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• August 2010
• July 2010
• June 2010
• May 2010
• April 2010
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• February 2010
• January 2010

Most recent entries

• August archive picture of the month
• Serco Annual report
• Photojournalist Steve McCurry
• July archive picture of the month
• Photography advice for graduate and student photographers
• Image used in Inside Housing magazine
• Adobe Photoshop CS5 Bridge startup scripts not loading
• Opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham
• June archive picture of the month
• 2010 10 mile RTTC National championships
• Adobe Photoshop CS5 Content Aware Tool
• May archive picture of the month
• Picture used in today’s Daily Telegraph England supplement
• United National Photographers
• Image used in The Saturday Independent magazine

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Taken during a summer holiday to Cornwall in 2006.

I work for several public sector organisations and and spend a few days each year working for the prison service.
Here is a small selection from the recently published Serco 2010 annual report.

Annual report photography

I was commissioned to photograph Steve McCurry last week, the Magnum photographer who took one of the most famous photographs in the word (Afghan girl.)
An exhibition of his work is on until October, in Birmingham museum and art gallery.
Well worth a visit.

Steve McCurry

A dancer pictured during rehearsals for Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2003.

Many thanks for all the correspondence from students and graduates in the past few weeks.
Unfortunately I haven’t had time to reply to all of you, but to help you with your chosen career here are a few things I wish I’d known before I left photography college.

1 Arrive early, leave late, especially on news jobs
2 Back up, back up, back up
3 You can never have too many spare batteries
4 You can never have too much spare equipment
5 Shoot RAW
6 Keep asking questions
7 Keep listening
8 Don’t take pictures to become famous, your subject is more important than yourself
9 Apple will always find new and better ways to take money off you
10 Adobe will want you to upgrade, at least once a year
11 Don’t be an early adopter of technology
12 Equipment doesn’t make you a photographer
13 IMAP email is better than POP3 if you are a location photographer
14 Never give away your work for nothing
15 If you become a commercial/editorial photographer, learn how to shoot a portrait in 5 minutes
16 Shoot for the market
17 Develop your own style
18 Never stop looking at other photographers work
19 Depending on the job, dress smartly
20 If you are looking for work have all ages in your portfolio, not just your friends.
21 Learn all you can about about copyright and image licensing
22 Make sure your spelling is perfect
23 Never forget, it really is the best job in the world!

Here’s my first ever front page, from the Biddulph Guardian, published whilst I was still a student at art college.

Article about improvements to the Newtown district of Birmingham after Beverley’s daughter, Charlene Ellis, died in a gangland shooting in 2003.

For anyone having problems with Photoshop Bridge CS5 startup scripts not loading I’ve found a solution.
Since purchasing Photoshop CS5 I’ve been unable to produce contact sheets from the output panel in Bridge (it’s been empty.)
Several re-installs of CS5 and a clean install of Snow Leopard didn’t make any difference, several suggestions on the Adobe forums also didn’t work for me.
Solution is to run diskwarrior then rebuild the directory and repair permissions (using the Diskwarrior tab.) I also ran check all files and folders.
Previously I’ve always repaired permissions from disk utility so running repair permissions from Diskwarrior did the trick (may even work by repairing permissions from the OSX startup disc.)
This has also solved the invoke Bridge error message in Photoshop.

Patients and staff began their move today to the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.
Over 500 patients will be relocated this week from the old Selly Oak and QE hospitals.

Related pictures: Building of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham

In 1993 I had the privilege to spend a few days with the Rev. Andrew Dean in Liverpool for a picture story I was working on. This is one of the images from story I produced.
The story lead onto another project, Ordination (Ordination of women as priests), which was exhibited in Manchester.

After competing today in the Road Time Trials National 10 mile championships I stayed on to watch Michael Hutchinson win again, with a time of 18.37 minutes (average of 32.2mph.)

2nd place went to world track gold medal winner Ed Clancy, recording a time of 19.20 minutes.

Adobe’s latest version of Photoshop, CS5 was released last week and like most photographers the feature I was most interested in was content aware. The demo from Adobe looked like no more hours of cloning and using the healing brush.
The example I’ve used is a panorama of 7 images stitched together in Photoshop CS5
.

As always it does a brilliant job but you do loose a bit of top and bottom of the image.

This is a far I could get using the content aware tool, it did a good job of the sky and part of the foreground but it couldn’t cope with the large area of water no matter how many times I tried.

Finished image with water cloned in using the clone tool.
Time taken from start to finish, 5 minutes. The image could do with a lot more work to get it looking perfect but the content aware tool looks like it’s a good starting point for cloning, although not the perfect solution.

The Assay office take a closer look at one of 24 plates silver plates made by Matthew Boulton in the 1700’s. Image taken in 2000 using the first digital camera I used, a Nikon NC2000 which cost approx £12000.

Image originally supplied to Birmingham City Council and used to promote England’s best small visitor attraction winner, in the Enjoy England awards.

UNP are a really good photo agency based in Yorkshire, they will now be syndicating my press and documentary photography to the national press.

Full page in this weekends Independent magazine. Portrait was to accompany interview with first time voter Lee Allen from Derby.