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Bookends and a year of imagery

February 27, 2015
From the Archive, Military work, Sport / Action, travel
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I realise that in the last couple of years I have not fulfilled the commitment of a BLOG properly.  Now I could make every excuse in the world, but who am I kidding.

I sometimes wonder what is the point of this blog?  Am I trying to reach anyone?  No, not really.  This is much more of a diary really, an opportunity to put some thoughts down, ideally thoughts I don’t mind others knowing about, that is.

So after a relatively poor show for some time, where do you go to try to kick it all off again?

The last twelve months have been busy with one thing and another.  There have been some really interesting trips away, a lot of mundane work, but then that is the lot of essentially being a staff photographer.

Here are some images taken pretty much in the last year, I will add a notation explaining them.

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The year has tended to start with covering the Divisional championships in France.

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An unusual trip to Cyprus and the last European divided city, here the tour piper uses the solitude of the roof to practice.

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The military do occasionally do this kind of thing from time to time.

300th Anniversary of the Personal Union

The summer saw the spectacle of the Queens birthday reception in Hannover, with all the pomp and ceremony you could imagine.

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Sport and competition is and always will be a big part of the military experience, this was from the British Forces Germany athletics finals.

British Army says farewell to German town

The final pomp in the small spa town of Bad Oeynhausen.

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Army restructuring brings with it new training opportunities and part of that is seeing exactly what the kit is able to do.

UK COMMITS TO MAJOR POLISH EXERCISE IN SUPPORT OF EASTERN EUROPEAN ALLIES

Poland has been a big part of this year, with two exercises being covered.

UK COMMITS TO MAJOR POLISH EXERCISE IN SUPPORT OF EASTERN EUROPEAN ALLIES

‘Green eyes’, or Night vision can make for an interesting shot.

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This year has been a whole lot of ‘last one’s’, here is the last British Army Polo competition in Germany before the withdrawal.

British Army Flexes its armour in Poland exercise.

A second visit to Poland saw our largest armoured deployment for an exercise for decades.

British Army Flexes its armour in Poland exercise.

The feet on the ground, every conflict needs them.

British Army Flexes its armour in Poland exercise.

A soldier moves as quickly as he can over open ground during the exercise.

British Army Flexes its armour in Poland exercise.

A British Challenger 2 can move very quickly over rough terrain, one of the fastest.

Throwing a spanner in the works

Army boxing is in good form and an amazing experience to see.

Inter-Service rivalry hits the slopes of France

The last bookend, back to skiing, this time an Army snowboarder makes some shapes against a dramatic backdrop.

What IS Facebook and Social media all about?

May 7, 2013
Opinion
2 Comments

In this last week a friend on Facebook……. wait, a friend on Facebook or a friend who is on Facebook?  Good question.  How many real friends do you have in a lifetime anyway?

Social media confuses me.  At first it seemed quite exciting catching up with people whom I had had no contact with since leaving school.  What were they doing now?  It appeals to our natural voyeuristic appetite, and yet it feels somehow detached, like you are doing nothing wrong, effectively spying on them (even though by putting their information up there for all to see if their choice).

It started by looking through the friends list of a new contact looking for other lost connections and then moves on to looking through photographs of them and their lives.

Have we always had this fascination?

A few years down the line and I find I have been questioning the validity of social media.  Of course from a business perspective it works like a dream, I can post and tag my images and all their friends can see them.  More work comes my way.  Perfection.

But this can only happen if the public as a whole use the site.  Numbers on Facebook are dropping in the western world now, but is this because the realisation has hit that time spend on these sites is a waste of time or are there other better sites available now?

I hope not.  Most of the crap on Facebook seems to be more and more like a cry for help than anything else.  The motivational and relationship status banners that are popping up all the time simply cannot be a healthy process.  At the end of it all, who cares?  I worry that many people who read these statuses are emotional vampires who get a kick out of the fact you are feeling low.  There are so many people that enjoy watching the misery of others, do they not have anything better to do?

I decided long ago to keep personal details as far away from social media as I could.  Most of your friends are really unknown, even if you did know them as a kid.

One of the other really big problems with social media is the faux bravery it nurtures.  In the safety of your living room, you can spout all the vile poison in your head (we all have some), and yet feel safe from physical reprisals.  You can say things to people that you just would not in a face to face encounter and feel safe that there is unlikely to be any consequences.  This is a very worrying development for me, but also because mostly people try to believe all they read, in fact I am convinced that people in general are happy to believe what they are told because it is too difficult, sometimes, to question it.  OK possibly not the case but…..

So going back to my friend, then from the beginning.  A professional photographer who has decided to turn his back on the social media revolution.  Wow, I thought to myself, that is brave (or stupid).  Where are his clients going to come from?  I thought.  How strange to think that, although it does seem like it at times, social media is not everything.  There is a life beyond it.  My friend (maybe I will start to believe that this is the case), made some other very valid points with regards to the devaluing of the photographic image too.  I don’t know though, maybe the digitising of photography has sealed its own coffin.  Maybe the image will now be consigned to the disposable and temporary scrap heap.  The next amazing image on Facebook is only a couple of status updates away, after all.

