Photography is a world wide passionate past-time for many millions of photographers (amateur and professional) across the globe. Photography is the celebration of all things seen and unseen, both of the obvious and of the subtly implied. By taking a photograph we are saying "I found this, take a look and see if you see the beauty too".

A photographer does not have to be trained to take a good picture. They do not have to adhere to rules to make an engaging image. A shutter button is pressed, light is allowed into the camera and a photograph results ... and as long as the photographer is not swayed by the need to fit in with the crowd they will have a valid photograph.

The photograph seems to capture something of the spirit of human-kind. As if validating our thoughts, a picture is able to cement an idea in the minds of others. The old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words could never have been truer. In fact, as pictures became publishable, so the need for words seems to have reduced. All in all, photography is both a hobby and a necessity within human society ... without it we would lose the ability to empathise with our fellow man ... and that to me provides me with validation for this website !

I hope you enjoy this website on photography and how to take better photographs. I wanted to build a website that provides advice for photographers who are just starting out and are keen to explore the world of photography and help them to make the most of their camera equipment and hopefully take better photographs.

My Photography:

Photography, for me, is a curious mixture of self expression and chance encounters. My photographic equipment is varied in both age and capability, which also satisfies my urge to experiment photographically.

My pictures also range in nature. I enjoy solitary stories which speak of characteristics that would otherwise lay repressed under a surface of respectability. These pictures can be landscapes, portraits or still life in content and they could be in stark high contrast colour or misty low contrast black and white ... just as long as they engross the viewer.

Picture Studies:

I don't know of a better way to explain my style of photography than looking at some pictures and talking you through the reasons why I took them. I hope that you will tolerate my prattling on and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me with your questions at colin@photogruphy.co.uk .

Informal Portraits:

Pictures of complete strangers can be wonderfully hap-hazard. Firstly both the photographer and the sitter are a little unsure of what to expect and secondly, the conditions are never controlled when compared to the exact specifications of studio lighting and backgrounds.

The image above is of a very friendly and chatty fellow that my wife and I met while walking through a Norfolk church yard. I was carrying a simple Yashica A Twin Lens Reflex camera with some rather basic 100asa film loaded, I had no tripod and needed to support the camera by neck strap and hand while shooting the gentleman in the shadows. I could have easily asked him to move into the sun to increase my chances of a better shot, but he had chosen the war memorial to sit on and who was I to ruin his directorship.

The resulting image is soft, badly focused and under-exposed ... and incidentally lovely too. The personality pours from my friendly sitter and quality cries out from his badly positioned tie, the perfectly shined shoes and contrasty poppy wreath clashing with the muted tones my subjects attire.

I guess the main point that this image illustrates is that when given a picture on a plate, try not to mess about with the food.

The following photographs show how huge the range of informal portraiture can be. You may be photographing family and friends, you might be brazen like me and ask interesting people to quickly pose for you or you may like to take candid shots from behind windows ... it's all valid photography.

These two pictures were taken on a sunny afternoon at a small festival. I have never had a problem with telling people that they are really interesting and asking them if I could take their photograph. Some may say no, but most say yes and even strike a pose for me.

Candid photography really interests me. You can catch true expression with candid photography. The viewfinder camera comes into it's own in these situations. In the days when view finders were common place and SLR cameras were frowned upon as being witchcraft, you were encouraged to use depth of field to attain sharp images. By setting your camera to F11 you could accurately calculate the distance that you could realistically expect your lens to achieve a sharp shot. This may sound amateurish, but it can really speed up your picture taking. Just imagine not have to focus, You gauge the distance of your subject, frame up and shutter down ... photograph taken.

The following is an example of this method of taking candid photographs. You can see that the subjects are completely unaware of their being photographed, they are sharp and the whole process took no more that half a second.

Another form of candid photography is the hidden camera method. In the following photograph I was actually seated in a pub and photography through a window. The couple almost look staged in their positions, but I can assure you that they found this placement on their own.

I was using high speed film on this particular day, which is why the image is very grainy. I actually think that the grainy film helps this image feel real. The couple are frozen in time, as I was able to take the at approximately 1/2000th of a second. The use of telephoto lens has compressed the background and this gives a real sense of place to this lovely holidaying couple.

The next portraits were taken with my Ensign 16-20 bellows camera and 100asa film, using a viewfinder and depth f field focusing system. I over-exposed to emphasise the beach and the subjects brought some guns for added impact !!!

I used to work in pubs and I can't tell you how boring it was in those days. I used to bring a photographic background to work and photograph my customers to break up the day.

This is Lou King, he has sadly died now and I guess this is why I think it's important to take someone's picture. Lou was one of those characters that make a pub worth visiting and without this picture I would have left him behind. As it is I don't think he is ever far from my thoughts.

