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A Short Walk In London

Having asked our good friend Scot Baston to shoot my daughters christening, which he accepted, and inviting his girlfriend, also our good friend, Juliette Kuil to attend as well, we decided we would make a weekend of it as there was no point in them travelling all the way from Devon to Surrey to shoot the christening only to head straight back to Devon afterwards. So Scot and Jules arrived late on the Friday ahead of the christening on the Sunday and traveled back late afternoon on the Monday after, which gave us enough time to have a proper catch up and even a short photowalk in London on the Saturday afternoon/evening. The plan was to have a much longer walk, but time got the better of us and we didn’t get half as far as we thought we would but that didn’t stop us from having a great time, a good old chat, a damn good laugh and the chance to capture some great images.

Steady on Scot

Saturday morning and early afternoon was set aside as recovery time from the long journey the night before, although I’m not sure exactly how much of a recovery Scot will have made as he seems to attract my youngest son’s attention like a moth to a flame except in this scenario the flame suffers worse than the moth as Lucas tends to like climbing all over Scot and being a general menace to him, not giving him a moments peace.

Jules bags another shot

After a decent recharge, and plenty of coffee’s, we set out to London at about 3pm telling my wife we would be back around 10pm. Taking out the travelling time that would give us about 5 hours to attempt to get our planned walk done as well as grab a bite to eat somewhere, surely that would be more than enough. Well the plan was to park up near the Houses Of Parliament, cross over Lambeth Bridge to the south side of the Thames and walk all the way down to at least the Millennium footbridge, cross over to St Paul’s Cathedral and then walk all the way back along the Embankment to Parliament Square and then back to the car. A slightly more ambitious plan would have seen us walk all the way to Tower Bridge and then all the way back but that plan was miles off reality, as the scaled down plan wasn’t achieved either as we only got as far as the Charing Cross footbridge before turning back due to hunger taking over.

Silhouette of the Houses Of Parliament

We’d spent so much time at Jubilee Gardens, where the London Eye is situated, that it had made it impossible to get as far as we’d first wanted to. Jubilee Gardens was packed with people as there was a mini carnival going on. There were all kinds of things to see, do and eat. The whole thing just grabbed our attention and we must have stayed there for nearly an hour and half shooting all manner of things like the street performers, the general public, the stall holders through to the architecture of the characterful London buildings as well as the London Eye itself.

Street Artist in the suit sets up these poses so your mates can get pictures

Having decided it was time to move on we made the conscious decision to abandon our plan to get all the way to St Paul’s as hunger was setting, but we wouldn’t hurry back to the car just yet as the best light of the afternoon/evening was just appearing and so we went up on to the Charing Cross footbridge to get some shots of the London Eye. Now, I’ve taken a number of shots of the Eye by night and have always been happy with the colourful results and I’ve never once thought that I could get anything as striking by day. Thing is I think I may just have achieved it after all. Some may agree with me and some may not, that’s your decision and yours only, but I happen to think this shot below rates as one of my best shots ever and it’s all due to the light being spot on perfect for the subject involved. Scot has admitted to becoming a bit of a light snob, and I can see the benefits of it when you come away with keepers like this. Had the light been to harsh or to dull then it wouldn’t have turned out half as good as this and it would probably have been destined for the recycle bin.

The London Eye in perfect light

For me this shot made the whole of the photographic side of our walk all worthwhile but having said that it wouldn’t have ruined the day had I not got that shot as the important part for me was being with great friends, friends who I don’t get to see as often as I’d like to but then when you consider the distance between where we live it’s understandable why we can’t hook up that often.

Jules

So with that shot in the bag we set about walking back to the car so we could get that all important meal. On the walk back we were stunned into a moments silence and worry as approximately 30 police riot wagons shot past us down the Embankment towards Tower Bridge, bringing on thoughts of the recent London riots. Quickly searching twitter gave us the answer as to why they went past at such a speed. Turns out a large gathering of out dated, mindless, right wing activists from some sort of racist organisation were protesting about other religious groups and getting violent towards them. I’m not in possession of the full facts but in basic that was what was happening and not far away either. Stepney, in East London, was apparently where it was kicking off and it turns out that the police were shepherding the mob from there down towards Tower Bridge to make them disperse there, damn good job we didn’t get that far on our walk then!

