonstreetphotographyfestival.org/diary/vivian-maier-a-life-uncovered).

In case you can­not get to the exhi­bi­tion, the Vivian Maier book is due to be pub­lished around early Decem­ber time (accord­ing to the Ama­zon UK esti­mated release date). I urge every­one to take a look at her work to see just why she has made such a splash. You can sam­ple her var­i­ous port­fo­lios on the Vivian Maier web­site http://www.vivianmaier.com/).

The pho­to­graph at the top of today’s post is one of Vivian Maier’s self por­traits. To me it cap­tures so much, from the mys­tery, to the artist, that was Vivian Maier.

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Will the new Leica M9-P tempt you?

Posted on May 18, 2011 by markb

Leica M9-P

Well Leica have cer­tainly made them­selves the talk of the town with enough sources now ‘ver­i­fy­ing’ a cam­era announce­ment towards the end of June. Said cam­era will be the Leica M9-P. It seems the Daily Mail’s shot of Seal car­ry­ing  the new cam­era around his neck (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1386594/Heidi-Klums-daughters-emerging-style-matching-green-dresses-leggings.html) has dri­ven out the rumours. Pos­si­ble enhance­ments to the cur­rent M9 might include:

  • Sap­phire crys­tal screen — This addi­tion seems to be confirmed
  • A LED illu­mi­na­tion of the bright-line frames in the viewfinder — Unconfirmed
  • Chrome alloy fin­ish — Unconfirmed

I raise the sub­ject of this revised M9 because I know there are a lot of X100 own­ers out there who are aspir­ing rangefinder users. This raises the ques­tion of whether your expe­ri­ence with the X100 so far is meet­ing your needs and if not, do you plan to advance to a Leica M? In which case, is the M9-P for you?

Clearly the X100 is a dif­fer­ent cam­era to the M9/M9-P. How­ever, an X100 has given me expe­ri­ence work­ing with a sin­gle focal length dis­creet cam­era and using an OVF viewfinder with some sim­i­lar­i­ties to a rangefinder. I think this pro­vides invalu­able and com­pa­ra­ble expe­ri­ence for some­body who might be plan­ning to switch directly from a DSLR to an M9. The biggest dif­fer­en­tia­tor for me how­ever, is the rangefinder’s unique man­ual focus capability.

I know there are a lot of poten­tial Leica buy­ers out there who hover around the deci­sion  on whether to sink what is a not incon­sid­er­able chunk of money into a whole­sale shift to Leica M. For me, Kai Wong at Dig­i­tal­Rev said it best when he said that you don’t buy a Leica with your mind, you buy it with your heart. Per­fectly said Kai, as the price of the new M9-P is expected to be about £400 above rec­om­mended retail price of the cur­rent M9 :-o .

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Cropping — a design option

Posted on May 16, 2011 by markb

Caught

I few years back I stud­ied pho­tog­ra­phy through the Open Col­lege of the Arts dis­tance learn­ing pro­gramme, which gave me a thor­ough ground­ing in the skills of image mak­ing. It was here that one of my tutors chal­lenged my pre-conception that pho­tographs should always be con­tained within stan­dard print sizes. Here I was con­tain­ing my dig­i­tal work within the bounds of film’s legacy.

Now I under­stand the pre­cise pro­por­tions that form the golden sec­tion, but I believe you can apply that con­cept more broadly within the divi­sion and bal­ance of any size frame. I always try to think beyond 2:3 or 3:4 pro­por­tions, see­ing crop­ping as a design option avail­able in post pro­cess­ing. Yes, try to get your com­po­si­tion right in frame, but you can defer design deci­sions to post pro­cess­ing, where you can explore new pro­por­tions for the image. The thing to do is not make this the norm.

Today’s shot is a rather extreme nar­row crop, and I admit the pro­por­tions are not ideal, but I wanted to show how I believe we can explore the extrem­i­ties of a picture’s divi­sion and balance.

What about the issues with dis­play­ing non stan­dard images? Well, for prints you can either cut your own mounts or get cus­tom cut mounts (at a very afford­able price). Dis­play­ing your pic­tures dig­i­tally on the likes of a TV, lap­top or iPad is even less of an issue, do not feel the image has to fill the frame. Of course, you can still work within stan­dard frame sizes, I fre­quently do, even when cropping.

Posted in Photography, Technique | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Photographing street performers

Posted on May 15, 2011 by markb

What nin­jas?

Could pho­tograph­ing street per­form­ers be thought of as a gen­uine sub­ject for street pho­tog­ra­phy? I have seen quite a bit of online com­men­tary on this sub­ject, inter­est­ingly, most of it lean­ing towards the answer being ‘no’! My own view is that like most things in pho­tog­ra­phy, it depends on the con­text. Does scout­ing high streets and shoot­ing street per­form­ers as a pri­mary sub­ject reflect suf­fi­cient com­men­tary on today’s soci­ety? Clearly not. How­ever, I do shoot the odd street per­former if there is an inter­est­ing moment or because they might just be cre­ative enough to catch my atten­tion, par­tic­u­larly if I am hav­ing a quiet day :-( .