This next image is of my wife's grandmother. I told her that I would make her look beautiful and I think that I did. OK, I did use a blue filter to bring out her wrinkles, and I did use a wide-angle lens to give the picture a Hitchcock feel ... but if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I succeeded.

This is a picture of wife's father ... do you see the resemblance ?

OK, all joking aside for a minute, this is my latest form of candid photography. The past two summers have been a washout here in the UK and there is precious little worth taking a picture of, so I've developed a way of revisiting old pictures.

I had been looking through a series of Paris photographs that I had taken on a recent trip and I kept noticing people that I had missed on the first viewing. So I thought I might be able to use them in their own right. Some serious cropping is required to get these pictures. Personally, I use a good quality film scanner and I still get a lot of grain ... but I think they work no?

The guy above really has that old French film quality about him. I love his steely eyes and determined stare ... probably a hit man.

These two images show life just ticking along. You really get a sense of perfective from these images, they show you that the world is perception based for the individual, but there is a truth out there also.

Now the picture below is a gem. I swear that I was just taking a picture of a bridge for a book I was collating. I had framed and shot the picture without any thought to the people in the image. Later when I came to print the picture I noticed that a street cleaner had been watching and had actually participated in my picture by pointing at me and smiling during the 1/125th second shot ... I love human life.

The shot below is a new process that I am developing for abstract portraits. So far the system requires a remote sitter, a video camera and a lens which focuses right down to the end of the lens ... not perfect yet, but getting good early results.

Abstract Photography:

I suppose that abstract photography is the particular field of photographic art that I am best known for. I love the ability to stretch film to its absolute maximum and utilise everyday materials to create wonderfully stunning images.

With this particular abstract image I had been messing around with some tin foil and needles, trying to make the perfect pinhole for a camera I was constructing. I was using my microscope to check for nice round holes and I had been using some mat paints to reduce the reflectivity of the reverse side of the foil. I had placed the foil mat side up on the microscope bed and illuminated the foil both from below and above and I nearly fell over backwards when I viewed the results. Firstly, it was the worst pinhole that I had ever created and secondly, it was so obviously alive and sentient.

I soon got over my disappointment at the distortion of the hole and concentrated on perfecting my sentient image. With some tinkering and adding some different shades of mat paint I finally decided on this image. I love it, but you should have experienced the joy of finding it for the first time ... immeasurable pleasure.

The remaining abstract photographs show several more techniques that I have developed over the years. Some are the result of lenses that I have designed and built using scrap parts, others were from working with fluids and light sources. I have always enjoyed the development phase of an image more than the execution of the final presentation.

I find that an idea can take you in any direction and that one thought can often develop into several, vastly different images.

My Abstract pictures range from the elegant to the bold, minimalist to complicated and thought provoking. I enjoy triggering prime evil responses in my viewers, touching a raw nerve of emotion as it were. There's nothing as satisfying as a viewer showing emotion, whether positive or negative, toward an image.

If you would like to learn more about my abstract processes and equipment I have a little website at www.artistnos.co.uk which aims to expand a bit on the subject.

Telling a Story:

It's not what I'm good at really. Setting up theatrical shots is something that leaves me exhausted. Using actors on location can sometimes result in total disaster, but other times the shoot takes on a life of its own and you just get carried along with it.

In this shoot we had been allowed limited access to an old stationery office which had since fell into disrepair. We all felt that it would be worth looking around for possibilities and strangely we all focused upon the buildings stark emptiness, rather than enjoying the clutter that existed on the other floors.

The loneliness was immediately apparent and it suddenly crossed my mind how someone could just waste away here without raising any alarm. So the shot was constructed. We took the photo shoot further and created all manner of depraved images, some of the tame ones I have shown below.

Not my favourite work, nor my best .. but a fun day out.

Photography - After Dark:

I've always loved going out at night looking for pictures. I think that the daylight is Gods own lighting, but the night time is the domain of mankind.

I've used all sorts of cameras to take night shots, but I've always considered the simpler manual cameras of the 1950's to the 1970's to be far superior for this kind of work. The lenses of these cameras are far higher in quality to modern lenses and there is no restriction to the amount of exposure that can be used. Modern digitals and SLR's seem to think that you will never need any longer than 30 seconds to take a picture and they seem to think that it is acceptable to trade down with aperture sizes when confronted with low light conditions.

I personally like to take 4 minute pictures and use F11 - F16 in cityscape night shots. A lot can happen in this amount of time and with the use of a piece of card you can choose whether or not to include it in your picture.

The following image was taken using a Nikon Coolpix digital. I had noticed the cyclist enter the picture, but didn't want him to leave the frame, so had to stop the exposure and hope that enough light had made it on to the image. With a film camera I might have taken the shot and then over shot another 30 seconds using a multiple exposure technique ... but no such luck with this digital camera.

