What do we really see when we look at a photograph? Is it what the photographer wants us to see or what we see because of what we know or what we believe? Let’s think about this for a while. We only see what the photographer has chosen to frame in
The French artist Edgar Degas said: “Art is not what you see, it’s what you make others see”. And so it should be with photography. It is inevitable that in photography what you ‘make others see’ will be a variety of things because your images will always be open to multiple interpretations. Indeed you could
In a previous post, Five Reasons Why You’ll Always Suck at Photography, I talked about some of the things that could be holding you back from really excelling at your art. Here, I’m going to take a look at the stages of competence you typically go through when trying to actively learn
A reflective post inspired by this article on Medium. So you call yourself a photographer? Sure, you’ve got an expensive camera (or six) and more lenses than will fit in all your camera bags (of which you have more than you know what to do with). You know all the
I’ve been pondering this question over the last month or so as I’ve tried to gain more readers to this blog. Over this period I have: Moved both my website and blog to a single platform, this one, on WordPress.com. Published regularly at the same time every week. Tried to
Last week the American photographer Bill Cunningham died at the age of 87. Cunningham was a street and fashion photographer and was famous for both his unassuming character and his bicycle which he used to get from his Manhattan apartment to the various fashion events that he photographed around the city. He was
I’ve been running this blog for over three years now and, hopefully, have learned a few things along the way, not least of which is that blogging regularly is pretty hard to do. Coming up with something original to say or, in the case of a photography blog, something pictorially
This weekend I visited Down House which was the home of Charles Darwin between 1842 and 1882 and is now owned by English Heritage. Darwin was one of the most influential scientists whose theory of evolution, supported with compelling scientific evidence built up over years of painstaking research, pretty much debunked
This is an image I shot this weekend in Birmingham which has been processed using Silver Efex Pro, part of the Nik Collection of photo editing tools. A few years ago, the Nik Collection would have cost $500. Now Google’s giving it all away. Google bought Nik, a German software developer,
To Specialise or Not – That is the Question
Francis Hodgson, photography critic and Professor in the Culture of Photography at the University of Brighton, has written an interesting post called Teenage Kicks about the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans who currently has an exhibition at Tate Modern in London. Tillmans is a fine-art photographer, essayist and campaigner (most recently campaigning against the UK’s exit