A Birmingham weekend

Earlier in December I had a weekend in Birminmgham, including a couple of visits to the well known Frankfurt Christmas Market that is open every day from the middle of November to a couple of days before Christmas. It does seem to get bigger every year. Apart from ther usual stalls selling candles, ceramics, small toys, candlea and jewellery, there are the food and drink stalls and this time the market has extended almost to the ICC. At this end it's a mixture of all types of stalls taking advantage of the passing trade: the German stallholders are concentrated in New Street and up to the Art Gallery. But you can now get hold of pork scratchings or ostrich burgers. What most appeals to me is the atmosphere around the food stalls: the sausages, chips and fried mushrooms, the crowds, watching people cooking the hot food. As always seems to happen, it rained most of the time I was there, but it never seriously dampened people's enthusiasm for the event.

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I also had a great evening out at a relatively new swing dance event in Birmingham - Hot Ginger. 'A night of retro style and retro dance'. Very good vallue, a very friendly cvrowd and superb swing music to dance to, in Moseley. I had the mobile with me and took a few pictures making use of available light. Details on http://www.hotginger.org/. I did try to find myself a decent Hawaiian shirt to buy, but without success - this might have to wait for the warmer weather to arrive. The organisers are aiming to hold one of these events about once a month, and I hope to be able to make my way across to Birmingham again soon.

Norwich sunrise

There was a beautiful sunrise here in Norwich on Wednesday around 8.00, and here are a couple of shots I took on my mobile. These were taken standing in front of the window next to my desk,

looking south towards Poringland

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Lens culture

I've recently returned to following some of the photographic blogs, including the excellent Lens Culture.
http://www.lensculture.com/webloglc/index.html
In particular I noticed the entry about the Paris Photo 2009 exhibition that took place last month, including the piece on art market anarchy:

'A surprise act of art market anarchy took place just outside the entrance to the exclusive gala VIP opening night at Paris Photo 2009 last week. While the crowd of well-dressed international art collectors began to enter the giant hall at the Louvre, dozens of pranksters quickly dumped thousands and thousands of anonymous vintage photos into a giant heap, and tossed handfuls of photographs in the air. "Free, free, free!"A surprise act of art market anarchy took place just outside the entrance to the exclusive gala VIP opening night at Paris Photo 2009 last week. While the crowd of well-dressed international art collectors began to enter the giant hall at the Louvre, dozens of pranksters quickly dumped thousands and thousands of anonymous vintage photos into a giant heap, and tossed handfuls of photographs in the air. "Free, free, free!" Even in this art-loving socialist capital, this act caused a momentary cognitive disconnect....'

I'd really like to have been able to gather up a random selection of photographs in this way and try to make something of them with a montage. And maybe the Paris photo 2010 should be pencilled into my diary for next winter.

Black and white portraits

I've participated from time to time in the Guardian Camera Club's monthly photographic assignments. Each month an assignment is published and you can submit up to six pictures through the Flickr group (appropriately tagged). For instance October's theme was rivers, and the current November project (submissions up to 14 December) is black and white portraiture in the style of Jane Bown.

At the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich a week or so ago I took a few shots of Teresa, and I've included a couple of these here. All done in something of a rush, but that's the way it has been the last few weeks.

Apple day at Gressenhall

On 25 October we visited Gressenhall Museum of Rural Life in Norfolk for the annual apple day - the purpose of the event is in celebrating the many varieties of apple including the rare ones. I did take quite a few pictures, mainly in the apple identification tent, and towards the end of the day, in the Gressenhall orchards. While there I decided to join the East of England Apple and Orchards Project - which aims to help conserve local orchards and local apple varieties. According to their magazine the five fruit trees in our back garden countsa as an orchard! I've included a few photographs here. Apples make quite undemanding subjects for a photographer.

Wells-next-the-Sea

We went to Wells on the north Norfolk coast a few weeks ago late in the afternoon and walked out across the beach and past the beach huts to watch the tide come in and see the setting sun. I know from the last time I went there in the winter just what a great place it can be for photography at the end of the day, with the vast expanses of sand, broad vistas, and sense of isolation.

These images were taken in the rapidly fading light and I was quite pleased with both of them - after several tries.

Norwich medieval churches (part 2)

Continuing with the remaining four themes of the photography competition, and following on from the previous post, these are my chosen pictures:

Worship and contemplation: St Peter Mancroft - I took several pictures of the chapel sign, as I felt that from one of these I would find a suitably plain image with reasonable lighting. I considered other churches but came back to what is a fairly serious image in the end.