Still, the picture did come out and it is probably one of my few successes using a digital camera.

The picture above is a similar effect, when the planning all went wrong. I had set up my Ensign 12-20, a completely manual bellows camera with a crystal sharp lens, and I was waiting for my 4 minutes to tick away when I noticed a car approaching from behind me. Until that point I had deliberately covered my lens to block out any passing traffic, but this car light trail would [in my minds eye] give a nice solitary direction for the viewer to focus upon. So I didn't cover the lens and sat back to wait for the car to leave its scar on my photo. Well it certainly left a scar ... breaking in front of me, the driver slammed his car in reverse and promptly performed the perfect 3 point turn in front of my lens.

To be honest I loved it from the moment I took the picture and just knew it would look good ... but I always have to explain it to my viewers.

These two images are night shots that have been allowed to go past their dark tones and into the realms of simulated daylight. The effect is more successful when using black and white film, but I think that colour film provides a lovely sense of age to the image.

People are almost impossible to shoot sharply at night, so I don't try. The following photograph was taken at F11 for approximately 1 minute. The lighting effect was courtesy of a missing bollard and my subjects were just a group of lads hanging around on a street corner. They had no problem with standing 'still' for 60 seconds and positioned themselves with real professionalism.

The sense of teenage angst pours out from the image as the boys fight with their instincts to run about shouting. They must have felt as though they hadn't moved for hours.

Low light photography, when not used to deliberately show night scenes, is probably most commonly used in situations where flash is not considered appropriate. In this case I was in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam when I spotted an image that has since changed my life. I new I had to take the picture and yet I only had a small compact Olympus Trip with me. I guessed the distance and relied on the in built exposure meter to take two images (one using the 400asa setting and one using 100asa setting). Although totally underexposed, this picture has helped me to remember my shock at seeing these two delicate creatures. Words cannot describe how much they have changed my life's philosophy ... I believe in the sentience of all things.

Looking for Photographic Subject Matter:

Photography is wide ranging and individual in nature. Although we all use a similar process to attain our results, the actual subject matter can vary enormously. I believe that a photographer should try to develop a recognisable style, while still remaining flexible enough to allow for new creations to occur.

The development of new material is always important to a photographer. Variety of subject matter is important and allows the photographer to maintain their interest in the medium. There's nothing more soul destroying than having to keep turning out the same old images every day ... so get out and experiment would be my advice to any photographer who feels a bit stale.

The following pictures are the product of walking around and looking at things. Letting your eye wander is one of the true pleasures of photography and can result in some lovely pictures.

Whether you live in the countryside or the city doesn't matter. Each environment has its merits where photography is concerned.

Always remember that you are just going for a walk and not necessarily going on a photographic expedition which will require all of our equipment, lenses and effects. I find that kit comfort and less lens choice helps to focus the mind and brings the best out of me. I hate carrying heavy bags of photographic kit around with me and when I am forced to I quickly become bored by the whole experience.

So I would advise you to take one camera, one lens and a limited amount of film or digital memory with you on these small excursions. With less equipment you will be more comfortable and be able to concentrate for longer. By using one lens only you will become more mobile when you try to get the picture you want. Move towards your subject, moving away, tilting your camera and standing on objects will all help you achieve the goal, without having to change lenses and add filters etc.

Sometimes the simplest cameras can produce the nicest shots. You should never discount a camera because of its age or apparent un-trendiness. The equipment that you use can make you concentrate harder and therefore reduce your mistakes. When I first used large format cameras my technique slowed to a crawl, sometimes reducing my daily output to single figures. But I was finding that I could get 100% success from my images, compared with 30% from an SLR.

Always remember that there will be another day and another chance to take another picture. So you can always take a different camera, lens or film on the next expedition and get a whole new range of shots from the same locations.

This also illustrates the importance of time to a photographer. Things change every second of every day and this means that we never run out of photo opportunities. The important element is keeping fresh and receptive to all that we see.

The next few pictures are just a small selection of shots I've taken while just passing by. They are not masterpieces by any means, but they do tell a story and allow my memory to trigger emotions ... validation enough for me.

A humorous corner of a friends kitchen

A Sad, but also beautiful beach scene.

A walk along the river Seine.

Parisian Street Art

Who says that a camera has to always be pin sharp and focussed?

By changing your perspective you can tell a better story.

I was glad to have only taken a telephoto lens that day.

Capturing romantic scenes.

Familiar pictures, taken at different times of day.

The Grave of Man Ray. I always like to leave a small token, maybe an exposed film or a small vintage camera.

Shop Windows are always fun

An old camera will produce old pictures.