
The Experience Curve
Over the last year I've been on a journey towards film, with the aim of going full time film for all my work. I'm just back from a 5 week trip to South America where I took the bold decision to shoot everything on my 40 yr old Hasselblads. A risky move as I had invested so much in this trip, and on the flight home I had no way of knowing if I managed to capture the landscape at all (or worse, rolls of ruined film caused by some unknown mechanical fault!). The only thing I had

Learn from your work
Around this time of year I do hardly any photography, with the long summer days I find it too hard to get up for sunrise, and the air is often hazy from warm weather. This year, with the exception of a few scouting trips, I haven't used my camera now in 2 months. But I find that this is a good time to reflect upon my work in the last year. By looking back at older images and comparing it to my new collections I can see a definite progress, which is great to see. When we're in

Working with aspect ratio
Having used a variety of cameras with different sensor sizes I have come to realise how much aspect ratio plays a vital role in both composition and post-processing. Like most people I started out with a digital camera based on a 35mm sensor with a ratio of 2:3. As I dabbled in black and white film I also bought a Bronica SQ-A medium format film camera, which produced a rather pleasing square image (1:1). This thought of aspect ratio stayed in my mind when I upgraded my digit

The Reward of Printing
In the early days of my photography and before becoming a professional I would always use a third party for my printing. Sometimes it was the local print shop, sometimes it was an online company. None of my work was proofed, and the results I got back varied a lot depending on the company. Sometimes the brightness of the image was off, sometimes the colour was off. As I began the transition towards becoming a professional I wanted to take control of my printing, I felt it was

L Brackets for camera
As I was about to write my review for the Gitzo Traveller tripod I came across my L Bracket that I have attached to my Canon 5Diii. For anyone not using a camera with an inbuilt portrait grip this is an invaluable piece of equipment, it allows you to mount your camera in either landscape or portrait orientation without setting the tripod head at a 90 degree angle. I've often found that having your camera sitting off to the side makes it more unbalanced, but this lets me set t

Working with tone
You may often find yourself editing a photo that has issues with tone or appears to have a colour cast, perhaps having an overall blue look or maybe a bit too red. This may be due to the white balance being off, but it can also be caused by using filters, particularly heavy NDs like the Lee Stopper series, they aren't as neutral as you would think. The first response to correct this may be to adjust the white balance in Lightroom, which might fix the overall look of the image
The Angry Photographer
After my recent trip to The Hebrides, I came across a beautiful spot on Lewis that I had camped at a few years ago with my wife. It reminded me of a particular evening that I was recording a time lapse of a sunset while drinking a coffee and enjoying the scenery. As the sun was setting into the last 20 minutes or so of the golden hour a car pulled up on the road behind us and a photographer got out, making his way towards where we were camped. He started snapping away at the