After years of playing guitar on and off, I decided it was probably time I learnt how to fingerpick. I’ve been getting pretty hyped for the new season of Game of Thrones, so I decided the GoT theme would be as good a place to start as any.
John and Jane Carey’s Wedding
On the 23rd of July 2014 I photographed the wedding of John and Jane Carey (nee Crocker) at Yeldersley Hall in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. I haven’t photographed a wedding for years, but John and Jane are tutors at my old college and it was an honour to document their big day.
More Burt Swan
A couple more of Burt, following on from the recent photo post.
Burt Swan
A rather regal-looking Burt Swan, photographed after the Swan family portraits.
Heathcliffe Swan
I had the pleasure of photographing the Swan family a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, their newest member: Heathcliffe. It’s been literally years since I’ve photographed a baby – or taken any traditional family portraits at all, for that matter – so I had a lot of fun photographing baby Heathcliffe. I also photographed the Swan beagle, Bert – look out for photographs of him in the next couple of days.
The Satisfaction of Printing Big
I don’t print very often, but when I do, I always end up telling myself that I should print more. So I treated myself to some gratuitously huge 45×30″ prints. For an idea of scale, the photos pictured are on a double bed, and are a little taller (in their shortest dimension) than our doors are wide.
Photobox have fairly regular sales for credits for their various services. This is great, because it means you can cash in on the time-limited sales without having to commit to which images you want there and then. I bought the credits for these prints 3 months ago, with only a vague idea what I wanted to print.
I ended up printing the following three images:
I say I don’t print very often, and yet I probably print more than most people. I hire out the darkrooms at uni to print every couple of weeks during term time (although this is probably just as much to do with tricking myself into feeling like I haven’t yet graduated, if I’m honest), and we bought a small A4 inkjet printer a couple of months ago with the intention of printing 6x4s on a semi-regular basis, alongside the odd invoice or job application or whatever.
Without meaning to go into a philosophical photography-snob monologue, the way in which photographs are presented definitely affects your relationship with the image in a significant way. Spending four hours in a blacked-out colour darkroom to produce a single 10×8″ chromogenic print certainly gives you time to bond with the image. AirPrinting a 6×4 from your iPhone creates a completely different relationship – something more throwaway (we usually have a selection of increasingly tired-looking 6x4s scattered over our coffee table), but still something tangible that exists in physical space, that you can pick up and pass around and rearrange, and which can’t be dismissed by closing a browser window. But a 45×30″ print is something completely different, something that you don’t typically encounter outside of a formal gallery space.
Photobox currently have 40×30″ prints on sale at £12.49, down from £24.99, but only until Monday. If you buy photo credits rather than prints, you have 3 months to decide what you want to print. If you don’t have a Photobox account then contact me with your email address and I’ll send you a link which also provides you with 50 completely free 6×4 inch prints.
WordPress turns 10 today
Today is the 10th birthday of WordPress, the platform that powers danfoy dot com, Creative Nottingham, and the majority of other web projects that I’ve worked on over the past 8 years.
WordPress began on 27 May 2003, as a fork of b2 (aka cafelog), and is now by far the most popular blogging platform in the world. It’s a mature and versatile platform, and has its own elegance, despite not being something that I’d describe as ‘lightweight’. ‘Blogging platform’ might be something of a misnomer – it’s grown massively in scale since I started using it around 2005, and can comfortably be used as a whole-site content management system (or CMS). It can be installed on any server that supports the requisite versions of PHP and MySQL. There is also a semi-free hosting service available at wordpress.com.
I’m currently redesigning danfoy.com using WordPress and an awesome adaptive framework called Skeleton. With a little forward planning, Skeleton makes it much easier to design websites which scale gracefully from full-screen web browsers, down to tablets (in portrait or landscape orientation), to mobile phones. It’s going to be awesome. We’ll soon be moving the Creative Nottingham site to a Skeleton-based WordPress site too, with help from Nottingham-based design agency Strafe Creative.
Photoblog on danfoy.com
I take photographs all the time, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at this site. For the past 6 months or so I’ve been reserving the blog for more substantial, wordier posts, and I’ve been posing my images to Facebook, and occasionally to various accounts on sites such as Flickr and 500px, whilst the galleries on here become more and more outdated.
So, I spent the majority of yesterday coding a photoblog section for my site. I’m proud to say that I managed the whole thing without needing to resort to plugins, which may have broken compatibility down the line, and the process was useful upskilling for another attempt at fixing some long-standing backend issues on another blog that I’m a part of.
I’ll be posting a mixture of new and old material, at least initially, to build up the section. At the moment the posts themselves are formatted similarly to the normal blog, but I’ll be changing the images to appear larger by default on a future update.
Nosebleed gallery, film, and simplified processing
WordPress 3.5 was released a fortnight ago, and along with it a new gallery system. The new system works significantly better with tablets than the old Fancybox system that I was using. Fantastic! Check out this new gallery for a demonstration (click on images to view them in the new full-screen gallery view). A couple of weeks ago, after a day spent revisiting old negatives and fawning over prints, it struck me that I was becoming […]
The Attenborough Short Photobook experiment
My partner Kat and I recently moved into our first non-student home together, in Nottingham. I’m from Derby, which is a half hour drive away, and Kat is from Wellingborough, which is around an hour on the train. Nottingham was an obvious choice for a couple of reasons: it’s the city in which we studied together, it’s a great city in its own right, and it’s also where the highest concentration of our friends live.
There are essentially two ways to surround yourselves with photographs in a new home: prints, and albums. I love both, but they function very differently.
| Prints | Albums and books |
|
|
Photographs are important, and I like them to be printed large so that they become a dominating feature of the space. The problem is that printing and framing large photographs can be prohibitively expensive, so care must be taken in deciding which photographs (out of literally thousands) to commit to printing. In contrast, the main problem with photobooks is having enough images available to commit to the expense of printing and binding, without the images becoming incohesive.
Deciding on how to display photographs in our new home got me thinking about the benefits of presenting images in book format. My favourite photobook is American Power by Mitch Epstein, which Kat – in a small, isolated example of what an amazing girlfriend she is – bought me for Valentines day last year. American Power is 144 pages long, and requires a decent (but well-rewarded) investment in time to properly enjoy. It is beautifully printed on thick paper stock, hardbound, and lovely. It is expensive to print books like this, especially as a consumer and as a one-off.
It no longer has to be this way, however. I use Adobe Lightroom to catalog and process my photographs, and version 4 of Lightroom introduced the ability to produce elegant photobooks for publishing either through Blurb’s printing service, or – significantly – as a PDF or series of JPEG files. I decided to try this out by creating a short photobook based on yesterday’s trip to Attenborough Nature Reserve with Kat. Think of this as a self-contained section in a family photo album. The same principals should transfer nicely to short photographic projects.
Unfortunately the PDFs exported from Lightroom split each double page spread into separate pages. To get around this, I exported the book as separate JPEG files, and then recreated the book in InDesign CS3. The book I created, which is presented as double 10×8″ spreads, is embedded below. However, I recommend you download a copy in PDF format, for better quality.
Producing books in this way is quick and costs nothing, which means publishing photographic projects in book format no longer necessitates said projects being as epic a commitment as American Power. Expect more eBook mini-projects in the near future.