Developing vision as a photographer. I know that a photographer and their blog should have its own voice and I am guessing that mine does, that is for you to decide what it is. As I like most creative people have difficultly defining what is my own voice. That is one of the hard things of being a creative individual, you find so many things of interest. Especially if you are dyslexic (and don’t even ask how long that word took to learn how to spell), as I quite often see the big picture and that makes it hard to …

Hi all, I hope your Christmas was good, New Year is next and with that comes New Year’s resolutions. What are yours? I know what mine will be: 1) I am going to edit my City of London street photography based project to see how far I have got with it. 2) I am going to spend more time marketing this year. As I want to meet more interesting people. A photographer friend of mine once said to me he had problems trying to get appointments because he felt weird contacting people who where to him strangers, my response was …

Walker Evans Walker Evans was a documentary photographer, famous for working in the 1930’s his images helped to define along with Dorothea Lange what the Depression looked like in America. I originally learnt about Walker Evans as an influence on another of my heroes when I was exploring the work of Robert Frank, I came across an essay by Tod Papageorge called “An Essay on Influence” Which was a wonderful exploration of how a photographer is influenced by another. The idea that so often gets referred to in regards to Walker Evans’s early work from the 1930’s, is that he …

Panelist on Photographing the City at Street London In August this year, I was honoured to be asked by Nick Turpin of the street photography collective iN-PUBLiC to be included on a panel discussion on photographing the City of London. The panel was part of the Street Photography Symposium held at the wonderful new D&AD building in Shoreditch just off Brick Lane. The weekend was a great event put together by Martin Usborne of Hoxton Mini Press and Jason Reed the founder was back in time for the event. Both Jason Reed and Nick Turpin where the creative directors for the Street Photography Symposium  I have …

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 …

Alex Webb Alex Webb has become influential not just to me, but a whole lot of street photographers, partly because he is rather good and partly because his work is hard to do well. He likes to have everything in focus from close to back within the image, this is achieved by having a large depth of field in his images. He also works extensively with a 35mm lens because this is how he sees the world. It does not distort reality, but is a little wider than our angle of view. Oh I forgot to mention he is yet …

Sam Abell He thinks about the horizon line and where he is going to place it.The video below on the Cowboy photograph, I would show to my students as an example of a complex photograph and his description of how he made it would often lead to great discussions on how and what a photograph can do. The power of description and the layering of the different elements, would often get student photographers to attempt more complex photographic compositions. This changed how I thought about my own images. Sam Abell was for a long time a National Geographic photographer, which is …