Art and architecture: St Peter Mancroft -

Again, this church provided great opportunities for another category. After several attempts to find an interesting angle of the carved oak figure of St Paul - with St Peter in the background - this one seemed the most satisfying.

Enjoyment and fun: St Peter Parmentergate, King Street - Here I made a couple of visits to the Tae-Kwon-Do class in the church and decided to enter a shot incorporating the martial arts Mickey Mouse and a student in the background - one of the more light hearted entries.

Innovation and change: St Lawrence, St Benedict's Street - although I made three visits with the camera and tried all sorts of possible angles and subjects ath this church (it has a fashion and textiles display two days a week) I came back to one of my first shots, with a fashion display and mirror reflecting the church window.

Al in all, an interesting project that made me think of Norwich's churches in a wholly new way - which was one of the aims of the competition.

Norwich medieval churches (part 1)

Norwich has A wealth of medieval churches in its hidtoric core. I've just recently finished my submission for a photographic competition run by Norwich Heritage and Regeneration Trust. This explores themes relating to the past and present churches and their place in today's society. Hence there were eight themes: history and tradition, people and community, inspiration and learning, restoration and conservation, worship and contemplation, art and architecture, enjoyment and fun and innovation and change.

Aftere much wandering around in and out of churches I finally came up with my chosen submission of eight pictures. I really enjoyed looking round churches I hadn't seen much of before, and have come to appreciate them not just in terms of the quality of their interiors, and the range of photographic subjects they offer, but as havens of peace and tranquility in the busy commercial centre of the historic city.

I did get more than I bargained for in one church where I ended up being invited to stay and document an importand church service and presentation of an honary award - quite a big responsibility.

Here are four photographs from my entry, one for each of the first four categories:
History and tradition: St Peter Mancroft, Haymarket, Norwich - a lovely large church in the middle of the city and opposite the Forum, it could easily have provided images for a whole range of entries...as it was, it provided three. Searching for an unusual viewpoint in this much-photographed church, I liked the very low angle and the lighting here, with the eye being led throught to the display of flowers below the organ.

People and community:St James, Whitefriars, Norwich, the Norwich PuppetrTheatre - in the foyer of this wonderful buildong in front of a photographic display tracing the history of the theatre in this converted church. Again, I took a lot of photographs in the auditorium and in the foyer, and hasdn't really considered any taken in this part of the foyer to be serious contenders at first, but in the end I rather liked the quirkiness of this, combined with the link to the people theme in the photograps on the wall.

Inspiration and learning: St Michael Coslany, Oak Street, Norwich, the Inspire Discovery Centre, teaching children about science with a range of interactive and boldly coloured exhibits. A good many interesting images available here, but my preferred option was always going to be one featuring the child and her binoculars. Just a question of which one to choose.

Restoration and conservation: extrenal repairs in progress at St Stephen, Rampart Horse St, Norwich, after a large crack was discovered and the whole structure of the building put in doubt! I struggled a bit to find enough subject matter for this one, which I hadn't expected.

I will include the other four pictures in my next post.

....and Chesterton Windmill

Chesterton Windmill is an imposing structure on a hillside close to the Fosse Way and to the east of Warwick. Information and some photographs here:
http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/Web/corporate/pages.nsf/Links/155D9C8F3E61BDB6802571020049F89D
When we were arriving we just caught the end of a wedding photoshoot - a photographer taking shots of people posing with one of the wedding cars with the windmill in the background. There was also someone taking picures from a point in the adjacent field. Other than that, we had the place to ourselves.

Compton Verney.....

Last week I visited Compton Verney in Warwickshire with Rachel, my youngest daughter. We're both keen photographers so it was a great chance to take a few pictures each and see what kinds of subjects appealed to us. Interestingly she tended to notice the small details of colours and textures, and I tended to be looking for landscape shots of the buildings across the lake. Compton Verney's grounds are beautifully landscaped by Capability Brown and the house itself includes an art gallery and a very fine cafe. The parkland and woods were well maintained and the house remarkably free of outside clutter, so altogether a very pleasant visit indeed.

An unofficial wedding photographer

Jamie and Amy's wedding near Buxton a month ago gave me a great opportunity to put into practice an idea I read in Amateur Photographer recently - basically to enjoy taking interesting

wedding pictures without any of the major responsibility of the official wedding photographer: in other words, to be something of an 'unofficial' wedding photographer looking out for the interesting candid moments and trying to capture the spontaneous and the unusual.,

On the whole I was happy with the results - out of around 220 exposures I saved on the camera ended up with just under 100 that were worth using, admittedly with a fair amount of cropping and brightness correction at times. Partly this was due to having to shoot at unusual angles and partly at having to adjust to the changing light throughout the day.

