FALLING SOMEWHERE AS RAIN

A train journey is always a great chance to take a few vernacular shots and an interesting destination makes for an even better opportunity. I spent a few days in Yorkshire this week, with a visit to the Leeds Museum Archives in to the bargain. Yorkshire is always a good venue for photography, with a mixture of ancient history, beautiful countryside and busy metropoli. The train journey element lent itself to quick, casual photography with the Iphone and  the Hipstamatic app, using a pak that emulates old sepia tinted plates - complete with dirt and scratches. The reason for this is to capture the heavily industrialised areas near the railway, especially near Manchester, where the cities Industrial Revolution heritage is still clearly visible. The phone and app combination served me well, after I found myself in Leeds, at the Discovery Centre, which houses the museum archive and large object store. A guided tour led us around the cramped confines of the stacks, where thousands of o...

One of the most exciting parts of photography, is the reveal at the end of a shoot. I am not by any means a technical photographer and rely more on luck than judgement when shooting with the iPhone or compact. Whilst in sunny Cyprus it was especially awkward to see the screen in bright locations, so sometimes I had to hope for the best. The camera does have the advantage of having a shaded viewfinder attachment on the rear, to make focussing easier, but even so it can be very easy to miss a shot while fumbling with the controls or chimping the previous shots. So I always look forward to sitting down each evening with the iPad and curating the days take, to see what I have gathered. Nine times out of ten I end up with a lot of average shots, but occasionally, I get a few keepers. I aim for the vernacular style, to either capture a particular moment or vision, or to record the events of a day. So besides tramping round dusty catacombs and shooting doors in back streets, I like to get a b...