amipal photography

In January, I traveled up to London with my erstwhile friend for an evening's shoot around Canary Wharf. I've walked around there a couple of times during the day, and captured a few architectural shots (as well as processing a bunch in a science fiction aesthetic ). The purpose of our visit? The Canary Wharf Winter Lights festival. My friend had previously want to head up for this, but for various reasons it never happened. When he announced that he was booking a day off work and going up regardless, I jumped at the opportunity to join him. I didn't really know what to expect. I'd been told that there would be a variety of art installations which had the creative use of light as their medium. How well would this translate to photography? And what compositions could one shoot without the photo ultimately being a record of the artist's work? The works were colourful and varied. Some featured audio background to them, which lent some of them a very eerie atmosph...

And so 2018 has been and gone, meaning an end to my Photo 52 for the year. When I look back at it in it's entirety, I'm quite proud of the work I've accomplished. Photography isn't my job: it is my hobby, and so it is primarily something which I do in spare time (what little I have). The purpose of the Photo 52 project is to ensure that I pick up my camera at least once a week - a difficulty considering a busy family life. This maintains my ability to tweak-settings, and keep my muscle memory and general composition up to speed. More often than not, a photo for the week occur within the local vicinity. Only six out of the fifty-two weeks feature shots from places outside of the greater Brighton area, mainly trips to London (though also my first airshow in years). I really value and appreciate the opportunities to travel for photography, not least because it gives me some fresh subjects to shoot but also because I more-often-than-not do so with a friend of mine wh...

The week just gone was competition night at the club. "Man-Made" was the subject which, as you can imagine, can be pretty much anything as long as it isn't natural. This of course meant a lot of head-scratching, as the possible entries were so wide. Today I thought I'd share not only the photos I entered into the competition, but also the issues that I deal with when printing them, as well as the selection process itself. Let's start with selection. I make use of Lightroom's Collections so that I can easily group images without removing them from their original locations. This is simply as case of creating a new collection (in this case called "Man-Made - PRINT1"), and then going through my archives looking for things that may be suitable. Simply selecting the image and hitting the B key adds it to the collection - and then move onto the next image. In the end, I have a "virtual folder" of candidate photos for the competition, some of wh...

I had the luck of getting a ticket to the uk.shooters Halloween Meet in London on 20th October this year. Me and one hundred and ninety nine other photographers (I'm assuming they all attended) descended on London's Leake Street tunnel to shoot a plethora of models who had all been made up by professional make-up artists. Now, previously when I've shot portraits, I've relied on the G9's face-detect auto-focus to acquire perfect focus on the eyes. This has worked very well in the past, and I've had little reason to doubt the capability of the body as a result. But this shoot was different. Not only was the available light low (and I mean really low), but many of the models had make-up the skewed the human face. Or hair that covered large chunks of the face. Ordinarily, if I notice something going wrong, then I'll try to work out what is going wrong, and above all, why it is going wrong. In this case, the camera was struggling to find a face in the co...

Hello all! Despite the long period of inactivity, this blog is still active. I've just been a bit busy. But back to this post. Today I'll be talking about a trip I made up to London for an evening shoot at St. Paul's cathedral. I knew before traveling that I'd need an ultra wide angle lens to do the architecture any sort of justice. I've owned the Olympus M.Zuiko 9-18mm lens for many years (checks LR metadata - April 2012!), and it is a compact and light UWA whose performance isn't too shabby. Saying that, I've definitely noticed a diminishing in its capabilities over the years - whether this is down to use or something else, I cannot say. I'm simply not happy with the sharpness of the corners from it anymore. I've looked into replacing the M.Zuiko previously. I can't really justify the ~£1000 GBP price-tag of the Olympus f/2.8 7-14mm, nor the similar price for the Panasonic Leica 8-18mm, as I rarely shoot UWA these days. I shoot manual l...

Last weekend I got up stupidly early to travel half way across the country to attend an airshow. But what an airshow! The Royal International Air Tattoo 2018! A word of warning - this is going to be a looooong post. Grab yourself a cup of tea and settle down... I haven't been to an airshow, or at least shot aircraft flying since the Goodwood Revival in 2015, where they had a number of warbirds from the Second World War flying. My equipment back then was my trusty GH3 with the first-generation Lumix 100-300mm lens, and my GM5 with Lumix 14-140mm as backup. These performed well as a pair, allowing me to grab take off, landing, and formation shots with the surprisingly-capable GM5, and the longer, single aircraft detail shots with the GH3. At the time, AF-S was used on both cameras, as I didn't trust the reliability of the continuous auto-focus offered by either - bare in mind that at this point, Panasonic had yet to introduce their Depth from Defocus technology to assist wit...

Due to some recent building work, I'm been stuck working from home for the last four weeks. Which is both a blessing and a curse - being stuck in the same room for days at a time with little human contact makes one a little stir crazy. Cabin fever is real, people. Anyway, this has led me to heading out for a walk after dinner of an evening; for exercise, for fresh air, for something other than the constant four walls. I have the benefit of both the South Downs and English Channel being a five minute walk from my house, depending on the direction I walk in, both of which are an ideal prescription for being stuck indoors for days on end. On a recent walk along the clifftop to Rottingdean, the sun was getting low and heading towards setting. Currently, there's a lot of long dry grass up there, and this created a wonderful contrast where tall bright stalks rose up above the heavily shaded undergrowth. I'd actually gone along there with my camera and a superzoom lens expecting...