Distilled – a place for black and white

Latest News, Latest Travel Images, Portraits

Sep 142012

I now have a new place on the web just for black and white photography and its on Tumblr. It features selected archive shots in black and white and lets me connect to the massive Tumblr community at the same time. You can see the Distilled site here

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Olympus workshop
I’ve been asked to run an Olympus Experience day in Cambridge, can’t wait:) Book your tickets here:https://www.olympusmag.co.uk/experiences/
An early walk in Winchester…
The phrase “no rest for the wicked” never had such resonance than last Sunday morning! After an uncommonly late Saturday night, sampling the heady nightlife of Winchester and drinking enough rum to ground an Italian cruise-liner, I awoke at a ridiculously early hour to discover a bright blue sky! I headed out (on foot) and came back with this bunch of pics.
Berlin
I was invited along to the Opening night of the Olympus Playground in Berlin recently. This comprised of a large warehouse with a number of art installations where photography is positively encouraged for a change! The following day I shot around the centre of town with the OMD and various lenses. Berlin had a nice combination of bohemian and designer culture with some fantastic graffiti and superb vintage stores. I liked the Berliners, they have a great look!
Life’s a beach! (on Gran Canaria)
Although in the mid 30′s, the weather was a tad hazey for most of the trip, but on the last day it came out nice and that is when most of these were taken. All shot with the Olympus EM5 and a variety of lenses (as specified on the previous post)
Get one over on the Airlines!
Its always been the worst nightmare of any photographer flying on commercial airlines, having expensive equipment lost or damaged by the carrier. So you try your best to get as much of your kit into your hand luggage as possible and hope the rest gets there safely. Increasingly, airlines are imposing ridiculously low weight limits on hand luggage in a poorly masked attempt to generate additional profits from extortionate excess baggage fees! 10kg does not leave much room for equipment when most carry on roller cases weigh between 3 and 5 Kg to start with! In 2 days I’m off to the [more...]
Photographs from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
These pictures were made on the Queen Mary liner in the middle of an Atlantic crossing from Southampton to New York in late December 2012. It was very cold and windy but also very sunny. These objects are parts of spare propeller blades which have been secured in an ornamental fashion to the front of the ship. They are referred to as ‘The Commodore’s Cufflinks’. There are 4 of these which are about 7 feet high and when the sun shines the light bounces and reflects off their highly polished surfaces making them look even more surreal. They were all [more...]
Claridges – and other great hotels!
I’ve been enjoying the BBC documentary on Claridges hotel, being aired at the moment. Here are a few favourite hotels I’ve managed to photograph over the years.
TPOTY Finalist again…
Another final but again no banana:) I was shortlisted for the New Talent portfolio of the Travel Photographer of the Year which required a set of six images depicting “Another World”. I used pictures I shot in Ireland this summer which I have posted below. The winning images were all pretty amazing so I am not ‘too’ disappointed:) The overall winner, Craig Easton is a well established and widely published photographer. He gave an excellent seminar at the TPOTY festival earlier this year describing his career which included shooting books with Rick Stein for the BBC. Other notable mentions in [more...]
Autumnal shoot with Kelly
Here are a few pictures I shot of Kelly in Winchester about 5 weeks ago. The first shows the quality of the new Olympus 75mm lens, the second and third were taken using the faithful PL 25mm. All shot on the Olympus EM5, all shot wide open.
Roll on Leica and Olympus!!
Photokina has come and gone, Europe’s biggest photographic equipment trade show held in Cologne. Its been a great show for photography in general with two lower cost full-frame models finally hitting the market from the big 2 Canon and Nikon. But the most interesting developments from my perspective have come from Leica and Olympus. Firstly Leica have announced the ‘M’ a full frame rangefinder which will use a CMOS sensor with NO AA filter! And its not just the same new Sony that everyone else is using either, it has been developed just for Leica by a Belgium based company. [more...]
Colour Tinted Black and Whites
After getting right into black and white photography from many of this year’s travels, I have started appreciating colour again but in a new way. Its possibly my solution to being a bit rubbish with colour management in the first place, but after reading an article on Paulina Otylie Surys in this months BJP, I decided to have a go at hand tinting some of my portraits. I’m using CS5 and Nik’s Vivezza 2 to make new interpretations of shots which I had originally conceived as black and whites. I start with the black and white edit in CS5 and using a [more...]
