Just a very quick update. Not much to say, really - I just wanted to post this photo of some dead leaves. I think black and white and high contrast suits this.

Another Place

Just a quick update. I went to Liverpool a while ago and have been meaning to sort through the photos for ages. Here is one from Crosby Beach of Antony Gormley's figures in the sand, which become revealed and then hidden with each turning of the tide. There are 100 figures in total, and the whole thing is called 'Another Place'. Walking out far into the shallow waters amongst the figures was really quite ethereal. Those which get fully submerged at high tide are covered in barnacles and sea weed, all of which crackles and fizzes, making it even stranger.

Negative paintings

I was going to upload some photos that I took in Cheshire the weekend before last, but these are mainly of sunlit leaves again (can you spot a theme here...?) To show that I am not just into vegetation, here are a couple of shots from a series I shot over the summer. Dungerness beach in Kent has to be one of the strangest places in the UK. It's like a desolate wasteland, and on part of it there are a load of old shipping containers which have been left there to rust and decay. I took a series of detail shost of the surfaces. I think of these as negative paintings'. They have started as a fully painted surface, and then the elements have gradually stripped layers of the paint away and caused erosion to reveal these wonderful patterns - sort of the opposite of applying paint and building up a pattern as an artist might do when approaching a blank canvas.

These are my two favourites, I think. Any comments welcome as always!

End of the summer

After being holed up for the past few weekends decorating our living room, I finally had a day free on Sunday, so I headed up to our local park to try and capture some Autumnal shots. As it turned out, it felt more like the very last days of summer; some of the leaves were turning and there were conkers all over the ground, but it was still hanging on to the green freshness of summer. I wanted to capture the dreamy, ethereal feeling with some shots which were suggestive of the atmosphere, rather than merely a reproduction of the scene. Here I have used a wide open aperture (f1.8) to get a very tight depth of field which leaves a lot of the scene out of focus, and adds some bokeh. For some of the shots I have also over exposed by up to three stops so the light flooded in. This helped to blur the edges of some of the leaves.