I still find it strange how much I rely on my friends around the world to let me know when images I’ve shot have made it out into the wild. Although the use of images is obviously something we negotiate all the time, exactly when and where they will turn up is quite often a mystery, and the past month or two has been no exception. Take my shot of the Hollywood sign, for example. […]
Wow – what a morning it turned out to be! Preparing for the worst, having checked the weather forecast the week before I arrived back home to England, I wasn’t expecting anywhere near this shot when I arrived at Dorset’s Jurassic Coast – getting ready to (hopefully) capture Durdle Door at sunrise. There’s a small window in the year when the sun rises just perfectly through the arch. It’s south enough to allow you to […]
“Pink Emerald” – print available to buy now As someone who’s snowboarded around Lake Tahoe since 2001, it can be really infuriating when you know there’s an awesome view of the lake that you’ve tried to capture but not quite managed to get the right combination of weather, timing and camera gear to be in the same place at the same time. This time, with a 3 day stay booked in, I was hoping that […]
Featured in issue 141 of “Digital Photographer” magazine – my long exposure shots from the Northern Lights above Tromso in Norway during 2012. The feature focuses on the techniques required to capture different situations with long-exposure settings in-camera. From firework shows at 20 seconds to lightning captures to sports scenes, the whole spectrum is covered. My visit to view the aurora borealis didn’t go without the odd hiccup or two – as I wrote at […]
“Circular Motion” – print available to buy now Who remembers being told as a kid to make sure to look both ways before crossing a road, and that cars are dangerous? Yeah… I do. Sadly, when I drove through Lujiazui on the way home the other night last week, I saw a sight that made me cast that very wise advice aside and resolve to get the shot I pictured in my mind, no matter […]
Shanghai’s Pudong skyline – once the home to two of the tallest skyscrapers in the world is soon to be the home of 3. The neon lights of the boats running up and down the river all night circle the peninsular in electric blue while the city behind entertains passers by with its iconic light show. To give Shanghai its true credit, this is a view that really doesn’t need an expensive camera to be […]
So this is the latest publication to feature the shot I took of Horseshoe Bend, AZ, last year – What Digital Camera Magazine. 🙂 This follows press coverage in the Times, the Daily Mail, The Guardian, Metro and many others who over the past month have picked up on the images which were submitted to the Society of International Nature and Wildlife Photography’s panel earlier this year. Sadly, being in China (and hearing about this double-page […]
Can a £50 compact digital camera really hold its own against a full-frame DSLR? I was contacted somewhat “out of the blue” a few weeks ago by Lucy at MoneySupermarket.com, the UK-based financial comparison and advice site, asking if I’d be willing to take on one of their challenges: to use a £50 camera (which they would provide) and write a comparison between that and my own (slightly) more expensive gear. How could I say […]
Well that was a nice surprise – I went to check the forecast and my images popped up in Yahoo!’s new Weather App for the iPhone (and yes, it’s also available for Android…) 🙂 Granted, it wasn’t a complete surprise as I knew they had been “tagged” by the Yahoo! team on my Flickr account with words such as “clear”, “night”, “cloudy” etc. but I had no idea of when they might appear. The app itself caught […]
Now there’s something you don’t get to see every day – the top of what was once the tallest skyscraper in a country (the Jin Mao Tower), from above, at night 🙂 By day, it’s spiky architecture is a defining part of Shanghai’s Pudong skyline – indeed, it was the key focus for another shot I took from the same building (if a little lower down) – the SWFC. This image, however, was unplanned… I’d […]
THIS is the Shanghai I see. 🙂 “Shanghai Calling” – Print available to buy now Millions of images exist of the PuDong skyline taken from The Bund, the famous “Oriental Pearl Tower” now dwarfed by the presence of Jin Mao and the SWFC – indeed, I’ve even shot it myself (although granted, from a slightly different angle 😉 ) So, why would I want to shoot a road network? Well, for two reasons: 1) When […]
It’s been 7 months since I moved to Shanghai – and I’ve only just made it to the top of the world’s (current) highest observation deck, The Shanghai World Financial Center/SWFC (or as it’s locally known, “The Bottle Opener”) to see the skyline from above. A few miles from Shanghai Pudong International Airport, I really have no excuse, but now I’ve been up there – wow, what a view 🙂 “View From The Top” – […]