Unique Portraits – a new website!
I am now offering commissioned portraiture in the south of England. To facilitate this I have started a new website just for portraiture. Its based on a platform written by the incredibly inventive people at ’22slides’. I first saw their websites when I visited the site of a flickr buddy of mine, the US west coast photographer Cameron Rad (check out his amazing work!). I was impressed at their websites simplicity and performance, not to mention their seamless integration with ipads and iphones! You can see the Unique Portraits website here
Distilled – a place for black and white
I now have a new place on the web just for black and white photography and its on Tumblr. It features selected archive shots in black and white and lets me connect to the massive Tumblr community at the same time. You can see the Distilled site here
Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize
I’m pleased to say that both of my entries into this year’s Taylor Wessing Prize at the National Portrait Gallery made it through to the second round from a field of 5400 photographs. Unfortunately they were not chosen to be hung in the final exhibition. Never mind, I’ll try again next year. Here are the two images I submitted, the first is of Valya a girl I shot in New York and the second is of my friend Iain.
Galway Ireland
I had a brilliant long weekend recently with friends in Galway. The rural landscape was untouched and around the peat bogs the views looked almost prehistoric. When I saw some low-flying herons go by, they looked just like terydactyls! The weather held up for most of the trip except for a spell on a beach in County Clare where my OMD was subjected to a torrential 10 minute downpour! The weather-sealed camera did much better than my supposedly waterproof jacket and boots!
Vintage Festival 2012
So this year’s Vintage Festival was postponed due to poor ticket sales and moved from the intended venue of Boughton House in Northamptonshire and amalgamated into the Wilderness Festival held in Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire. The scaled down festival still had the Torch Club which again welcomed the amazing swing orchestra of Ondrej Havelka from Prague.
A Return to Croatia
After nipping across the border from Montenegro earlier this year, I was so impressed with Dubrovnik I decided to return to the stunning Adriatic coast of Croatia. This time I was based in a great town called Rovinj (pronounced raw-vin), a few hundred miles north of Dubrovnik and 600Km south of Split, located in a beautiful region called Istria. I was staying in an apartment which was tucked away behind some restaurants and bars. The staff and their families lived in the neighbouring apartments and over the week I managed to photograph some of them. Rovinj gets few British visitors [more...]
1st outing with the new Panasonic 12-35mm X
So the sun popped out for a few hours the other night and I managed to get out into the country near Winchester with my new lens the 12-35X. This is a great lens. It benefits from the main reason that Four Thirds manufacturers originally designed their sensor with a squarer ratio than that of either 35mm or APS formats: because the light hits the sensor at a less acute angle, it performs better in the corners, especially with wide angle lenses. Sharpness and micro-contrast is remarkable for a zoom, I’d rate it easily as good as the Olympus 12mm f2 [more...]
Shooting in Portugal with the OMD
The main reason I went to Portugal in May was to shoot the apartments and facilities of 2 luxury resorts in the Algarve. I used my recently acquired Olympus OMD E-M5 mirrorless camera and purchased a lens specifically for the job, the Panasonic 7-14mm wide angle zoom. Using the camera at waist level height on a tripod, the OMD made swift work of the task. With its flip up OLED screen and its bright electronic spirit levels, getting these extreme wide angle shots level was a breeze and saved me a lot of time spent straightening and cropping in post. [more...]
Shooting ‘la fille a la mode’
When I received an email from Winchester Fashion Week telling me that a theatre group called Dante or Die would be coming to the Theatre Royal, I was intrigued. The short film giving a taste of their performance, confirmed this was something I had to photograph. The company’s co-founder Terry, kindly agreed to let me photograph his Eight beautiful and elegant actresses, dancers and musicians. They performed at ‘very close’ quarters for a small audience who were led throughout the backstage areas of the theatre, at one point actually going under the stage. The athletic, dramatic and comedic performance (which [more...]

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