A happy candy floss seller

All in all though it may have been a short walk but it was one of the best due to the company, the photography and eventually the food, even though it was only a Pizzahut

 

Dom

Baptised As A Photographer

Sunday the 4th of September 2011 will be a date remembered by us as our little baby daughters christening day. A very special day that we wanted to have precious memories of, and although I could have joined in with the days celebrations and shoot the proceedings as well I decided I wouldn’t because I wanted to enjoy the day without having to think about getting that all important shot. So who to give that responsibility to.

Well we chose to ask my good friend, and fantastic photographer, Scot Baston and without a moments hesitation he said he would be delighted to do it. We of course invited his better half, Juliette Kuil, to join us for the occasion and thankfully she was allowed to have time from work to be able to do so. It also allowed us to plan a weekend of it, if they could arrive late on the Friday prior to the christening on the Sunday, which they did. So there will be more on that in another post to come

I have to say it was probably the best decision we’ve made in a while as there would have been so much that I’d have missed if I’d have done the photography myself. Scot was on hand to capture each and every detail of the day from the formalities to the surprise of the arrival of  The Venerable Daniel Kajumba to help conduct the service. Daniel is an Archdeacon from Southwark Cathedral and is the very man, or should that be, Ugandan Prince who married the wife and I ten and a half years ago. Scot could capture all of that, where as I wouldn’t have at all, and how gutted would we be now if we didn’t have pictures from all the big day’s events.

(Danny’s entrance was a surprise to us all, including Scot who very quickly had to adjust, hence the slight blur, to capture Danny walking in)

The pattern of the day was very similar to that of a wedding, and so Scot approached the photography very much in that manner. Getting Imogen into the christening gown, us getting ready, the service at the church and the reception in a function room. Capturing details of Imogen gown, socks and bib. At the service shooting the moment the holy water was poured on to her forehead and then on to the party where the cake would be cut.

(Imogen’s eldest brother, Tomas, helps Danny to pour the holy water)

Imogen looked very beautiful throughout the day and Scot’s photography shows this off superbly. He was wonderful all day long, dealing with people he’d never met before, dealing with large numbers of people and dealing with those who didn’t really want to appear in any photographs, (and not to mention dealing with my kids, who tend to use him as a human climbing frame! lol)  he dealt with it all very professionally. His character leads him be a natural at this kind of photography and the results of his efforts speak volumes to. We are eternally grateful to Scot, and Juliette, for coming all the way from Devon to be part of, and shoot, Imogen’s big day. She, like us, will have a great collection of images to help us remember that fantastic day.

(Imogen’s other older brother, Lucas, very proud and rather mischievous)

Scot, thanks for all your help

Dom

All the Images in this post are the images taken by Scot Baston and therefore are Copyright protected in his name.

(Most of the Images were edited by Scot Baston. Three were edited by me and are in no way representative of Scot Baston’s photoshop knowledge and skill. They are the shots of Imogen on the brown carpet, the entrance of Daniel Kajumba and the Baptism of Imogen by Daniel)

Norwich Street Photography

Yesterday we went to Norwich for an afternoon wandering around the shops but as the city has its fair share of tourist/photographic attractions I took my gear along with me to grab a few shots of the city. Typically the weather dictated that we spent a fair time in the shopping centres dodging large downpours of rain rather than strolling down some of the more historic lanes that I would rather have seen.

So we didn’t make it as far as the Cathedral, the Castle or even the market. So being a rather frustrated photographer at the moment, what with the lack of opportunities to actually get out and shoot, I decided to try and get a few street photography shots. This is one of the types of photography I would love to be able to master but I just don’t seem to have the knack for it or maybe even the guts for it. It takes a certain type of person to be able to stand there in the street blatantly grabbing shots of people as they go about their daily lives, and make them interesting.

