Knox at pixels at an exhibition website has teamed up with a guy to create an app that allows users to submit their images to the site quickly and easily. They hope to have more exhibitions and more online galleries and I'm happy to be involved. If you want to get the app it's available at the iTunes store here. Even if you dont want to submit anythign yourself it's worth going over to the pixels at an exhibition website to view some of the great work many contributors are creating. Some really fantastic stuff there.

One of my latest submissions.

Technically the iPhone is limited. It’s a fixed focal length lens (equivalent to 35mm on a full frame camera I think). The lens is not sharp. It is awkward to hold. There is little ability to alter aperture, focus point or exposure. So the artistic options open to you are nowhere near that of a compact or digital slr. It does however have a nice big screen! I wear glasses and I always find using the viewfinder in my DSLR a pain. I find it hard to see if it is focussed and its hard to see the full frame. No such problems framing with the iPhone. In fact this may be its strongest point and one of the reasons I like it so much. The ability to see and compose is pretty critical in the way I take photo’s. I like bold, graphically strong shots and the limitations of this thing help me. I don’t waste time zooming in and out, changing aperture settings or iso’s. I just switch it on, point it at the subject and then move around till I like what I see.


I'm a bit of a tv fan. I love tv probably more than film, shows that move me, where drama and thrills are order of the day.  Although I'm happy to watch some comedy or reality tv along the way. Usually the source for this quality  programming is America and this last week myself and Melanie have sat through season3 of MadMen on our Apple TV. If you have never seen it then I advise you find a way to watch, from the beginning. It's quite wonderful. Set in the early 60's it's the story of Don Draper and his family and work colleagues at a New York advertising agency (The Madmen). It's progress on air has matched my progress as a photographer and this week when i was watching I found myself marvelling at the cinematography and lighting of the show. The scenes with Don and Betty inside their home or hotel rooms always had a film noir look to me. Amazing use of low key lighting for dramatic effect. It had me pretty inspired. The season 3 story line also came to a very, very satisfying conclusion. Damn I can't wait 6 months for next season! Here's a taster.


Photographically it's been quiet this week but i still have news to tell of my exploits since Glasgow trip. Will work on that post now.

I was born and brought up in Glasgow. As I grew up in the 70's and 80's a lot of the landscape around where I lived changed. I remember the docks on clydeside having refuse dumped in to them for years, then the piling going on to compress the ground before the SECC was eventually built in that location. Then there was the European City of Culture year where the south side of the docks became a massive garden show for the summer and at the end redevelopment of the site near the city centre started. Expensive sail shaped flats went up and that theme continues to this day. New housing popped up all over the place and my first job from school allowed me to see it all first hand as a surveyor valuing homes for building societies. I travelled all over the city, into every neighbourhood and in to many homes. I got to know the city and my fellow glaswegians very well.

Then in Jan93 I moved to London to work. I was away from Glasgow for about 4years before returning, only to leave again 4years ago. It's amazing how much can change in a few years. We've had more boom and bust in the periods I've been away and the skyline of Glasgow has continued to be developed. More flats have been built on Clydeside. The huge granary building, a landmark of the west end, has been knocked down and turned a pretty rundown area in to a sought after residential location. New concert venues have been built further along the river towards town, the BBC have built a new HQ and moved to the other side of the river from the SECC and new pedestrian and road bridges have been built connecting each side.

So what is all this above about. Well, it got me thinking. As I drove up to Glasgow on business a few weeks ago I decided that if I had an afternoon or morning free I should go and try to seek out these new additions to the city, along with some of my own favourite things and I should try to photograph them. Hopefully my own style with the iphone would continue to develop and on my quarterly subsequent trips up I could continue in the hope I would end up with a body of work I could edit down to create a book. This book would be part of a series, not just on cities but on many other subjects. As an aside I was at a talk by Martin Parr the other day and it seems that he appears to be working on several projects all at the same time in a similar way, not that I think I am Martin Parr!

Here is a taster of some of the images from the Glasgow project.

The newest road bridge over the Clyde. Named the Squinty bridge by locals.


The Science Museum beside BBC Scotland on south of the river


The Kingston bridge, Glasgow City Centre. This carries the M8 which cuts through Glasgow.

I do not speak french at all well. In fact I don't speak french at all. At school, french was the class I dreaded and I did the worst in. The prospect of actually having to go to France and perhaps actually have to listen or speak to someone in that language used to fill me with dread. Nowadays a little has changed. I still do not speak french. I can understand a fair bit though and having visited the country and driven through it I can say I like the place, Paris especially. It's a really, really beautiful city. My wife and I went for a long weekend a month ago, staying with one of her friends up near Montemartre.

