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February 22, 2011
 

A sunny winter's walk along the South Bank

The weekend before last contained that rarest of things: a sunny, mild day in the midst of a London February. It would have been rude not to start the day with a chorizo sandwich in Borough Market and ruder still not to continue on the time-honoured South Bank stroll up to the Hungerford Bridge. I have done this walk so many times I could do it in my sleep, but I never get tired of it. Any excuse, as they say, and I usually bring a camera along because there are always interesting subjects, from the market, the river activity, the South Bank buildings, the other strollers, to street performers, the kids in the Undercroft and always a bit of randomness at some point in the trip. 

These, without further ado, were some of the sights I saw that day.... more in my January/February 2011 Set on Flickr. 

And of course I have many more South Bank shots from years gone by...

Filed under  //   2011   london   photo   photography   photowalk   southbank   sunny   uk   winter  

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January 27, 2011
 

Al Balad ("The Old Town"), Yanbu, Saudi Arabia

Earlier this month I was on a short business trip to Saudi Arabia. In four previous visits I have had mixed photographic success in the Kingdom, primarily because I have been there on business and usually not in control of my own itinerary nor free to explore either on foot or by vehicle as I might do in most places I travel. Also, Saudi is not a place that's particularly used to people just photographing for the sake of it, as I found out to my detriment back in 2008 when I was detained by the police in Jeddah for inadvertently taking a picture of a royal building that was occasionally used by the intelligence service. Well, how was I supposed to know when it looked just like every other hotel on the seafront? The upshot of it is, a large percentage of my Saudi shots have tended to be taken on enthusiast compacts like the Canon G9 / S90 out the side of moving cars. Not the best recipe for photo success. 

But this photo was a rare time when we were able to slow down and take things leisurely; we were visiting the seaside town of Yanbu, which despite being by the seaside is, let's be honest, a bit of a hole. Sorry, Yanbu-ians. As is typical of the bizarro world of Saudi, the seaside is almost completely ignored except for one nice empty park, but otherwise surrounded by empty lots and vast fenced off tracts of abandoned private property. The only bit of "history" around is the Old Town, a clump of old-style wooden clapboard buildings in what was the centre of the old town. In most other countries (or at least places with tourism economies) these would have been preserved and there would have been a thriving set of restaurants and shops drawing the tourists in. Alas, there are no tourists, and no reason to keep the buildings maintained. So, they crumble, ignored, except by the poor souls who call them home. Never let it be said that the Saudis are nostalgic, at least when it comes to architecture....

Filed under  //   middleeast   photo   photography   saudi   saudiarabia   sepia   travel  

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January 27, 2011
 

The Canon 7D on the Streets of London

I've been a bit coy about posting here so far in January - as usual, work has landed with a thud atop my head. But I thought I would post a few photos from a couple of London weekend walkabouts which I've used to try and acclimatise to my new Canon 7D. It's a whole lot of camera, not dissimilar to my old 40D, but with it's own good and bad points. My only struggle with getting into it was trying to figure out how to change the autofocus mode and select points - I had to climb down off my arrogance hill and actually crack the manual. I have also been toying with video, but I feel it will be a while before I have anything worth posting. But I've generally been very happy with both the responsiveness and the image quality of this camera. 

Filed under  //   2011   7d   canon   london   photo   photography  

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January 2, 2011
 

Christmas in the Texas Hill Country [Photos]

This Christmas we headed over to Texas and the Hill Country therein, where my mother's small ranch (the Canyon Wren Ranch) always provides some interesting rural photographic subject material. It wasn't the best weather during our visit, but I did manage to get in some good sunrise "golden hour" shots as well as some moody intra-storm shots where golden sun poked through ominous storm clouds. 

Canyon Wren Ranch

While we were there we popped over to Austin for a night, and due to a timely influx of Santa cashola I went ahead and sprung for a new Canon 7D body which I've been ogling for the last year or so. It seemed, well, wrong not to do it, especially as the price was the same as it would have been from B&H in NYC. Anyway I was able to get out at sunrise on the last day and go down to the James Kiehl River Bend Park near Comfort, TX, and give the 7D a try-out (at least from the still photo perspective - I will get to video later). I was very pleased with what came out of the camera and I was also very pleased that a bit of sun decided to peak out behind the storm clouds yet again...

James Kiehl River Bend Park

Filed under  //   2010   photo   photography   rural   texas   usa  

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December 20, 2010
 

Winter hits the UK with a wallop (Photos)

A little bit of snow and the whole place goes to pieces... but at least the white stuff is camera-friendly. These shots are from London and Cambridge, and are from the same winter storm which left 3-4 inches of snow across the Southeast of England and managed to utterly paralyse much of the area's transport network. 

London...

... and to Cambridge

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December 9, 2010
 

Sunset over Paddington Rec, Maida Vale

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December 3, 2010
 

Photos from Bruges, Ghent and Brussels

Last weekend we took a short city-break to get away from London for a bit and managed to find somewhere even colder to go in late November: Belgium. We spent a positively brassic 3 days and 4 nights in Bruges, Ghent and Brussels. I must say that due to the weather I never really felt like I got into my photographic groove - when it wasn't (below) freezing and overcast with dull winter half-light, it was heaving down with snow or gale-force winds. But I managed to get a few shots anyway, and a couple of them turned out to be decent. 

