The abandoned £5 top-up card
I took this today, outside the pub. It looked sort of plaintive.
Phone photography has come a long way in the last few years. Time was when no one would have taken photographs taken on a phone that seriously unless they were looking for a deliberate low-res effect.
Nowadays we don’t just have the in-phone camera, but a variety of apps for photo manipulation.
This was taken via an app called RetroCamera for the android.
Tower No 1
Because I’m a bit OCD, and a tiny bit bonkers, I like repetition. I like those little Perspex boxes you can buy where identical blobs of coloured oil run down a chute of some sort and fill up the reservoir at the bottom, at which point you turn it upside down and the whole thing starts again, and I like hour glasses, and sand pictures and consequently I like series of photographs of the same thing.
At one time I used to wait for the train in the mornings (and sometimes later) at this point on the platform of my local tube station, and got into the habit of taking photographs of this tower block quite regularly, in various climes and seasons of the year.
I’m thinking I will post them here as an occasional series, since there’s quite a few of them, displaying the changing face of this one view of London.
I like this idea.
Father and Daughter – Hammersmith Tube
There’s nothing much I can say about this. This family was on the opposite platform when I was taking photographs, and this image kind of looked good when I checked through the shots.
The Raven
Why do Ravens hang around in cemeteries? If you read the answers posted across the net you will find that the crow family (which contains Ravens as the large scruffy cousins) are thought to be the escorts of souls to the afterlife.
Realistically, Crows and Ravens are carrion eaters, and are attracted by the smell of death.
They are beautiful birds, and apparently highly intelligent, for birds anyway. Finding one perched on a gravestone was an open invitation.
The Evil Pigeon of The South Bank
Rumours had circulated for a couple of years about an evil pigeon, haunting the South Bank, and terrifying tourists and art lovers with its devilish glare.
I set out to find this beast, and trekked along the route of its reported sightings, between The Globe Theatre and the Tate Modern, for the best part of an afternoon, but saw nothing apart from Damien Hirst who was popping in with a barrel of formaldehyde to top up his shark tank.
Suddenly, I got an eerie feeling that I was being watched by something soulless and malign and looked up to see this…
Woman at Ladbroke Grove
There’s a nice sense of mystery here, since the subject is distanced not only by the fact that she has her back turned but by the closed door through whose window the picture was taken.
Like the found objects in the last photograph it raises questions in the mind, and the answers will be different for each of us.
Things I Find On The Street
Found objects are fascinating to me. Individually, isolated from their usual environment, one can see their shape and form as perhaps one has not seen it before and, the human mind being what it is and hardwired to construct sense from mystery, we attempt to ascribe some sort of meaning or purpose to these objects.
When they are combined, the effect is increased, and we struggle to find relationships between the objects and to construct meaning which is unique and personal to each of us.
Danger of Death
The Welsh don’t mess about when it comes to telling it like it is. They tell you in both Welsh and English, and also provide a handy little illustration demonstrating what might happen if you climb over the spiky fence and the barbed wire. Yes… you may well shuffle off your mortal coil, soft lad!
The Piper in The Temple
Photocollages can be fun. This is comprised of at least six separate photographs, taken at various times in various places. The old lady is a regular outside Shepherds Bush Tube Station where she plays lively tunes on a recorder. The tree was growing from the mud of the Thames on the Hammersmith towpath, and the tomb itself is in Kensal Rise cemetery.
The Ghost of American Television
When does a photograph stop being a photograph and become a painting?
Admittedly, the original image was a bit of experimentation where not only was I photographing a TV screen, but moving the camera as I did so. The rest is painting with Photoshop and employing Gaussian blurs and dodging and burning to a large extent.
It’s difficult know when to stop.
Two Paintings
I have been working on some paintings of covers of early David Bowie albums, and this is a shot of one in progress with the finished ‘Hunky Dory’ painting in the background.
I like the unplanned division between the new and the old and the contrast in focus. It wasn’t something I had thought of in advance. It just happened that way, as it does frequently.
Shadow Painting #02
OK… at the risk of repeating myself, I will explain again how these images were created.
The screen was an A3 sheet of tracing paper securely taped to a foamboard frame and held upright by four stacks of CDs.
The camera was set up on a tripod on one side of the screen with an anglepoise lamp about five feet away on the other side. Then, figures and scenery items are cut from card and secured to a cardboard base so that they can be moved around behind the screen. Then one photographs the shadows thrown onto the screen by the lamp. The interesting thing about this process is that depth of field effects can be simulated by the distance one places the cut-outs from the screen. I love the effect, and will be experimenting and developing this process further.
Scotland
I feel very lucky that although we spent only a few days in Scotland in 2009, I managed to take a surprisingly large number of photographs that have turned out to be very interesting, and packed with detail and light and shade. This worked a lot better with some grain added. It has the look of an engraving, and the aerial perspective dissolves the mountains in the background into subtle differentiations of grey.
I will have to visit there again at some point.
A Dark Time
Some years ago, my triplet brothers Ajax, Bitumen and I became so fat that we were legally committed to a Welsh Fat Prison for six months where we weren’t allowed chips or pork pies.
It was a tough trial, but we got through it and can now all get into the same lift without setting the alarms off, which we haven’t actually tried as Ajax fell out with the rest of the family over an incident in Asda, and has disowned us all. However, I am told it would be possible, if we were all to try it now.
Self Portrait #002
Using a pinhole camera to take a portrait shot must be rather like posing for a photograph in the olden days. A long exposure is necessary so one must necessarily sit still for several seconds. Not as easy as one would imagine, and because there is inevitable involuntary movements, added to the fogginess of the pinhole effect, the result is a soft, slightly surreal image.
This was taken with a Nikon D300s, ISO 200 with a pinhole lens cap and an exposure of 15 seconds, for those of you who like to know those sort of things.
A Random Tube Person
This is one of my favourites of my random shots of people on the London Underground. This gentleman yawned at just the right (or wrong) time, producing this bit of marvellous serendipity.
The Brixton Crucifixion
I imagine you could ask photographers why they take photographs, and you would get a different answer from all of them. You could ask me and you would get a different answer each time, but the bottom line – and I have been thinking about this for quite a while – is that I take pictures for the same reason I write haiku. It is an attempt to capture one moment in time and space that will never be repeated.
This was a random shot I took in Brixton market some years ago now. What I like about it is not just the somewhat symbolic pose that this guy adopted, but the strange and wonderful combination of reflected text in the window and the text within the shop behind him, which seems to surround him with phrases of obscure meaning.
The Pigeon Kit
The folk of North Wales are very keen on their pigeon-racing. The pigeon kit (a kit being a shed, I’m not sure of the origin of the word) in which the pigeons live and to which they return from a race seems to vary from being a precarious punch and judy style affair perched precariously on the edge of a cliff or the brow of a hill, to more elaborate constructions which could comfortably house a family of six and a dog.
This is a midrange property.
Horses Under a Big Sky
I found these horses on a trip to Wales a couple of years ago. It seemed to me that they were the only creatures around at the time, and seemed to resent my presence there, in their kingdom under this huge sky in one of the high places of the world.
Photography in Progress 
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