I came away with a small number of pictures, and from what I’ve seen on the back of the camera there may be two shots that could be ok but nothing more than ok. The rest are just dull and lifeless. I wrote a blog entry a few months back on street photography and how on earth do people do it, and it looks like I still don’t have the answer. May be I have to try harder, try to ignore the apprehensive nervousness of actually doing street photography or maybe I should just give up!

I will at some point in the next 24 hours or so get to look at them properly and maybe edit them. As for getting them online to show you an example or two, well that’ll be down to the T-Mobile gods. If they happen to give me some 3g in the little village we will be at, then I will put them up here, if not they’ll go up in a weeks time.

Dom

Not Getting The Time To Shoot?

I guess this must happen in most people’s lives at some point, and probably for more reasons than just my own at this moment in time, but my problem is getting the time to do any kind of photography. It seems hard enough to achieve at the best of times when you have a family and commitments to work, but for the past 9 weeks,and probably for quite a few more to come, the opportunities to pick up the camera have been at an all time low due to the arrival of Imogen, our nearly 10 week old baby.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a wonderful event in our life and I wouldn’t change it for a single thing but obviously this has affected the way I run my life. Our new baby’s needs along with those of the wife and our two boys are my priority right now. Throw into the mix a lot of sleepless nights and you get one knackered bloke who is busy with all things family and very little else.

So where does my wonderful hobby and part time business fit into all of this, well it doesn’t really. Sure I’ve taken family snapshots that technically are no better or worse than any photo that may sit inside any photo album across the land but in terms of proper thought out photo shoots I’ve done two in 10 weeks. Both of baby Imogen, one when she was just over a week old and the other when she turned nine weeks old. Not a lot huh.

This lack of activity is not for the want of it though. I crave the opportunity to get out and grab some shots but the glare on the wife’s face tells me that even though there may be a cracking sunset out there that she needs help bathing the kids and getting them to bed so there’s no point in even asking, and of course by time that’s done the sun is virtually gone and I’m feeling to tired to bother.

So I’m having to look at other opportunities, ones where I would normally leave the DSLR at home and take the wife’s point and shoot, ones like two weeks ago when we took a trip with friends to Drusillas Zoo on the south coast of England. Normally I’d leave my camera at home because zoos tend not to be the greatest places to get decent shots because of wire fences, cages and dirty, often scratched, glass windows putting a barrier between the camera and the subject. It becomes a challenge that I need not have or bother with in times when playtime with the camera is at a high, but like now when the chances are low that challenge becomes unmissable.

So, how do you deal with these obstacles. Well, with a little technical now how and a little common sense. The one thing that drives me mad is when I see someone taking a shot of an animal and its caged behind glass and the flash fires! Wonderful, you just got a nice picture of a flash reflected straight back into the camera. Yeah you might get to see in the shot what it was you wanted to get a picture of but that flash of light will be fairly over powering. So the answer there is to just turn off your flash and increase your iso. The next thing you can do to enhance your chances of a decent shot is to get your lens as close to the glass window as is possible to get rid of any other reflected light, maybe even cup your hand over and around where your lens meets the glass. If possible try and find a fairly clean piece of glass to shoot through, it’s not always easy to do but it will help you to get a clean image.

The next most common obstacle at zoo’s is the good old wire fencing. Dealing with this is down to the capabilities of your gear and a bit of luck. Here you’ll need a lens that can create a shallow depth of field, ideally an f/2.8 or less and what you would do is set your aperture to it’s widest to create the shallowest depth of field possible and as you zoom in on your subject and then focus on it it should blur out the fence, and the chances of this happening increase the further out you zoom. This is where the luck bit comes in. If your lucky and can get quite close to the fence you will have a better chance of totally blurring out the fence where as the further you are from the fence the more likely it is that you will see it in your pictures.

This advice is hardly ground breaking stuff but just something to keep in mind next time you get a family trip to a zoo, or even a museum where lots of exhibits are behind glass, and you think maybe I won’t bother with the camera. Situations arise all the time which lead us all to change the way we live our lives but it’s only when they do that we start to miss things that we may have taken for granted in some way. I know what I’m missing doesn’t really register on the important scale what you rate it against some of the terrible things that are happening in the world right now but you now what I mean

The Lesser Spotted Long Eared Tomas!

