A summer’s evening in Lyon. I saw these three men and liked their arrangement and the pastel colours of the buildings behind them. I wanted something more in the picture and so I waited. Then suddenly one of them produced a piece of paper and handed it the other. That was the moment to take the shot. I don’t know what the paper was, maybe it was a contract. It could be anything in fact but The Contract sounded fitting for a title.
Taken in Lyon. I liked the diffusion of the frosted glass of the bus shelter and the fact that the legs and feet were sharp below the frosted glass. Their heads were hidden by an empty grey panel presumably there to take advertising. I wanted something to fill the board. Just 2 minutes away around the corner was a closed-down café with grafitti and paintings on it. Above the window, there were three painted heads. It just shouted at me that these were the heads that should be behind that bus shelter.
Bletchley Park, 2009. OK, so this ‘girl’ is actually a mannequin but I tried to tackle them as street photography subjects in terms of angle, filling the frame and having some kind of background to ’set the scene’. Unfortunately, their faces seemed so plain that I added a canvas-like texture in Photoshop that took away the plainness. This shot in particular has a rather eerie stare at the photographer.
Bletchley Park, 2009. This lady was dressed in elegant 1940s dress (actually, she was one of the guides) but she willingly posed for me in the Bombe Room (the Bombe machine is behind her).
It was the pink hair and clown-like face paint that caught my eye. Then there was the surprised stare as he posed for the camera.
This is the variety known as Gold Heart. I liked the shape of the stem in the image area. Fortunately, the plant was in a pot at the time and I was able to move it to a location where there was a fairly dark backdrop (actually the backdrop is a distant Ceonothus).
I had bought myself a Canon EF100-400 lens and wanted to try it out. I found these tulips in the Fellows Garden at Queen’s College, Cambridge and wanted to use a longish focal length to isolate the tulip and a wide aperture to give me a narrow depth of field. (I didn’t keep that lens long – the size and weight as well as the trombone action didn’t justify the quality that it delivered.)
I suppose all photographers have a poppy shot of some kind. And why not? Their vibrant reds certainly add impact to a picture. This is my poppy.
This isn’t really a derivative shot at all. It was taken at the 1940s weekend on the Poppy Line (North Norfolk Railway) in 2010 and is an image of the locomotive wheels shot with a slow shutter (and panned) as the train came into the station. I quite like the somewhat surreal effect but it doesn’t please everybody.