Except it is not, you find some of the good image based pages and you will find that many of the fantastic images being displayed are old, some very old.  You see with all of this technology, I think we have started to miss the point about photography.  Great off camera flash is wonderful for the wedding client or those portraits in the hay field, and it is such a skill (no doubting that), but they are still gimmicky. A great image is still a great image, even if it was taken 100 years ago.  Digital means we can (and do) take more photographs, but we have always known that quality is better than quantity any day.  So by taking more images what are we missing?

I think that perhaps we are missing the connection, that is what it is all about.  A real connection and not a cyber one.

What’s it all about? and what IS the magic of photography?

February 20, 2013
Opinion, Portraits, Wedding
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Wow, heavy, or is it?

Today we were informed by WordPress that we have now reached our second anniversary, where does the time go?

How do you begin to approach questions like ‘What’s it all about’?  Well I suppose every single one of us would give a different answer and more than that, your answer would differ almost daily…

The question always reminds me of a Michael Caine line used in a song by Carter USM and it always makes me smile, not for any other reason than the acceptance that we all pose the question to ourselves at one time or another.  It’s only natural.

So what is this blog all about?  Well I am under no illusion that this gets seen by millions of people, tens of people is something….  This is a tool of my trade, a business tool an opportunity to shout about what we are doing, what our plans and ambitions are, so show some examples of our work, to interest you (well you can’t have it all I suppose), but ultimately a way of connecting.  There is no malice, just what is intended to be an honest approach.  The trouble with the written word is context. The skill in writing is just that, but often over looked is the skill in reading.  Most of us don’t really understand punctuation, me included.  Where should that colon come in, why does the apostrophe go there and how does the comma in a certain place change the meaning of the sentence?  Yes it is fair to say, I am not the best at writing, but I try.  We all communicate with each other, and talking is the best way because quite simply, the voice naturally has the natural inflexions that enhance the words themselves and make the meaning come to life. to give it context, to make it easier to understand.  I think it is far easier to misunderstand the written word than not and possibly the other way around for the spoken word.  That is not to say, the spoken word is never misunderstood because we all know it is.

I guess it makes sense then that unless you are certain the writer of some text is excellent and you have confidence that you read well, you should never take what you read too literally.  Easier said than done!  I know….  The more I write the more I understand just how artistic writing can be.

This leads me onto the next question, what IS the magic of photography?  Well apart from being a tag line for this blog, photography for many has always had that allure of magic.  If you go back to thee old film days (many of us view with a nostalgic tear), the actual process of creating an image onto a piece of glass or gelatin is nothing short of ingenious.  Using the right chemicals at the correct temperature for the exact amount of time to develop the latent image is nothing less than astonishing.  To see an image form on a blank piece of paper in the darkroom will always amaze me, it feels like magic.  Of course I know it is not, it is chemistry but I will never fully understand the process so no matter how much I research it, I like the feeling I get that I am witnessing a little miracle.

Photography has changed in many ways in recent years and like any development, change is never all good, but usually it is also never all bad either.  It is true the chemistry has gone, but the technological change is as dramatic and breath taking as the original process.  How modern digital cameras capture what they do, well there simply has to be an element of magic in there somewhere.

Again though, this is not all there is, the magic goes beyond that.  Surely the magic is in the emotion that a still image can portray?  The capture of a genuine smile, the love displayed in a wedding photograph, the drained exhaustion of a brand new mother holding their baby, the satisfaction of having received your scroll from University, the list goes on and on.  The capture of these things remind us of those moments and allow us to relive them, to remember.  This is the real magic of photography, a simple two dimensional print or image can be so much more than that.  In fact in cases where families have lost all their belongings in a fire often say that the hardest to come to terms with is the loss of their photos.  Makes you think….

Building books and the tangible truth

October 22, 2012
Afghanistan, Military work, Opinion, Portraits
6 Comments

If there is one aspect of digital photography and the internet that I don’t like it is simply the lack of necessity to print your images.

There is nothing quite like a decent print, and trust me it is never simply a case of hitting the print button.  So in the last six months or so I have been responsible for producing 4 photographic books, and all I can say is wow.  Although the books have been limited run or one offs, the sense of achievement you get after all the work of putting them together and handling it is second to none.

I now have the printed book bug.

A reflective image is so different from a back lit image, that seeing your images feels like seeing it again for the first time.

There are some amazing companies out there that can produce these books and some of the software you can use to complete the books are very straight forward.  All I would say is don’t feel the need to over complicate the layout.

Photo books should ideally, in my humble opinion, be about an image at a time, although that is not always possible.  There is certainly a skill in putting a book together and I feel myself getting better each time.  There is a lot of work, in particular when you are trying to include other contributors.

Another important effort is to do your best to create a narrative, to make the images inter connect and flow from one to the other and at times, even if you have a cracking image that misses the narrative, do not shoehorn it into the book just out of hand.  If you need to add another section to the book to fit it in, then try but be your own worst critic.

The end result is worth it though.