Tag Archives: Kew Gardens


Waterlillies


Earlier in the year I visited the Monet Gardens at Giverny to photograph the waterlillies. Prior to the shoot, I was asked to make some test shots for a few ideas I had, and these are the results. Shot at my local, Kew, the ideas weren’t adopted in the end, but a few days ago I finally made some high res scans. I love using square format. Unfortunately most art directors worry when you mention it. To fit a page, a crop is almost inevitable, making its use irrelevant.  And why shoot a beautful garden in black and white? The […]

Garden Photographer of the Year competition 2011


This year I have been lucky enough to have a single image selected in the final of the IGPOTY competition and have a portfolio commended. The exhibition will be on show at Kew Gardens from May 14th. The single image is a portrait of a gardening team in the WW1 cemetery at Le Trou Aide Poste, near Lille, Northern France. This photograph is based on an image, taken around 1920, of a team of War Graves Commission gardeners. It is part of a story on the Fromelles Cemetery near Lille, opened in 2010 for the reburial of British and Australian WW1 […]

Kew Gardens, 18th February


A few test shots from a short visit to Kew Gardens last Friday. I’m also trying a blog slideshow plug in, which has more images to scroll through. Hopefully it will view correctly in your browser. If you click on a large photo, it will stop the slides changing and display a full frame image. To restart the show, click on the background or thumbnail of your choice.

Shake it, shake, it like a Polaroid picture…..or not!


The instructions from Polaroid issued after the song by OutKast suggested you shouldn’t really shake your valuable instant photographs as they developed. In fact shaking is more likely to cause damage. So however energetic you feel, gently place each picture on a flat surface …..and watch it, watch it! Apparently the idea of shaking your print came from using the old peel-apart material which had a damp surface immediately after developing. Shaking the prints helped them to dry – or so the say. Yesterday I went to Kew Gardens to test my latest photographic acquisition, a Polaroid 320 camera. After […]

Keep it simple, silly!


Over the last two or three years I have been running photo-sessions with colleagues who want to improve their photographic skills. An hour’s guidance can often help people see photography in a completely new way. Usually for personal work, or for those in the transitional stage between film and digital, I find teaching can be rewarding, especially when seeing someone make progress. In most cases, there is a eureka moment – a basic concept suddenly makes sense, with many other things slotting into place. As there is so much information available in books and online that it becomes difficult to […]

Joiners and montages


One of the unusual jobs I did last year was to produce three photo montages for SAGA, illustrating parks that had been restored using lottery grant money. Actually it was one of those jobs that was great fun to do because the brief was very open. I had free range over the interpretation, providing each image was identifiable with each of the respective sites. A rarity! The parks in question were Myatt’s Field in Lambeth, London, Catton Park near Norwich, and Sandall Park near Doncaster. Due to the hot weather in early July 2010, the time scale for shooting was […]

Worth a look…….Vivian Maier, nanny and street photographer……and The British Council film collection


Just a quick note on a couple of things worth looking at. The first is a clip from a WTTW broadcast on American TV called Chicago Tonight. It details the discovery of a collection of street photographs taken by a nanny named Vivian Maier, who worked in New York from the 1950’s through to the early 1990’s. The collection amounts to an estimated 100,000 negatives, and could be one of the most important photographic discoveries for many years. The work is largely unknown – even her employers through the years didn’t really appreciate what she was doing. But it is […]