Thanks for dropping by and taking the time to read

Dom

Proud as can be!

Its not often that you’ll catch me talking about much else on the internet other than photography, West Ham United, things that get my goat with the world today (that’ll be the grumpy old man syndrome kicking in at the ripe old age of 36), or catching up with friends and what’s going on in their lives. So for me to blog about what’s happened in our family life in the past couple of weeks and how I feel about it all is an incredibly rare occurance.

Well as some of you may well know we, well my wife, had our third child on the 15th of June and this time we had a little girl. She joined us and her two brothers at 13:43 at the East Surrey Hospital in Redhill, Surrey. We as a family owe a debt of gratitude to the wonderful staff at the hospital for helping to deliver our little Imogen by c-section and then care for her and my wife until they were both fit and well enough to join the boys and me at home in Horley.

It’s at this point I must say I’m so very proud of my wife who has done a fantastic job in nurturing this tiny life inside her for the last nine months, as she did twice before with Tomas and Lucas. She’s a great mum and a brilliant wife who completes my life. Claire I love you ever so much and always will. Life without you and the kids would be unimaginable.

Having your first child is always a life changing event, where as having your second and third is not as intrusive on how your life works as your already in routine of living your life dedicated to your child but your levels of emotion and pride in those second and third arrivals are just as high as the first.

As she arrived tears of happiness flowed yet again, and to a certain degree they still do now recalling the moment we met Imogen for the first time. Its an emotion, feeling, moment in life that I don’t believe can be matched by any other event that we face in life. Bringing one of your own into the world is an amazing feeling and I’d recommend it to all and everyone.

Well that’s all the soppiness your gonna get from me for a while, lol.

So for now here is a link to a set of pictures of our little lady  http://flickr.com/photos/a100images/sets/72157626891812753

Thanks for stopping by and having a read

Kind Regards

Dom

It’s Been Too Long…..

A few days back my good friend and fellow photographer Scot Baston posted a new blog about the community spirit that photographers have. For me that spirit is at its best within the online photographer community where Twitter and Facebook seem to be the main gathering places and its those places that I to have gained many new friends and in some cases very good friends who will very probably be there for life, yet a couple of years back I’d never heard of them.

Scot’s blog entry talked about how he’s found the photography community to be helpful in the extreme, from both a giving and receiving of information, advice, help, inspiration, reality checks and just as importantly the creation of associations & friendships and I whole heartedly agree with what he said and the vast majority of the replies that he got, but I’m not going to continue on what he said, elaborate on it  or give my reasons for agreeing. What I will do is share a day which I will remember for a long long time, a day where I spent a good few hours in the company of some great people I met through photography and social media, doing what we do best……in the pouring rain!

About 8 months back my family and I had a weeks break down in North Somerset which was basically right on the doorstep of Shelly Lovegrove, Scot Baston and Juliette Kuil who all live in the Somerset/Devon areas. So it had to be so that we met up for an afternoon at the very least, somewhere where we could combine an afternoons photography and a good old chat in person, instead of having to use the social media networks to communicate. Well the date was set about 2 or 3 weeks ahead of the meet up, and little would we know that it would be the only day of my holiday that it rained but there was no way we would let that affect our plans, not a chance.

The choice of where to meet up was kinda left to me, being the guest on there patch, so with the help of googlemaps I thought Tarr Steps looked a great place to meet. Very photogenic, in the middle of nowhere, and there was a pub nearby, perfect.

We met at about 11am in the car park just to the north of the steps and the first 15 minutes was spent fighting to get in to out wet weather gear. The rain was relentless, not heavy, just very constant but without protection we’d have been saturated within minutes. We spent most of our time at the steps talking, walking and wiping lens’ dry, and on the odd occasion trying and get a decent shot or two. Given the conditions it was more miss than hit, but it was fun none the less.

We spent a short while under the protection of the trees that rain along the line of the river, of which the steps allow you to cross, whereby I thought it was a good opportunity to try some off camera flash shots using Shelly, Jules and Scot as willing models. We had some fun with that for a while, and got a decent shot or two, before deciding that a quick retreat to the little pub to dry off, warm up and refuel would be a good idea.

