Category: Photography

Yesterday I had the pleasure of taking photos at the wedding of Emma and Ben near Maidstone; the wedding was in Mereworth, with the reception held just up the road in West Malling. The church was a lovely building, with a grand entrance and an amazing ceiling and it had a balcony affording good views of the proceedings. I was a little taken aback (as were some of the guests I think) when the vicar suggested that I should do the group photo of everyone from up there before the final hymn, but she was in charge!

The wedding was beautifully styled with a lot of the details hand-crafted by friends and family. The bus ride on an old Routemaster between the wedding and reception venues was a lovely touch, the sensitive decoration of the reception venue (complete with black and white movies in the background) and all of the smiling faces helped to make my job easier.

All weddings are special obviously, but for me this was a special one as it was the first wedding I’ve shot under the name of Lightbulb Head (the previous 30 or so were as “srphotos”). Whilst Kiri came to the last wedding that I shot under my old photography company, I did this one on my own and it felt a bit weird not having her to assist and capture moments where I couldn’t physically be in two places at once. I think we’ll probably do future weddings together.

All that remains is for me to once again congratulate Ben and Emma and thank them for sharing their special day with me.

When I started taking photos properly, I didn’t really know much about cameras or photography. What was the relationship between aperture and shutter speed? How could I vary how much of the picture is in focus (later understood as “depth of field”)? How would I know when to use flash? What did the different lens numbers mean (I’ve now got a watch with these numbers on!)?

I found some of the answers in a book – Keep it Simple Guide to Photography. It’s a very basic book, but has some great examples, and it makes photography accessible for the beginner. I can really recommend it for anyone wanting to make more out of their existing camera, or anyone wanting to take the step from compact to SLR. In fact, I’ve recommended it to so many people over the years that I should probably get commission…aside from the fact that you can buy it for a penny at Amazon!

I say that I found some of the answers in there – but I don’t think you can fully learn photography from a book. It’s by taking loads of photos and making lots of mistakes that I’ve properly learned and that’s what I’d recommend.

But…photography is so much more than understanding your way around a camera. Some of the basic philosophies around photography that I stated in a blog post in 2008 still stand:

• Practice the art of seeing – so often in this digital world where you can take hundreds of pictures without paying the earth, people just take photos. I know I shouldn’t be bothered by it, but it makes me sad to see people absently pointing their phone at something and clicking the button whilst not even looking.
• Kill the phrase “I’ll fix it in Photoshop” – composition and lighting can all be changed after a shot, but you can save so much time by getting it right in the camera. I’m a real traditionalist in this respect, and don’t do any post-processing (aside from occasionally removing sensor dust from my photos)…but I find myself being more sloppy with digital photos than I am if I’ve got a film camera in my hand.
• Style happens, don’t think about it – when I first started taking photos, I didn’t think about style, then I went through a stage where I was obsessed with “finding my own style”, and my pictures deteriorated in quality. I then forgot about style, and my own style emerged!
• Examine your own photos– once you’ve taken a picture, look at it afterwards. I don’t just mean glance at it – critique it. Decide what you like about it, decide what you don’t, and then use what you’ve learned when taking more photos! Don’t just stop at your own photos – do the same with other people’s photos (but don’t be rude!)

Obviously you never stop learning and developing (pardon the pun) your photographic style, but I think the book and the basic philosophies got me started along the right track.

Four hundred. That’s the number of blog posts that I wrote for srphotos.co.uk in the last 5 and a half years, and in the last year of that, there have been fewer than 30 posts. That’s a lot of blog posts that I don’t really want to get rid of as part of the merge with Lightbulb Head, accounting for a good few hours of my life! It’s lucky that I don’t have to – Kiri has said she’ll make a book out of them, creating the story of srphotos.co.uk.

However, within that vat of old blog posts, there are a few which are still pertinent today, others which are amusing to read in hindsight (think technology predictions!) and others which, quite frankly, deserve to be dropped on the floor. So, my plan is to choose some of the better posts, update them and pop them up here, but don’t worry, you won’t get all of them! I’ll start with one about my camera equipment.

Back in January 2008 (almost 5 years ago to the day) I wrote about my cameras as the most frequent question I was asked was “what camera do you use?” followed by “what do you recommend I should buy?”. I’m still asked these questions today, and I’ll come on to recommendations in a bit, but firstly, this is how my kit bag has changed:

• Main digital camera – back in 2008, this was my trusty Nikon D50 – I still regard this as a cracking piece of kit, but I sold it to my brother-in-law. Nowadays my main digital camera is a Nikon D700
• Main film camera – a Canon AT-1 that was my Father’s and Grandfather’s was the answer in 2008 and it’s the same answer today – it’s doing well considering it’s around 30 years old
• Backup digital camera – I don’t think you could call my Canon Powershot A510 a backup camera, but it was the only other digital camera I owned. Now I have a Nikon D5100 that I use both as a backup, but also as my main camera when I have to think about weight of equipment
• Backup film camera – funny story here – the answer in the original blog post was a Canon AV-1. Between then and now, I have owned every single camera in the Canon A-series (A-1, AE-1, AE-1 Program, AL-1, AT-1, AV-1) – they are beautiful items, but it did get a bit silly. I’ve now downsized again, and have just the A-1 as a backup
• Lenses – I’ve got largely the same lenses for my film cameras – 28mm-70mm, 70mm-210mm and 50mm. Digital is where there’s been the biggest change – back in 2008 I had an 18mm-55mm. Now I’ve got an 18mm-200mm VR lens (almost welded to my D5100 – the best all-round lens I’ve owned), a 50mm, a 24mm-70mm f2.8 and an 80mm-200mm f2.8. They weigh a tonne!

So that’s the kit, but what about recommendations? Please feel free to let me know what you want to be taking photos of, and I’m happy to make individual recommendations. What I will reveal is that I intend to buy a new compact camera soon and the Panasonic Lumix TZ30 looks very attractive!

Yesterday we went for a bit of a wander and I thought I would use the inbuilt camera on my Android Wildfire (I’m a little behind the times with phones!) rather than taking a dedicated camera, just to see what it was like. For a start I don’t have any special photo apps on my phone yet – there are just so many out there. This is what I managed to take:

What I should probably say is that it took me about 5 minutes to take it by the time I’d taken the phone out of my pocket, unlocked the screen, been distracted by a new text message (well, 2 actually), opened the standard camera app and pointed it in the right direction, worked on a nice composition, unlocked the screen again after the 5 second inactivity time-out, chosen which point I wanted to focus on and then pressed the button. OK, some of that can be attributed to lack of familiarity with the phone, but I can’t help but think that for that amount of faffing around I could have taken a better photo on my DSLR or even a compact camera, whilst having more control over the shot. However…I was able to upload the picture directly to Flickr from the phone, which in turn automatically tweeted it – an obvious benefit.

So, my question to you is – can you recommend any good android apps for taking photos? I’m not talking about photo editing apps, but ones which give you nice control over ISO, shutter speed etc. Answers on the back of a postcard (or just reply below!)