Bruges
Ahh, Bruges, the chocolate-box, over-touristed town of a thousand clichés and contradictions, at once beautiful and twee, mentioned in breathy tones by most people of a certain age until they actually go and remember that every other shop either sells chocolate or lace, and that the 300-beer tavern you remember from that backpacking trip when you were 20 is still, well, full of 20 year old backpackers with braying, twangy voices, comparing the chocolate and lace they have only just then purchased. Oof. Still, we drank well and ate very well, we managed to crack off a few shots and I even managed a panorama on the 2nd night before the weather set in and I was forced to abandon the night's shooting due to a sudden blizzard. I revisited some shots I'd first taken as far back as 1994, but with an added digital element this time round. 

I was happy to get the following panoramic shot of the classic Bruges canal / belfry shot. This was achieved by shooting 4 vertically-oriented shots using my Canon 17-40mm F4L at around 35mm and then stitching them together with Photoshop when I got home. The result is almost pin sharp, and I have a feeling this one may end up on my wall...

Eventually the ever-increasing hordes of tourists combined with a Belgian-beer-inspired hangover drove us out of Bruges and we fled east to Ghent through the snow-shrouded Flemish landscape...

Ghent
After the madness of Bruges the calm streets and canals of Ghent seemed almost deserted in comparison. But we really liked this slower pace and felt that it was a more "authentic" place, whatever that means. 

In Ghent we came across an alleyway almost entirely given over to graffiti: tagging mostly but a bit of street art in the mix. 

Brussels
For the final night we repaired to Brussels so we could be in place for the Monday morning Eurostar. We had fun in the Christmas Market in Place St Katherine, including going up on the massive Ferris wheel....

All in all a fun little weekend outing. 

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November 23, 2010
 

iPad's iOS 4.2.1 "Upgrade" is a dog.

Yay, thinks I, a new bit of kit for my trusty, addictive and yet slightly, ever-so-slightly unsatisfactory iPad (see previous post). 

I get in last night, hook the thing up to the iMac, fire up iTunes and let it do it's thing. Some time later, the iPad is reborn with iOS 4.2.1. Angels clearly begin to sing at this point. 

Except... hang on. 

Yes, there is a fancy schmancy new "multitasking" model (which isn't really multi-tasking, really, just advanced app switching) and folders, and, er, new fonts in the Notes app, and, er wireless printing (if you have the right kind of printer, which I do not), and wireless streaming of video (again, if you have an Apple TV, which I do not), and, er.... um. 

Has it fixed the three biggest bugbears I had with the previous version? Let's see:
  1. Can you now delete photo albums or multiple photos in an easy way? No. 
  2. Can you now be sure that your calendar entries will intelligently maintain their actual temporal positions when you change time zones on the bloody thing? A resounding No.
  3. Can you unlock-with-a-passcode whilst music is playing on the iPod app without said app then crashing? So far, Yes. 
So that's 1 out of 3 of my main issues with it fixed, being generous. A 33% success rate, or 66% complete bloody failure. 

But that's not all; it's taken some functionality that I actually came to depend on, and buggered that up too:
  • As is much lamented out in Apple-land, they've turned the very useful hardware orientation lock on the side of the thing into a completely bloody useless mute switch. This one beggars belief. 
  • Slightly more importantly, this "upgrade" has made my Wifi and 3G connections flakier than a dandruffed scalp. Where once I surfed away, blithely unaware of the titanic struggle my iPad apparently was having in keeping itself connected with the outside world, it now constantly informs me of its plight with pithy reminders of its inability to activate the cellular network and its sheer incompetence at maintaining a solid wifi connection. Which would be acceptable I suppose if I were walking around, or sat on a speeding train, but this is happening when I am sat motionless with the thing. None of this happened pre-upgrade. 
I would say that those two "upgrades" pretty much erase the remaining 33% I was awarding the "bug fixes" above. So we're back to a flat 0% then. 

So, thanks once again, Apple, for failing to properly QA an OS upgrade and for believing your own hype. 

UNDO

Filed under  //   apple   ios4.2.1   ipad   rant   technology  

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November 16, 2010
 

A somewhat motley collection of London photos from the past few weeks

Sometimes I get too caught up in the day job and I forget that I don't have to go abroad to use my camera. I have a lot of London shots in my archives and so sometimes it can feel like I am treading over old ground, but then again I am always a slightly different photographer in a slightly different mood with that little bit more experience, or less patience, or more inclination to shoot people today rather than landscape...

More to come, at some point.

In the meantime we have booked a nice little long weekend in Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels, and as it's my fourth time to Bruges I know I will be coming back having done some serious shooting. Must remember to pack the tripod, Bruges all lit up at night is fantastic, especially if you luck into a calm windless night and the canal water is still. Can't wait. 

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October 29, 2010
 

No terror arrests in 10,000 police stop-and-searches

A really interesting article in today's Guardian about the total pointlessness of the Section 44 stop-and-search tactics the police have employed against all manner of innocent people in the last few years - including many, many hapless photographers. Even the Government's own man, David Davis, is calling this what it is: lunacy. 

More than 100,000 people were stopped and searched by police under counter-terrorism powers last year but none of them were arrested for terrorism-related offences, according to Home Office figures published today.

The statistics show that 504 people out of the 101,248 searches were arrested for any offence – an arrest rate of 0.5%, compared with an average 10% arrest rate for street searches under normal police powers.

The figures prompted the former Conservative home affairs spokesman David Davis to call for the controversial policy to be scrapped.

"This astonishing fact of no terrorism-related arrests, let alone prosecutions or convictions, in over 100,000 stop and searches, demonstrates what a massively counter-productive policy this is," said Davis.

Hopefully statistics such as this, together with Home Secretary Theresa May curtailing the police's Section 44 powers, mean that we photographers will be free to move about - and photograph in public spaces - without fear of pointless police harassment. 

 

Filed under  //   civilliberties   photography   police   policestate  

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