This gave us a better chance to all have a good catch up on things in general, as well as deciding where to head next, whilst waiting for some great home cooked country pub grub. We came to the conclusion that Dunster would be a good choice. A Ye Olde village with a castle, what could go wrong with that. Well nothing really (apart from being locked in, more on that in a moment!) even the weather had improved. The rain had stopped, the skies were still a murky, uninspiring grey but as before it just didn’t matter. The photography was really just a side effect of the meet up, the interaction with these great people was far more important.

We started out in Dunster at the northern end of the village and walked south down through the high street, towards the castle and up to the castle entrance to find that, as we suspected, it would cost to get in. Deciding it was probably a little to expensive for just a general wander we headed of further to the south of the village and came across signs for the Dunster watermill. Immediately we all thought that it sounded like it had the potential for picture taking, so we followed them. Eventually we found ourselves approaching running water and guessed we must be getting close,but at one point though it felt like we were going to end up on private property as there was a five bar gate to go through which didn’t give any sign that going beyond it would be a public right of way but as it was open we wandered through regardless. About 30 meters further on from that gate was an old stone archway with an open metal gate and the other side of it was a watermill, so rightly or wrongly we assumed this to be the watermill that the sign posts were taking us to.

We then set about getting some shots of the old wooden wheel that the water would have turned in years gone by, but it wasn’t as spectacular as we had hoped, so we moved on, deciding to follow this small river a little further on till we found a picturesque stone bridge with the water rushing under it into a small waterfall. We must have spent a good half an hour to 45 minutes shooting it from different angles and shutter speeds before deciding that it was time to end our days shoot and head back to the car park. On approach to the metal gate it became clear that it had been closed, on further inspection it had been locked, whoops. There was no way round, over, or under this gate, we were stuck! Turns out we had accidentally found our way in a back entrance to Dunster castle and it’s grounds, and now we had to find our way out of it. Thankfully that task wasn’t as hard or as troublesome as we had at first feared. Eagle eyed Scot had spotted what looked like a footpath on the other side of the river behind a barbed wire fence. So we walked back to the stone bridge, crossed it and sure enough found that there was indeed a footpath, we just had to hurdle the barbed wire fence, which we did, thankfully.

Making it back to our cars I invited Shelly, Jules and Scot back to where we were staying, as it was only a couple of miles from Dunster, to meet my family and get a well earned cup of tea. This gesture was important to me for two reasons. 1) to elongate my day with my very good friends and 2) so my wife, her parents (as they were on hols with us as well) and my kids could meet them to. Well they accepted my offer but you may be wondering why the second part was that important to me. In all honesty I don’t believe my family could quite believe its that possible to be that good a friend to someone who you’ve hardly ever, or in some cases, never met but only ever conversed with over the internet. Yet it was very evident to my family on meeting Scot, Jules and Shelly that it was and is possible as our relationship and interaction was like that we have with any of our friends that we’ve known for years. Plus it helped that they are all great characters with down to earth attitudes.

Like I said at the start though, this all happened 8 or so months ago and that was the last time I saw all of them together. I’ve met up with Scot since, but that was still 6 to 7 months ago and that for me is just to long ago. I would love to meet up with these guys much more often but life, and the distance involved, dictates that it just can’t happen every other month or so but more like once, or if we’re lucky, twice a year.

Having said that we do still have good old Twitter, the very thing that meant we would meet in the first place. Of course we have more than Twitter to be able to communicate but our conversations are rarely private. They are normally of something that any of our other photography friends can, and do, join in with. Its what makes the whole thing unique and very very special, just like my friendship with these guys.

I’ve been lucky enough to meet a few other twittering photographers, all of whom are great people and I would be very pleased to meet up with again, and theres a few others I am yet to meet but I’m sure I would get on very well with should the opportunity to ever arise.

I’ll finish now by simply saying thanks to those whom I talk about here for being great friends, motivators, teachers, listeners, advisor’s and puchbag’s, (Bob!. Scot and a select few will understand this one!),  and I’m very very much looking forward to meeting up with all my photography mates soon…….whenever that may be!

Dom