A slightly more con­tentious issue is whether we, as pho­tog­ra­phers, should con­tribute some­thing to the performer’s col­lec­tion tin. Again, I think the gen­eral online view is that as street pho­tog­ra­phy is meant to be a can­did reflec­tion on soci­ety, any­thing that con­trives to manip­u­late a doc­u­men­tary image is wrong. How­ever, Jeff Wall was one of the first street pho­tog­ra­phers to chal­lenge this view, with his famously staged shot of a white man mak­ing a racist ges­ture at an Asian man (see http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/infocus/section1/img4.shtm). Cur­rent day street pho­tog­ra­pher, Peter Funch, sim­i­larly pro­duces com­posed street shots (see http://www.peterfunch.com/). These are great shots which offer pow­er­ful com­men­tary on mod­ern society.

Street veg­etable

What about street adver­tis­ers? I do not exag­ger­ate when I say that this week­end, Can­ter­bury city cen­tre had street adver­tis­ers at every major junc­tion on the high street. That in itself is a com­men­tary on the recent shift back to this most basic form of adver­tis­ing. I think the argu­ments are exactly the same as those for street per­form­ers. In the case of today’s shots, both of these pho­tographs were taken on a fairly quiet day in terms of get­ting any real street pho­tog­ra­phy ‘keep­ers’, but both shots brought some fun to my time out shoot­ing :-) .

Posted in Street photography | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Where next with your photography?

Posted on May 14, 2011 by markb

Deci­sions

Have you ever been stuck in a rut with your pho­tog­ra­phy, or per­haps stayed within your com­fort zone? It can be all too easy stay­ing within your com­fort zone, even within a genre like street pho­tog­ra­phy. Could it be time to try new ideas, stretch your­self, start a project?

Have you got a par­tic­u­lar area of inter­est or per­haps an issue you are pas­sion­ate about? Why not turn it into a project, com­mu­ni­cate your story through pic­tures. If it is a local or national issue of inter­est, you might find par­tic­u­lar par­ties inter­est­ing in pub­li­cis­ing or using your final body of work. If you do not want to share pub­licly, pro­duc­ing your own pho­to­book is pretty cheap these days. It could be some­thing you shoot in a week­end or turn into a long term project. The project does not need to be a seri­ous social issue, it could be that you want to shoot a cer­tain subject.

Of course, you might want to focus on tech­nique. Per­haps you always shoot in aper­ture pri­or­ity and might want to explore the bound­aries of shut­ter pri­or­ity instead, learn­ing to cap­ture the energy of move­ment and blur. Just how much of our camera’s func­tion­al­ity do we use? How about using your camera’s brack­et­ing for dynamic range and see where HDR pho­tog­ra­phy takes you. This is easy enough to do in the X100, from the com­mand dial’s Drive but­ton, you can select Dynamic Range Bkt.

How about shoot­ing with a dif­fer­ent cam­era? Film, pin hole or Holga cam­eras might offer new and dif­fer­ent chal­lenges. What about shoot­ing loca­tions, maybe even shoot­ing after dark (safely). My point is that the ideas for what you can do are only bound by the lim­its of our imag­i­na­tion. The ideas really do not have to be big, although they can be, some peo­ple pack in their job to pur­sue projects :-o .

Talk to any pro pho­tog­ra­pher and they will tell you that one impor­tant thing that dif­fer­en­ti­ates them is the fact that they shoot all the time. Prac­tice really does make per­fect. So break­ing out of your com­fort zone might give you that excuse to keep up your pho­tog­ra­phy activ­ity, Amy Mad­ina takes a ‘Pic­ture A Day’ (http://www.dangrabbit.com/photography/pad), could you do that?

For today’s shot I was inspired by the film ‘Slid­ing Doors’, which depicts the dif­fer­ent paths our life can take based on a sim­ple event. That event does not have to be an acci­dent, it could be some­thing of your doing. I always find it excit­ing to think about where a new pho­tog­ra­phy activ­ity might take me!

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More X100 colour

Posted on May 11, 2011 by markb

I know, and I apol­o­gise that there has been so lit­tle colour mate­r­ial on the site. Actu­ally, I have been cap­tur­ing a few inter­est­ing colour shots over the last few weeks.

Tat­too co-ordination

This first shot was one which had colour writ­ten all over it, so to speak! I absolutely love the fact that this chap has nicely colour co-ordinated the yel­lows and reds on his leg tat­too with shocks and t-shirt. I cap­tured this as a sim­u­lated Velvia shot in the X100 and then processed the JPEG in Light­room to retain the camera’s sim­u­la­tion. I have given the pic­ture a strong dose of con­trast and effect, but you can see how the cam­era has boosted colour.

Being fol­lowed

What I like about this next shot is that in one respect there is a com­plete jux­ta­pose between these two very dif­fer­ent look­ing indi­vid­u­als, one seem­ingly know­ing exactly where he is head­ing and the other per­haps check­ing direc­tions (or is she fol­low­ing him?). Yet they are both tourists with cam­era on hand and prob­a­bly head­ing for a tour of the cathedral.

Hope­fully, some colour bal­ance has been restored to the site ;-) .

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