As the brightest comet in nearly a quarter of a century, you’d think that catching a glimpse of the huge cosmic ice-ball otherwise known as C/2020 F3 “NEOWISE” would be easy. After all, many had reported seeing it in the pre-dawn sky, and it’s a pretty decent size at 3 miles wide. As it travels through space at a rate of 144,000 miles per hour, nearly 70 million miles away from earth, NEOWISE has become […]
Nearly a year on, and we return to “Part Two” of my Patagonia trip – following on from the time already spent in Chile’s Torres Del Paine National Park. It turns out, there’s a LOT of paperwork involved in taking a car from Chile to Argentina – something that Mark had (luckily) flagged before we picked it up in Punta Arenas. Without all these documents (and fees) being arranged when you collect your car in […]
Standing tall and majestic in New Zealand’s Fiordland National Park, the peaks that surround Milford Sound can capture light in truly magnificent ways, all through the year. Whether it’s the deep, misty haze that each morning can bring, or the final rays of sunlight on a spring afternoon, there’s something special about this iconic view that just keeps pulling me back to visit time and time again. They say the journey is often just as […]
There’s something inherently mysterious and special about visiting arctic circle locations such as Greenland. Whether it’s the months of nightless days or dayless nights, the extreme temperatures in which people still manage to survive, the stunning scenery by itself, or the first-hand view you get of what is happening to our world’s climate – there was enough attraction to convince me, along with Thomas from Rollei, to head north and explore. Having decided to head […]
Our cities are, by nature, ever-changing entities in their own right. From skylines that morph into different silhouetted shapes each year, to businesses and people that come and go as their needs and successes change – these moments in time that I capture in my cityscape images are never the same from one day to the next, and the ones I’ve taken of San Francisco are no exception. From high above the rooftops, blue hour […]
It’s a horrible trap we fall in to, when flying “down under” from London: Sydney becomes our target, to the exclusion of many other locations. It’s the primary advertised route from the UK, and after travelling 20-24 hours to get there, our appetite for further travel can sometimes fade a little, meaning we focus purely on this one “cool city” on Australia’s south-eastern coastline. And, in part, rightly so – it’s an amazing place to […]
It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally been released: The Phase One Guide to Long Exposure Photography You can now get your virtual hands on our free interactive guide to getting the best out of your camera when it comes to long exposure photography, compiled and presented by Phase One and, well, me! Whether it’s the look of silky water and cloud movement you’re trying to achieve, capturing light trails at night, brightening […]
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, made by FotoPro, 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 […]
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 […]
