Edinburgh

Edinburgh is a lovely city, all tall Georgian terraces, broad boulevards and steep hills, meaning that looking down a side street almost always reveals some new pretty view.

Please see previous post on hipster holiday snaps for info on how to take shots just like these.

Posting will return next week with a round-up of recent work for clients, which I've been a bit neglectful of updating.

Croatia Part the Third (the favourites)

This looks like an abstract painting; the light top right is the sun streaming into a cave on the island of Biševo where the water glows a deep and ethereal blue.

Croatia Part the Second (the favourites)

This image isn't really anything special photographically speaking but is my second favourite for the simple reason that it's from a really wonderful day we spent island hopping on a speedboat, swimming in coves with yachts, seeing dolphins breaking the water, drinking fresh orange juice and failing to climb hills. It's sometimes worth remembering that photos can just be lovely aide-memoires.

Croatia Part the First

Or, how to take the perfect set of hipster holiday snaps...

 

Marjan Forest is a lovely place for a walk.

 

All the leaves are shaped like hearts.

 

And there's some rusty training equipment in the trees.

 

 

We ate a LOT of sladoled (ice-cream).

None of it looked like this guy though.

 

Split's a bit gritty.

Ex-communist relics hanging about.

1. Buy some expired rolls of film at the market for a pound a pop. (You will later find out that two of them are covered in scratches and dirty streaks of chemicals but don't worry, this is all part of the master plan).

2. Only carry your old Russian camera around with you. Make sure the strap breaks at some point, plunging your camera to the uncarpeted floor of your bedroom and ensuring the already dodge winding mechanism will remain that way forever. 

3. Forget what ISO the film in your camera is, meaning your usually pretty-accurate use of the sunny f16 rule falls by the wayside and half the roll will be wildly underexposed. 

4. Don't be bothered to clone stamp all the dust off your images.

5. Write an ironic blogpost about your pictures, and love them anyway.

Sigh

Hello all, how are your summers? I've just returned from trips to Croatia and Edinburgh.

It's sometimes tricky deciding what cameras to take away with me; my digital cameras are worth much more than my film cameras and so potentially attract much more unwanted attention from thieves and bad'uns; digital photography feels like work and has the capacity to take over activities but since most of my film cameras are 'vintage' (read: old and crapped-out) they can be somewhat unreliable. Anyway this time I decided to take a very ancient Russian rangefinder, a Holga, and a home-made pinhole - all film. I've featured images taken with the rangefinder on previous trips; I like the slightly soft, grainy photographs it produces and, if I'm honest, the stylish look of the thing itself (it looks like this). However I think it may be time to retire this baby. After the first two days in sunny Split I began to suspect it was not winding properly - I'd had a film in there previously and had been shooting a lot over those first days and somehow the film seemed unending. Sure enough, after developing and scanning it, it turns out that every image I've taken on this camera for the last couple of months is overlaid on top of itself.

Although it's kind of an expensive and annoying mistake, I do love the resulting image. Looks like something you might dig up in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, no?

Big Dance Walk 2012

I photographed Tom Goodwin and Petra Soor's Big Dance Walk in 2010 - back then it was the hottest day of the year and the grass in Footscray Meadows was all sorts of shades of brown and gold, crisp and sere. This year's event in Oxlea Meadows was almost the exact opposite; everything bursting with chlorophyll and rich black mud squishing underfoot. The Big Dance Walk is a gentle, involving, meditative and joyful piece performed by adults, children, and older people and having experienced it in such extremely different ways reflects the richness of life itself and the rewards and wonder both of aging and of being young; and of being out of the city and into the green. For more Big Dance events see their website bigdance2012.com

 How beautiful are these two women?

 Like actual models...

Brighton III

I made a (slightly rubbish) GIF out of some of the pictures from the arcades...pretty colours and shining lights make my heart beat a bit faster.

Brighton II

A few more from the seaside.

This place is called Horatio's Bar and the thudding symbolism of the chained and wonky lion was too good to miss.