I don’t really want to get into a discourse on the meaning of the various elements of the shot, and yes, I suppose they are some pretty old/traditional/obvious symbols, but still, the symbolism of this shot means a lot to me. I’ve been trying to find an image with these elements that I liked for a while – I’ve had another lined up as a “maybe” for about a month now that I might put up just to illustrate a completely different approach to the same idea

A few hours after I took this photo, the glass candle holder exploded. It was a bit unexpected, I have to say.

One from last Christmas, as it turns out. I’m in the process of working out what to archive of the last year’s photography, and what to just ditch, and I turned up this one, that I toyed with posting last year, but couldn’t find a version of it I liked. Having started to do these tinted B&W portraits a bit lately, I thought I’d see what this looked like, and lo and behold, I like it more.

This is, as those with good memories for faces might recall, my grandmother. The inamorata says that she things that this shot looks scary. I disagree, but then, this is a woman I grew up with, so I may be biased. What do you think?

Not my finest ever shot, but I do like the way that this might, at first glance, be mistaken for a landscape shot across a tree-covered valley. I’ve made sure the colours are a little over saturated, and deepened the shadows, trying to create a sense of unease, of something out of place and slightly unnatural.

I’ve been reading Lovecraft, lately.

And a return to something more conventional – a shot of my Dad. This is the first decent photo I’ve managed to get of him, because he has the same gift I do for looking bloody awful in photos. This one’s not perfect, either but it’s the closest I’ve ever manage to get to him looking like he actually looks.

On a slightly-related note, I ought to take a moment to thank ewa for the new default icon for this journal, based on one of her photos of me and my camera.

The second of these abstract pieces. I spent quite a while talking about them last night, so I have less to say about this one. I think that is is perhaps a little more immediately accessible, though. What do you think?

No, it’s not the cover of a lost Cocteau Twins album.

I may annoy a few of you with the next shot or two, as I go wandering off into the realms of abstract photography for a bit. My apologies – I’ve a conventional portrait of my Dad coming up afterward, just to reassure you all, and possibly answer some of the questions about where I get my looks from.

I don’t normally talk too much about my thoughts and feelings around an image – I like to let people work out what I’m saying, but I think I probably ought to make it a little clearer with this sequence, which are about how I respond to the beauty of nature. I’m firmly with Richard Dawkins, here – “Unweaving the Rainbow” does not destroy it’s majesty, and the more one understands of the scientific process behind the natural world, the more impressive it is. That’s the point of view that gave me the inspiration for these shots.

On the technical side, well, while this image, and the any that follow it are not as strictly composed as my normal work, you’d be mistaken if you thought that all I did was whirl the camera around at random while on a long exposure to get them. As you can probably see, there are three distinct elements to this that the camera was moved in relation to for different periods of time. I didn’t know exactly what the final shot would look like, but I did have some sense of the elements image I wanted to produce.

I’d love to know what you think of them…

Another from Borough. I get hungry just looking at this one.

Other than that, not a lot to say. Sorry. I’ll try and be more entertaining with the next shot.

I was round Borough market this morning. I’ve got a huge pile of “maybes” as a result. Well, five. That’s a lot for me. Normally, if something is a “maybe”, it’s not good enough. This lot, though, I just don’t know if they’re terribly interesting – I like them, I just don’t know that anyone else will see the same things I do in them.

But I digress. This isn’t a maybe. I saw these strange little trees in one of the grocers there, and was immediately struck by the fact that I could not easily connect them with any fruit I’ve ever knowingly eaten.

So I took a photo, and hope to be credited with exposing the alien fruits tat have obviously come to take over the earth. Or at least our citrus groves.

Don’t panic, I’m not going to be doing this to all my photos from now on, but this is another one from the archives that I just couldn’t get the tone I wanted for it. It’s probably the single photo I played with longest, trying to get a lomo-like look to it and never quite getting it right, and it suddenly sprang to mind on the bus home tonight.

There may be a few more of these yet to come – I’m racking my brains trying to thing of the shots that I took in 2005, and gave up on because they looked too real. I’m sure I won’t be able to simply Lomo them all, but you never know, I might be able to retrieve one or two more.

If I start to bore anyone with lomo stuff, do say.

Like every other Londoner with a pulse, I did indeed go an see the Sultan’s Elephant, back in May. And I took a shitload of photos. And some of them were adequate compositions, but mostly, they just looked like shots of a couple of bloody great mechanical contrivances. Impressive, sure, but I didn’t feel the photos had any magic in them. The show was all about magic and wonder, I just didn’t feel the pictures caught it.

And then last night, I got the provebial thunderbolt regarding a way of maybe making the shots a little less real, adding that dreamlike hint I thought was missing.

Yeah, it’s “just” a lomo style filter. But with this shot, I think it makes all the difference in the world.