The Street

If you get the chance, have a look at my recent project on Street photography:
http://www.christopher-seaton.co.uk/thestreet.html

These images were taken in London, Canterbury and Broadstairs.

Chris

Joiners

Today I had my first look at the book Hockney On Photography; Conversations with Paul Joyce. AF kindly lent this to me for a few days to peruse, explore and gain inspiration. There is something about Joiners which just strike a chord with me. I appreciate they are not to everyone's taste, but they are to mine and as such this coming weekend sees my Documenting the Real shoot, which relates to Hockney. It's a bit of a secret at the moment, so no more hints from me just yet.

Chris

A Year in the Life of Canterbury

Kent Creative Arts are doing a Photo a Day project for 2011, entitled A Year in the Life of Canterbury.

http://www.kentcreativearts.co.uk/a-year-in-the-life-of-canterbury/

This is a project that I would like to take part in, the challenge is finding the time to visit Canterbury with a camera. Since I'm not in University on Wednesdays, I took the opportunity today to travel over and see what there was. It was a little cold, especially when the wind was blowing, but here is my submission for today:

I just hope no-one takes a better photograph today!

Chris

Price On Application

It has dawned on me that I need to start taking the photographs for my Price On Application project. Anyone near Broadstairs or Portsmouth currently selling their house and would not mind having it photographed at night?

This is roughly what I am looking to create... Just need to find some volunteers now. Fingers crossed!

Chris

Margate Beach Cross

The British Beach Cross Championships came to Margate this past weekend, so I took the opportunity to nab a few shots. Despite using my somewhat dated 55-200mm lens, with it's less-than-speedy focussing and it's ability to create soft images, I stole a couple of half-decent photographs.

Judge for yourselves.

Chris

Yesterday's Problems Today

A visit to, and tour around, the printspace (http://www.theprintspace.co.uk/) in Shoreditch should have been a day without any problems. The trouble is, this is London in 2011.

Wandering the streets looking for photo opportunities, I stumbled upon a police car parked on double red lines whilst two officers were stood on the pavement questioning a cyclist. Nothing particularly interesting there, so without breaking stride I snatched a couple of shots from the waist.

Needless to say, upon a quick review I noted that they were technically poor (blurred, out of focus and poorly framed). That said, I never delete an image until I have seen it on a larger screen than the 3inch on my dSLR, so they remained for the time being.

Around 400 yards down the road, whilst waiting for some traffic lights to change to allow me to cross the road, I was approached from behind by two slightly out of breath police officers. And so it began... Questioning the very nature of my actions, they asked numerous questions and requested, at first politely but later in a more aggressive manner, to see my images.

One such question was: "Our colleagues informed us that you were taking photographs of us in a serendipitous manner, why was this?" I politely responded that I was simply a photography student undertaking a Street project and that if I raised the camera to my eye that it would draw attention to the action of taking the image, and thus those photographed would begin to react to the camera.

Thankfully, after a quick glance between themselves and review of my photographs, they seemed satisfied with the explanation and duly walked back from whence they came. Amusingly, one of the other images they saw was of a woman walking in front of some politically motivated graffitti. It's just a shame that I was caught.

After recalling the event to KS in the foyer of the printspace, she pointed out that I should have questioned the use of the word 'serendipitous' when 'surreptitious' was more appropriate. The infamous lyric, "I fought the law and the law won", takes on a whole new meaning. Whilst she was right that I should have pulled them up on their English, I'm not sure that irking them further was the way to handle the situation. Perhaps I will try it if I ever get stopped again...

The wariness to the camera, and the assumption of guilt that duly follows, is something every photographer in the UK is certainly aware of. So much for the promise to stop the unfair treatment of photographers. As for the printspace itself, well it was certainly a worthwhile experience, just a shame it was somewhat overshadowed.

Chris

A new era begins...

I thought it was about time that I should finally get around to starting a Blog. I plan to update it weekly, although I'm not sure why I'm telling you that as things never go to plan with me. The next post will be a little more about me, but subsequent posts will be on current visual affairs in my life. Exciting? Well, probably not...

Chris