Our visit coincided with my taking part in a 31 photos in Oct project elsewhere. I had decided after two days of that project to just use my iPhone for the images. Having become so engrossed in this idea I actually ended up never taking my expensive dslr and lenses out the car (except once) and my compact CanonG9 was hardly ever used. Here are a few from that weekend. Every image was captured and processed in phone, using just two applications.



I'd never been to La Defense before. on our first day in town we thought we'd do the touristy bit we don't usually do and head over to La Defense and then back via Eiffel. The Defense area reminded me of Canary Wharf, only with much more litter and more run down. The buildings were impressive but the unpleasantness of the upkeep of the area disappointed me. Here are a couple of images from this section

On second day we headed over to the area around the Pompidou centre. My wifes favourite cafe in Paris is situated right opposite that famous building.  Cafe Beaubourg. We always end up there at some point for a fantastic coffee and a snack. While Melanie went to do some shopping I had time to wander around the square taking some pics.

It started to pour and the crowds who had been standing outside the cafe's ran for cover. This guy just stuck his helmet on and started to walk….


I have many more shots from this little trip. The quality of some of what I achieved and the fact the phone seemed to amplify my already simple graphical style has set me off on a new ongoing project. After Paris I headed to my home town of Glasgow on business and I decided before I arrived to start something new there. More about that tomorrow

So this iPhone thing has sort of got a grip on me. Our little photographic group did a day trip in to London a month or so ago and it set off a major chain of events for me. The idea was to just use compact camera's all day and near mid afternoon my batteries died. So I carried on with the iPhone.

The revelation to me was how much more I enjoyed taking photo's with this camera and how much I liked the end results. Here are a couple from that day out

I'm not going to argue that an iPhone is all you need and that there is no benefit to higher spec devices but I will say that, in my case, it's fun. The technical limitations of this little 3megapixel camera are in a way, possibly what makes it such fun. Just as some folk enjoy only using a single fixed focal length lens I am enjoying just using the phone, almost to the exclusion of all other cameras.

Since that day in London I've taken hundreds of images with the iPhone. In Paris on a long weekend I documented my time with it. In Glasgow on business I took a morning off to wander around the new redeveloped area's that have appeared since my youth growing up there. I've hired a studio and model and done some fine art work. Through all this time my expensive dslr has been lying dormant.

I am sure that I will come back to the big Canon at some time but for now I am re-invigorated and I want to share this work with you. Tomorrow I'm off to hear Martin Parr talk at Vision 09 . On Saturday I'll try to post some Paris shots from the phone project

I’ve posted before about the group of photographer friends I meet up with every week. Well, we decided in summer that we ought to try to enter some images in to competitions. One of these was for Landscape Photographer of the Year. Now, I’m not really a landscape photographer. That is, I take landscape photos and I enjoy taking them but it’s not what I really, really enjoy doing. I don’t have grad filters and I don’t really know how to layer different exposures or focus using hyper-focal distance etc. I just know a nice image when I see it. So I chose a handful of my shots to show to my friends to see which ones they would choose. Unsurprisingly, as we are all so different in our approaches, we all chose different groups of shots but there was one commonality. In fact, the common shot was actually my favourite of all f them anyway and it was the one that has been selected to be published in the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2009 book. Here it is here.

The image is on page 105 of the book, full page, right hand side. Good location! I’m pretty chuffed. It’s on a discount at Amazon right now so if landscapes are your thing get on over…..

In my main day job I travel alot around the country. In the past I'd be driving along or walking about some new village or town and I'd see something strange or exciting that would appeal to my eye or sense of humour. Often I'd kick myself for not having my camera on me. So I bought a Canon G9 compact to carry with me at all times. It lives in the glove compartment of the car. Well it did.

I've been away on a trip to Glasgow to see my parents and I took my 5D and kit with me in order to take their portraits. During our recent house move I managed to misplace my battery charger for my 5D but I had spare third party batteries that I thought were charged that would do me until I could track down or buy a new charger. No luck. They have gone flat....so I went to glove compartment for the G9...and it was gone. Yes, it's been left on my desk back home after I downloaded last lot of shots from it.

I really wanted to get some shots of my mum and dad though so I decided to use the last camera I had with me. My borrowed iPhone. I actually got a new N97 with a cracking camera in it a couple of weeks ago but as a phone I have real problems with it so I reverted back to a borrowed first gen iPhone for this trip. Amazingly a few days ago one of the bloggers who I read launched a photo processing app for iPhones. It's called, THE BEST CAMERA, and it's been co-developed by Chase Jarvis, professional advertising photographer. Although limited in scope it's pretty nifty and great for doing a little touch up and upload to twitter or flickr or facebook or whatever, straight from phone. So I drafted in my wife to hold up the seamless background and got my folks to help me make a portrait of them. Here are the results, processed in that app. They are down res'd to 480x480 but even then, pretty nifty!

My mum and dad