I had the pleasure of photographing the Swan family a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, their newest member: Heathcliffe. It’s been literally years since I’ve photographed a baby – or taken any traditional family portraits at all, for that matter – so I had a lot of fun photographing baby Heathcliffe. I also photographed the Swan beagle, Bert – look out for photographs of him in the next couple of days.
I don’t print very often, but when I do, I always end up telling myself that I should print more. So I treated myself to some gratuitously huge 45×30″ prints. For an idea of scale, the photos pictured are on a double bed, and are a little taller (in their shortest dimension) than our doors are wide.
Photobox have fairly regular sales for credits for their various services. This is great, because it means you can cash in on the time-limited sales without having to commit to which images you want there and then. I bought the credits for these prints 3 months ago, with only a vague idea what I wanted to print.
I ended up printing the following three images:
I say I don’t print very often, and yet I probably print more than most people. I hire out the darkrooms at uni to print every couple of weeks during term time (although this is probably just as much to do with tricking myself into feeling like I haven’t yet graduated, if I’m honest), and we bought a small A4 inkjet printer a couple of months ago with the intention of printing 6x4s on a semi-regular basis, alongside the odd invoice or job application or whatever.
Without meaning to go into a philosophical photography-snob monologue, the way in which photographs are presented definitely affects your relationship with the image in a significant way. Spending four hours in a blacked-out colour darkroom to produce a single 10×8″ chromogenic print certainly gives you time to bond with the image. AirPrinting a 6×4 from your iPhone creates a completely different relationship – something more throwaway (we usually have a selection of increasingly tired-looking 6x4s scattered over our coffee table), but still something tangible that exists in physical space, that you can pick up and pass around and rearrange, and which can’t be dismissed by closing a browser window. But a 45×30″ print is something completely different, something that you don’t typically encounter outside of a formal gallery space.
Photobox currently have 40×30″ prints on sale at £12.49, down from £24.99, but only until Monday. If you buy photo credits rather than prints, you have 3 months to decide what you want to print. If you don’t have a Photobox account then contact me with your email address and I’ll send you a link which also provides you with 50 completely free 6×4 inch prints.
After not really picking up my guitar for a couple of years (which coincided with me becoming obsessed with photography, funnily enough), I’ve decided to start playing again. Kat said she’d like to learn, so I gave her a quick lesson the other night. And what do you teach someone who’s new to guitar? The opening bars to Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, of course.
Dead rabbit near the base of Thorpe Cloud, Derbyshire. I had an enjoyable day of printing in the colour darkrooms at NTU yesterday. This is a scan of my favourite print from the day. Technical info: 10×8″ colour c-type print on matte Fujicolour Crystal Archive. Expired Kodak Portra 160VC, 120 format. Bronica SQ-A, Zenzanon-S 80mm ƒ/2.8
Today is the 10th birthday of WordPress, the platform that powers danfoy dot com, Creative Nottingham, and the majority of other web projects that I’ve worked on over the past 8 years.
WordPress began on 27 May 2003, as a fork of b2 (aka cafelog), and is now by far the most popular blogging platform in the world. It’s a mature and versatile platform, and has its own elegance, despite not being something that I’d describe as ‘lightweight’. ‘Blogging platform’ might be something of a misnomer – it’s grown massively in scale since I started using it around 2005, and can comfortably be used as a whole-site content management system (or CMS). It can be installed on any server that supports the requisite versions of PHP and MySQL. There is also a semi-free hosting service available at wordpress.com.
I’m currently redesigning danfoy.com using WordPress and an awesome adaptive framework called Skeleton. With a little forward planning, Skeleton makes it much easier to design websites which scale gracefully from full-screen web browsers, down to tablets (in portrait or landscape orientation), to mobile phones. It’s going to be awesome. We’ll soon be moving the Creative Nottingham site to a Skeleton-based WordPress site too, with help from Nottingham-based design agency Strafe Creative.
Behind the visitor, whose name I didn’t catch, is excellent work by Simon Roberts and others. I’d say that this photo is a reasonably fair representation of what the visitor actually spent most of his time doing whilst in the venue.
I’ve been volunteering for the FORMAT13 Photography Festival in Derby for the past four weeks, mostly performing invigilation duties. This is Matt, who I had the pleasure of invigilating with this past Tuesday. If you’ve not had a chance to visit FORMAT yet, and can get to Derby either tomorrow or Saturday, I strongly recommend checking it out. The festival is spread over numerous venues across the city centre and beyond, so prepare to spend […]
