I have taken me a while to write my posts this year, I have not been able to think of much to say related to my photography or that which I want to share publicly, so I have been a bit quiet this year. I just realised that it has been 11 months since I last posted a life time for a blog. In the meantime, I have begun teaching photography again, at two different colleges in London. I am teaching a combined course in Illustrator and Photoshop at Morley College in South London and at Working Mens College in …

In January 2016, I started a social documentary project to photograph the City of London. This projects is ongoing and evolving over time. When I started I thought it would take me about a year to make a set of images and I would move onto something else. Part way into the project England voted for Brexit and I realised that I needed to keep going with this project. It has become apparent to me that the project has developed a life of its own and I will stop it the day that Brexit happens or Brexit is cancelled one …

What do social documentary photographers do? Or more importantly what do photographs do? If we accept that social documentary photographers are storytellers, then the photographs that we make are our stories and to make great photographs, we need to connect ambitions for our photographs with what we want to say as storytellers. It is really that simple. Yet we have a problem with photographs as there meaning is not always fixed, it is often dependent on context and the words that we use around the image. That is why newspapers don’t let images speak for themselves, as they are often …

About 15 months ago, I start photographing in the City of London, doing street photography documentary project of city workers. I aimed to be in the City at least twice a week, to spend my time walking the City. So far apart from a few weeks, I have managed to achieve this. It has been really really fascinating and I have learnt a lot about how the City functions, the patterns that exist within the City. I have learnt that certain buildings become hubs, around which specific industries exist. For example: the Lloyd’s of London building with its insurance market, has lots …

I have been working towards a way of working that is part documentary and part street photography for a while now and I have come to the conclusion that Photography is Easy, Meaning is Difficult. I have an idea for what I want to say with my photographs and the making of images is easy especially with current digital cameras, but the making of meaning is much harder. By that I am referring to the kind of meaning that I want to have in my images, not the meaning that is attributed to the image because of their interpretation of …

Photography Print Portfolio Thoughts. I am in the process of geting myself sorted out with new print portfolios for my photography, and am busy researching what is available out there now. I have had portfolios in the past, that are print books with acetate sleeves. This time, when I get new print portfolios, I want to do away with the acetate sleeves and make something that is not the traditional black leather portfolio, that I have had in the past. My old portfolios came from: Brewer and Cantelmo: My first professional portfolio and it really got a battering as it got …

I am probably going to be doing quite a few posts about this topic in the next few months and maybe even years. I have been since the beginning of the year working on a project to photograph the City of London. I discovered that Martin Parr, has been doing the same thing over the past few years, as photographer in residency for the city of London. He had an exhibition of the work at the Guildhall Art Gallery, earlier this year. The images where featured on the Guardian Newspaper website. When, I found out about the Martin Parr, City …

As you might have guessed I have been working on rebranding my website. I have been doing my brand identity with a designer and am very happy with the results. I spent quite a bit of time working on both my documentary photography site identity and my financial services photography brand identities. I found recently that when I got my new logo back from the designer, that my website itself would not be able to display the logo on the wordpress theme that I was using, so I was stumped. Good ole google can be so helpful and after quite a …

[portfolio_slideshow] As part of my recent trip to China I visited Shenzhen and Guangzhou, travelling via train between them on the fast modern service that they have between these cities which surprised me in how modern they where. These images are from that part of the journey. I spent way to much time near shops which where not really that much cheaper than the UK (if you now where to shop) and a quite a bit of time walking around. The sheer number of people can be at times overwhelming. Their is so much being constructed everywhere that it constantly feels that …

[portfolio_slideshow] This set of images is from the Hong Kong, part of my recent trip to China. Hong Kong surprised me with it humidity at around 80% making it rather quite tiring to be walking in the heat, the solution was to walk for a bit get hot and then go shopping in air conditioned buildings and just about every shop had air conditioning. The area around the Tism Sha Tsui or TST for short where I stayed for the first 4 days was so full of shops and designer boutiques that it made London’s Bond street look a bit dowdy …