You can live in a city all your life and never uncover all its secrets nor learn all its history. There are always new places to discover and explore. A very recent outing of discovery took me from my home in Ealing, west London, to a park in Abbey Wood on the city’s eastern fringes.
-
-
I wonder whether images ‘choose’ photographers? I think in a way they do, in the sense that any keen photographer will put themselves in the best position for potential pictures to choose them. They know where to go, where (and importantly) how to look.
-
The first colour many of us think of when we hear the word ‘night’ might well be black. But as Van Gogh famously reminded us, there are many more colours to be seen then too. And he made his remark before the advent of our brightly lit cities, where many colours are more evident at night than black!
-
The Tarsier Conservation Area on Bohol Island in the Philippines is a protected area dedicated to preserving the Philippine tarsier, one of the smallest primates in the world. Known for their strikingly large eyes in a tiny body, these fascinating animals play a vital role in maintaining the island's biodiversity and ecological harmony.
-
I am writing this at the end of March and spring seems definitely to have arrived in London. Street trees are in blossom, birds are more active and more vocal, and our garden is awakening. But my ‘story’ starts back in the tail-end of winter, February.
-
If a black and white photograph is a 'departure from reality' (and surely it is), then why are so many photographers still drawn to taking them? And what is their appeal for the viewer? Is it merely nostalgia as some have claimed? After all, the oldest among us grew up I'm a world of black and white films, TV and family snapshots.
-
‘That’s my village, Bangaan’, said Conchita, pointing to a cluster of houses among the rice terraces far below where we stood on the terrace of a simple roadside restaurant. Peering down through the drizzling rain I could make out a simple church and rooftops of corrugated metal and thatch.
-
Neil Gaiman once said, 'Picking five favourite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.' If you replace the word ‘books’ in that quote with ‘photographs’ you will know exactly how I feel. I have a similar reaction when people ask me which are my top three / five / ten places I’ve visited.
-
When we travel, we love to try the food of our destinations. Pasta in Italy (of course!), curry in India, kimchi in North Korea, even grasshoppers in Oaxaca. And on our latest trip to the Philippines we naturally enjoyed many local dishes, and like the Filipinos themselves ate rice with almost every meal.
-
What we choose to leave out of a photograph matters as much as what we choose to include. And we are making such decisions every time we point our camera at a subject. But thanks to digital photography it is now very easy to make them retrospectively, when we come to edit our shots. Furthermore, we can take a single shot and test out a variety of options.