“The Racetrack” – Print available to buy now In 2011, I managed to capture another shot of Devil’s Golf Course in Death Valley. Having visited many times before, each time being stunned by the scenery this National Park has to offer (along with the 120 degree heat some days!), it dawned on me that there was one area that I’d never quite managed to reach : The Racetrack Playa. The place still remains as mysterious […]
“The Greatest Wall” – Print available to buy now Since moving to China, I’d looked at the best time to go and photograph the Great Wall (or the sections near Beijing, anyway) – and no time seemed perfect. Winter is VERY cold up there, summer is too hot (and covered with people sleeping on the wall) and while autumn is a great time for colour, the early sunrise along with massive crowds makes it difficult […]
That’s right – I’ve decided to provide a watermark free copy of my Horseshoe Bend sunset image for use as a desktop wallpaper*. The image was taken in July this year, just as the sun hit the tip of the desert horizon in Page, Arizona. From this amazing vantage point, you can see the Colorado River snake its way around the huge rock formation as it makes its way to the Grand Canyon National Park. […]
Well that was a surprise! For those of you who don’t know already, I’ve moved to Shanghai for a while – which presents me with some amazing (and very different!) opportunities to shoot some new landscapes and street scenes that you just can’t get in the West. Sadly, it’s also meant that I’ve been so busy with the move and setting up home here, updating my website has kind of slipped… 🙁 So it was […]
A couple of months ago, we were in San Diego watching the solar eclipse by accident and I started seeing images of a massive rock formation crop up across the Internet as photographers had flocked to “Horseshoe Bend” in Arizona to capture it as it happened. Sadly, clouds obscured a lot of the images they posted, but it did make me want to go there to shoot (after all, it faces almost due west, perfect […]
Last October, during a visit to LA, a friend and I tried getting that ever sought-after “unique view” of the Hollywood sign. Despite signs threatening death to all tourists (I imagine it could be quite frustrating there!) the backroads surrounding the overlooks didn’t provide much in the way of an inspirational view and while we saw some fantastic houses, I left with nothing special in terms of photographs of the sign. This trip, I decided […]
Wow, it’s been a looooooong time since I wrote on here – and for that, I can only apologise. Those following me on facebook and twitter will know that it’s been a crazy busy few months, but I know that’s no excuse for not checking in on here every now and then. So tonight, I was planning to grab a few pictures of the 99% full moon – but instead the somewhat permanent feature of rain […]
Quick question: What do the following images have in common? The simple answer? They’d be impossible shots to take without some form of filter – and in this particular case, a filter which many people misunderstand or simply don’t think they need. That is, until they understand the power that it can have when shooting landscapes. It’s also one of the most frequently asked questions of land/seascape photographers – “how did you manage to do […]
This is a photograph I never thought I’d get – not only because I hadn’t planned a trip to Norway (the Northern Lights / Aurora Borealis had never been something I thought I would see for myself) – but also on the first dark Friday night there, having spent 4 hours freezing by the side of a lake, they showed absolutely no sign of appearing! That’s right – less than 30 minutes after getting to Tromsø, […]
After a gruelling CES in Las Vegas, a free day in San Francisco was just what I needed, and the prospect of spending the day shooting with a great photographer friend of mine – Scott Marrs – was not to be missed 🙂 With my new Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 L II in my bag, it was time to get the tripod and ND filters out to go grab some images. We actually spent the day […]
Ashamed as I am to say it, given the amount of time I spend in and around Dorset, I’ve never once photographed Corfe Castle. It’s just down the road, and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of photographers have captured it already, but for some reason, I’ve just never gone. So, with the sunrise now starting at a reasonable hour in the middle of winter, I decided to give it a try. The only problem […]
I must have been promising to upload more pictures from our trip to Thailand for about 5 months now – well, I finally got around to it! Since the first post I made about Maya Bay (on Koh Phi Phi Leh), I’ve been meaning to sort through the hundreds of images we took over the two weeks out there and it’s embarrassing to say that I have just managed to do that. That said, I […]
