Category Archives: collections

here are some of my favourite images i shot over the course of 2011.

january

as january’s go, this one was pretty cold. me and jen witnessed salt water freezing and one morning my camera packed up on the beach on a day that i reckon had to be less than -10 degrees in the wind. as land-based predators were able to walk on water, this swan became easy pickings for hungry scavengers.

february

coastival ended february and the levellers played to a packed crowd. having never really shot any gigs and without having a press pass i was running around in the crowd with only one lens. i got a few ok crowd shots and some nice shots of the previous band but the levellers had difficult lighting. i guess he liked the scarborough crowd.

march

ok, jen took this one but that dude is handsome, if a bit gormless.

april

a couple of mates were competing in the northern downhill race at alwinton so i headed up there to photograph a proper bike race. i may be wrong but i think this guy was the eventual winner.

it’s difficult illustrating speed and steepness in bike photographs sometimes, everyone says it, but if you look how far off the back of his seat he’s riding it gives some indication that he’s dropping down what is probably a 75 degree hill.

may

though i have the larger size of this image and i can see all the horrible distorted edges from combining 3 of the cheapest nd filters money can buy, about 4 quids worth, at this size i’m quite happy with this.

obviously those rocks are purple in real life as i don’t even use photoshop.

june

family holiday time in volcanic lanzarote. blue skies and white buildings, it’s clichéd but i like it.

july

there aren’t many decent thunder storms in the uk but in july we had a few days of good one. i’m glad this worked out ok since i got drenched and fell down a muddy embankment. those rain clouds on the left passed by really slowly and there was the occasional lightning bolt acoss the sea. had i caught one of those in this picture this entry would simply read ‘WOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’ but instead i have to do this interesting description.

august

photographing jen is easier than she thinks. firstly she’s more photogenic, or photojenic, than she thinks. secondly, i can just grab her head and move it to where i want it, something other subjects might object to.

we took these to use on jen’s website on a hot day in a meadow, one of scarborough’s best places to go on a hot sunny day. shame about the stupid poodle that ‘won’t hurt you, unless you have food’. i’ll happily punch a dog in the face if it eats my food.

september

i’m lucky that i rarely rushed to work on a morning, so it was easy to take a long route, or a different route every day. most days i’d get chance to take a couple of photos first thing. this might have been better in black and white, who cares. there seemed to be many ways to interpret their looks, like those paparrazzi photos that capture people in half blink and claim they’re paraleticly falling out of a club. i’m not sure if she’s looking at him in disgust or inbetween smiling. part of me thinks she’s probably looking at him to say ‘aren’t you going to fix this bloke taking a picture of us 10 feet away?’ but the fact they’re in a moving tram may have protected me.

october

surf comp time at cayton. from this moment on i vowed to sell my zoom lenses and buy fast prime lenses in future. after day 1 shooting specks of people surfing at full zoom, with cropping the images were awful. i went home and spent the evening thinking about how to shoot differently. on day 2 the conditions were far better, cleaner surf, breaking closer to shore, and with more people watching, i was able to get better wide shots and show more of what the surf competition was like as a whole, rather than focusing on the individual surfers.

there were still some sneaky sets coming in and a howling wind. white horses and white ships.

november

i’m happy with this mainly because of that light from the stained glass window. there’s not much else to say other than the band is the wind up radio sessions and i shot some photos of them while i was in montreal visiting my mate matt, in the blue shirt.

december

i took this a matter of days ago, when matt (above) visited us in vancouver. this lake provides vancouver’s drinking water.

water is plentiful in british columbia. it rains for days on end, the streams flow rapidly almost constantly. coming from the uk, where you pay for water, to a country powered by it, where water is free, highlights the differences geography can make to a place. while one country wallows in abundance, another struggles with scarcity.

it’s been a turmultuous year on earth, and while water doesn’t relate to all the problems inflicted on the world, it is the backbone of our human needs, accepted or craved, the one thing that we need to get right above all else. look around you, all that other stuff is superficial.