The elation at making it through the storms and into Yosemite National Park in the deep winter snow soon fades as you start focusing on the next challenge in a few day’s time: Getting back out again. Awesome though it was to be surrounded by deep walls of ploughed snow on the one remaining open road in and out of the park, you know you’re only one storm away from being trapped in the valley […]
Why would anyone go to the hottest recorded place on the planet to photograph locations 282ft below sea level? The answer is simple : Because Death Valley’s landscapes are absolutely mind-blowing. Step out of your air conditioned car and you’re instantly hit with the wall of arid heat that awaits all visitors to this seemingly barren land. With red STOP signs in every direction, warning of the dangers of walking after 10am (and the importance […]
Lensballs, glass ball photography, rabbit-holes – regardless of the name given to this style of photography, it’s seemingly becoming more and more popular with each passing day. As someone who’s more inclined to shoot literal scenes of landscapes and cityscapes, it’s often good to try something completely different, just to mix up the thought process a little. And that’s exactly what shooting with a glass ball did for me over the past few months. Every […]
It’s not a secret any more! The Phase One IQ4 150MP Infinity Platform ships at the end of this month, and for the past week I’ve had the honour of being their focus in the latest marketing campaign. With all of the “pre-launch” out of the way, it’s now time to focus on what’s really important, the “why” of what makes this new camera system so special. In the latest email newsletters, Phase One have […]
While many now focus purely on drones and helicopters to get some spectacular shots of our cities from above, I’m yet to find a long exposure image (in either scenario) that can be enlarged to a size much bigger than a phone screen. It’s obviously not a problem for social media posts, but how about when we want to print or display a cityscape at night in high resolution? For that, our trusty man-made balconies, […]
While eclipses of all sorts happen throughout each year – from “blood moons” to annular solar eclipses, total eclipses and every partial one in between, this year’s lunar eclipse promised something special: the longest lunar eclipse in the 21st century. So the call from Rollei came – could I come across and be involved in their live shoot on Instagram, capturing the spectacle from Hamburg? Well, why not…? With a few days’ preparation beforehand and […]
Light pollution: Increasingly a challenge for city dwellers and photographers alike. Those deep, dark skies that I’m lucky enough to see full of stars out in the countryside are becoming an endangered species in their own right as the world’s population continues to rise and urban areas inevitably expand. The problem is, with all that light bouncing around, our view of the night sky (and ability to capture it) continues to diminish on a daily […]
It’s one of landscape photography’s “big ticks” – that shot of the fishermans cottages in the shadow of Lofoten’s mountain range in Hamnøy; one of the archipelago’s tiny islands connected by bridges that span for miles across the region. I have to admit, it’s been a place I’d been wanting to shoot for a while, so when the opportunity arose to test some new equipment in low temperatures, it was pretty high up there on […]
There’s a new kid on the block – well, triplets, actually : The Rollei Lion Rock Mark II series of tripods, with three different heights and capacities of up to 20kg, 25kg and 30kg. So, having used tripods from Manfrotto, Really Right Stuff, Gitzo and many others – after years of them trying to convince me to switch from my existing “old favourites”, could this finally be “the one”? Last year, I was lucky enough […]
So here we are again, stood on top of an historic building, looking out over the city of Boston just after sunset. What a view, and what a night. It wasn’t the night I’d been planning, to be fair – this was supposed to be a really quick trip to capture the snow that had fallen over Cape Cod – checking out Race Point Lighthouse for the first time and seeing how some new equipment […]
Stepping out onto the scorching hot ground of the Red Sand Desert, I was reminded (rather cheerily) by our guide of the one thing I should be grateful for in this midday sun : “at least it’s not last month, it was at least 10 degrees C hotter!”. It was quite a contrast to where I’d been sat just hours before, being looked after in BA’s Concorde Room at London Heathrow – getting pampered (in […]
What an evening – and what a view! Being lucky enough to stand in the foothills of Kirkjufellsfoss at 12:30am this summer was quite the experience, and everything I thought it would be all those months ago when we planned this trip to Iceland to see the midnight sun. Landing into Reykjavik, it was clear this was going to be a strange week – looking back to the plane in the middle of the night […]
For the briefest of moments, the sound of cracking had stopped – the huge iceberg formations that feed Iceland’s iconic Jökulsárlón (or “glacial river lagoon” when translated) had steadied and the tide was turning. While often full of baby icebergs which have fallen away from the surface of the Vatnajökull glacier, finding one of this size in isolation resting in still water (with very few people around to distract) was quite unusual. Even better, the stillness […]
Chicago. “The Windy City” – home to some of the finest architecture, food and (now!) baseball teams in the USA. Stood on the rooftop of the Carbide and Carbon Building, now the home of Chicago’s Hard Rock Hotel, it’s easy to see why people are so fascinated with this city – looking out across the skyscrapers, neighbourhoods and river as it weaves its way through the juxtaposition of historic stone buildings and sleek modern towers. And what […]
Persuading me to leave a 5-star hotel and “rough it” in a Jucy campervan for a week or two while tearing around New Zealand’s south island is no mean feat, but just over a year ago now it was done – and with some great photography results to show for it. This year, based on that success, was the return. With a lot more clarity on our route, more flexibility in our approach and with Jucy […]
Seeing the northern lights (aurora borealis) in the sky above us is becoming an increasingly popular to-do list item, but despite being fortunate enough to have seen them a few times now, the lure of seeing the southern lights (aurora australis) during our time in New Zealand was just too tempting to ignore. We’d been lucky so far, really, when it came to night sky photographs. While not my favourite subject, hunting for the right location, angle, […]
(Don’t) Look down! At around 1,000ft above the ground, Menara Kuala Lumpur (or the “KL Tower” as it’s also known) isn’t a record-breaker by any means, but hey – it’s still the highest place you can get to across the city. My usual plan when shooting nightscapes tends to specifically exclude photography from the iconic towers for one simple reason : that icon can’t be in the shot if you’re stood on it to take the photo! This […]
The sudden realisation that you’ve been back in the UK for over 6 months now, and are yet to capture any shots of London hit me a few weeks ago. An easy fix, for sure, but it also dawned on me that I was missing some standard “stock shots” of the city at night. It was time to put that right… London, to me, will always have with it a certain air of excitement. As a […]
