Sheone is the adopted name of a London graffiti artist who has been working for 20-odd years. The had an exhibition on this week in a building on the South Bank that is scheduled for demolition tomorrow. So I went along to see. There was no particular structure to the exhibition, but this was certainly the piece that caught my attention first.

Graffiti is one of the few art forms that I think it acceptable to photograph – there’s a technical challenge in reproducing it to capture (or subvert) the spirit of the original piece, choices to be made about how much of the original context to include or not, there’s a certain documentary concern, and so on, that make photographing it different to taking a picture of something that was made to hang in a gallery. I’m not trying to claim the artist’s work as my own, simply trying to be inspired by and respond to it.

So that’s my justification for putting pictures of someone else’s work online, anyway.

Another portrait of Orla, with her Dad in the background. I’ll try and get out and about with the camera at the weekend, so I can stop posting baby photos… :)

I was interested to discover that the previous shot looked markedly different on my work screen to what either of my home monitors made it look like, which is unusual, because I keep one set at close-to-print colours, and the other set at a more or less neutral “screen” set up. And it occurs to me that I have *no* idea what it would look like on your average CRT screen…

Happy New Year folks. This is the first of two (or possibly three) portraits of my little cousin Orla that I took at my family’s Christmas celebrations. I thought I’d put this one up now, while the holiday period is still in recent memory, as it’s the most obviously seasonal of the three.

I hadn’t met Orla before, but I was impressed to find that at slightly over one year old, she’s already the life and soul of the party (and delighted to pose for the camera), and in keeping with the spirit of the season, was delighted to share her toys with absolutely everyone, so I wanted at least one portrait of her that was very clearly festive, which I think I got here…

Not the most stunningly original shot I’ve ever come up with, I admit, but I was passing the Eye the other week, and was struck by the idea of producing a companion piece to Pearly Gates (21st Century Edition). So here it is.

You’ll have to forgive me – I’m drunk, so this is likely to be less than coherent. This is a texture piece – a shot that is, one one level, trying to capture both the mood of my Christmas, and on another, a technical experiment in capturing texture with a very narrow depth of field. I’d love to know how well you think it worked – what you can infer about my holiday from this shot alone…

Merry Christmas, folks.

One of the things I like about “Test Site” is the sense that it’s an attempt to try and figure out some alternative ways of doing things that we take for granted. That it’s an attempt to look ahead to at least one possible future. Any, of course, the whole thing has that cyberpunk feeling – all glass and polished metal. And so I went looking for a few sci-fi/cyberpunk type shots.

A shot of a London landmark. I was walking up and down the Thames a fair amount the other day, and got shots if it in all kinds of light, but this is the only one I feel does justice to the grandeur of the place.

A question for you this time. This is obviously (well, obviously if you’ve been or have heard about it), a photo of part of “Test Site”, Carsten Höller’s current exhibit at the Tate Modern (some more shots of that to follow.

But here’s my question: what is this photo about? (As is often the case, there’s a clue in the title.) What was going through my head when I took it, what ideas am I reaching for here?

It won’t exactly bother me if no-one gets it – while I’m generally trying to say something about the thoughts in my head when I take a photo, that’s mostly because I think I take better photos that way. But I would like to know what other people think about, or think I’m thinking about, when they look at my pictures.

Here’s the other take on the same idea at my previous shot. I’d be interested to know which one everyone prefers.