Today, everyone is arguably a photographer, shooting images with their phone cameras almost every day. But when I started, as a child in the 1960s, photography was a hobby, and a relatively expensive one at that. Only the keenest photographers went on the journey from taking family snapshots to an obsession with getting the best from a camera, trying to create something both memorable and beautiful.
I can’t remember the last time it snowed properly here. It’s not something I’ve ever welcomed. Living in a city my experience of snow has been largely negative. It messes with our transport system and makes getting anywhere a nightmare; it looks pretty only for a matter of hours and then turns to brown slush; and if the weather stays cold the slush then turns to slick ice patches which as a person with zero sense of balance I dread!
Weaving his way expertly between the throngs of sellers and buyers, our driver and new friend Habib led us deep into the heart of the market. The place was so packed it was hard to make progress at times, especially with the occasional car or bush taxi trying to squeeze through the crowds, and the many porters with their wheelbarrows shouting at everyone to make way.
Any photographer knows that light is everything, and that the best light is often found at the beginning or end of the day. Sometimes you can plan to be in the right place at the right time, but sometimes it just happens.
Despite the invasion of modern living in many parts of their country, the Maasai cling proudly to their traditional way of life. They never cultivate land (they consider it demeaning) but instead graze cattle, which hold a god-like status in their culture. The cows provide almost everything they need to live: meat, skin, milk, dung for the walls and floor of their huts, and warm blood extracted from the neck of a live cow and mixed with milk as an iron rich food.
None of us are able, at the moment, to gather new travel memories. Perhaps for that reason, the recollections of travels past become all the more precious. And what better way to trigger these memories than browsing through your mementos – old photographs, scrapbooks perhaps, and for those of us who buy them, objects and souvenirs.
Why celebrate one festival when you can celebrate three? We hadn’t planned our visit to Cuenca to coincide with this particular weekend, when the city parties, but we were lucky to be here at this special time and to be able to join locals and other visitors in some of the fun.
‘Nature does not turn out her work according to a single pattern; she prides herself upon her power of variation.’
Sometimes the most effective photographs of natural subjects (plants, animals, even entire landscapes) can be achieved by getting so close that the subject’s outline disappears.
There’s nothing like a carnival parade to stir up the emotions. There’s the anticipation among the spectators as they wait for the parade to arrive – can we see it in the distance yet? The excitement when finally it arrives, with all the colour and spectacle. The joy on the faces of the participants in the parade as they see the reactions. And the slight feeling of let-down when it has passed, seemingly so quickly after the long wait.
London is a city of contrasts, where famous sights and almost palatial homes can rub shoulders with the worn and neglected. Just as its people are diverse and eclectic, so too are its buildings.