At the end of it all, though, I think I'd really like to carve out a niche as a wedding photographer, if only I had the nerve.

Exposure considered

The Exposure photography exhibition has been and gone. A learning experience for both of us, though I did sell two pictures and Teresa sold one, and we also sold a few postcard size prints for a few pence each. Interestingly both photographs I sold were from my collection of images from the historic covered market in Porto - maybe I should make these the focal point of any future exhibition. I've already planned to return to Porto in May next year and I think I'm going to have to spend a couple of hours at the market next time.

We did learn how to cut mounting board, looked at various different ways of hanging our photographs, and thought about how others had gone about it. Certainly the process has made us think through what we are trying to achieve, and why. We bought and restored second hand frames, sand on the whole this was successful. Here's one of the images from my short list(Livraria Lello bookshop in Porto) that didn't quite make it into the exhibition this time.

Things move on, and I've been rather preoccupied with sorting out a set of wedding photographs and sifting through photographs of Norwich's medieval churches for a competition entry. I will put something on the blog as soon as I can. I've also been providing photographs for some people at a church where I just wandered in......and ended up being co-opted as the official photographer for an award ceremony. Occupational risk of being seen with a decent camera, I suppose.

Exhibition opens in Norwich

This Sunday sees the opening of the Exposure photography exhibition in Norwich.

On Sunday morning Teresa and I will – with some trepidation – be at St Margaret’s Church on St.Bededict’s Street to set about handing our photographs. It’s been quite a learning experience so far, what with choosing the images to display, finding and preparing frames (we both decided to acquire secondhand frames through charity shops and car boot sales, and adapt them for our purposes) and working out how best to fix them to the walls. It will be interesting to see just how our very different photographic styles come across when put side by side (we are sharing exhibition space as Stripes Creative).

Norwich Cathedral

I've just made a couple of visits to Norwich Cathedral to take some photographs for the Guardian Camera Club's August assignment - religious buildings and iconogrpahy. It made me realise just what a marvellous building this is, and that I have never really looked at in detail, and certainly not from a photographer's perspective either. I've taken quite a few shots that I'm happy with - in fact it will be hard to choose just six to post on the web site. I will include a few of them in this post. It was great to be there at different times of day, and see how the changing light offers different possibilities - sometimes a shaft of sunlight would pick out a feature of the architecture, but in a few moments it could be gone. Interesting how the little details appealed to me the most - the hymn books, prayer cushions, notices and so forth - maybe I was looking for something a little different.

Norwich HEART has a competition running till the end of October on the theme of Norwich's medieval churches, so it looks like I will be really busy over the next few weeks getting to grips with the local churches and their various uses - a good follow-on to the Cathedral project.

I came out of the first week of my photography course at the Norwich Arts Centre on the 1st of September and wandered into the nearby St Laurence church, which is usually closed, but currently has a display of fashion and textiles. It's a lovely light and airy church and I decided to take some pictures, some of which may well feature in a September post.

Hemsby meteorological station

I became intrigued a few weeks ago by the disused meteorological station between Hemsby and Ormesby St Margaret in Norfolk. It's certainly in a very sorry state, and I would love to have discovered it a few years ago. Information is hard to come by, but I think it closed around eight years ago. In any event, we took quite a few photographs there and here are some of them.

There is an earlier phoograph of the site, taken from the entrance gate, on Geograph:
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/521621

Photography blogs

I've recently discovered the Guardian Camera Club, which encourages people to share portfolios and submit images for criticism, and there is a really interesting item about blogs here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/camera-club-blog/2009/jun/22/camera-club-blogpost
The main page for the blog is:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/camera-club-blog

After following most of the links I can recommend in particular having a look at
http://www.foto8.com/
http://www.nocaptionneeded.com/
www.lensculture.com/webloglc/index.html


This blog is really all about my pictures so for this post I'm including a photograph I took on my recent visit to Porto in Portugal - it's the interior of the marvellous Livraria Lello bookshop, Rua das Carmelitas 144, something of a local institution with its neo-gothic exterior and amazing and complex art nouveau wooden staircase and interior. There will be more on Porto to follow - now that I've actually found the time downloadall the pictures I took on my visit. I've several other projects on the go, so watch this space......
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