550 days of evening.camera

I've been shooting for my evening.camera project for nearly a year and a half now. In that time I've amassed some 530-odd (and growing) images, of which I've managed to post, pretty much on time, one a day.

That's quite staggering for someone like me, who has issues with actually getting stuff done sometimes.

Beyond posting the images to the evening.camera blog, and Twitter, and Instagram every day (you can receive those by email, you know, if you don't want to have to follow the project through social media — just fill in the form on the evening.camera page), I don't really know what to do with them all. It feels like I should make a book or a magazine or an exhibition of them, but honestly I don't quite know where to start with all that.

One thing that I have noticed, looking at all 500-odd images zoomed out in Lightroom, is the colour palette of the project. There's very little black-and-white in there (a deliberate decision), and so you find these repeated fades from blues to golds, pastels to vibrant colours, as the night draws in and contrast increases. It's also affected by the seasons, because "evening" is lighter in the summer months than the winter.

I'm going to keep shooting for the project, of course, I'd be silly not to. But it's time to start something new as well, because evening.camera is more like visual pushups for me rather than a mountain that I must climb. I need a new mountain.

I also need to finish the stuff I start. But that's a separate blog post.

Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley, California

Finishing subject|object — seeking subjects of colour

It was 2015 when I started the subject|object project. Or maybe it was even 2014; I don't really remember. All I remember was coming up with the original brief:

Each subject is photographed twice for the project: A head-and-shoulders portrait (“object”) and a full-figure nude (“subject”). The two images will never be displayed together; there is no link between the “object” and the “subject”.

With the “subject” are displayed the subject’s details: their name (or pseudonym), age, profession, and their thoughts on the objectification of people in the modern world.

The “object” images are displayed alone, to allow viewers to have their own thoughts on the person in front of them

Since then I've photographed 35 people, and I'm getting to the point now where I'm getting ready to put the project out there in the wild. At the top of this post are some of the "object" images — the portraits. I haven't yet worked out how I want to display the nudes, at least on the web (though you'd think I'd have figured that out after a couple of years).

Overwhelmingly, the people I've photographed for subject|object have so far been white. I really want to change that before I wrap things up and start preparing for a gallery show. Britain is a wonderfully diverse country, and I want to photograph way more people of colour before I call the project done.

So, if you're a person of colour, and you're within reasonable travelling distance of Manchester — or you know someone who is — please don't hesitate to get in touch. I'd love to photograph you for this project. If it's going to be about the way that we, as a society, objectify each other, then it should be made up of a representative cross-section of our society, don't you think?

That's not to say, by the way, that if you want to be part of the project and you're white, I won't welcome your participation — I absolutely will; I just really care about this project being as diverse in its participants as possible.

You can get involved with the project by filling in the form on the subject|object project page.

Can we shoot something cool together in just 15 minutes? Come and find out!

One of the biggest joys in making portraits, I find, is getting to meet interesting people. And the truth is that everyone is interesting in some way. I've yet to meet a truly boring person in my career as a photographer.

But here's the thing: when you work a lot with models and musicians and people with a media profile to project and maintain, you encounter a lot of artifice. Not always deliberately; there's rarely a moment that a person decides "I shall pretend to be someone else in front of the camera," but often: The band who want to look like hard-core rockers, and who are completely different when the camera is off them. The model who is painfully shy until the camera points their way.

For my latest project, I want to do something different. I want to work with people who don't regularly sit in front of a camera for a professional portrait. And I want to push the boundaries, creatively, of what I'm able to do: with lighting, with sets, with props. I want to make portraits that are weird and wonderful and different.

And because I like to make my life harder, I'm giving myself only 15 minutes per sitter to shoot a portrait. 

Here's how it works: the sitter comes to my studio in Manchester, we have fifteen minutes to shoot and chat. We pick a few favourite frames together, then we're done. The selection of the final portrait is mine, and because I'm limiting the amount of retouching I'm doing, the sitter should have their image within 24 hours.

For all of this, I'm charging just £30 per sitter. That's a fraction of what I'd normally charge for a shoot. Why? Because I honestly believe that people want interesting and different images of themselves, and £30 is not a high bar to clear for most of those people.

If you're in North-West England, come and be a part of it all. You can read a bit more about the project and book a session over on the 15-minute portraits page.

I can't wait to work with you!