Do something, do something different

Without wanting to put a jinx on it, I think we're finally coming out of The Winter That Would Just Not End. Maybe. It's time to start doing something. Anything would do, frankly. It's also time to start making new stuff and updating promos and sending stuff out and making people aware that I'm alive.

Which is the most exhausting thing ever and something that I'm really not all that good at. In fact, putting it bluntly, I absolutely hate the self promotion aspect of photography. (If there's anyone out there who wants to become my marketing consultant in exchange for free corporate headshots and the occasional pack of Jaffa Cakes, do yell…).

Thankfully, it's also the time of year for the stuff I'm good at: shooting pictures. As the winter weather starts to turn to spring I can finally get out of the studio and start shooting on location, and refresh my portfolio a bit. Or at least, that was the plan.

I put out a call for folks to shoot with on Instagram and Twitter (my general loathing for Instagram does not extend to not using it when it's useful, it turns out). Leona replied, and we quickly set up a test shoot. We wanted to shoot entirely on location, but in the end, thanks to the Manchester weather, that didn't work out. Leona had also wanted to shoot something in her red suit, so once we'd brought the shoot into the studio I set about trying out a couple of ideas that were in my head.

The first — at the top of the page — was to shoot the red suit on a red background with some kind of over-the-top facial expression. The second, below, was to shoot the red suit on something close to a complimentary colour so that the red really popped.

Looking at my portfolio page, there's not a lot of bright colour there. I tend towards darkness and shadow, even when I'm using coloured light. I want to expand my range a bit, so pushing myself to use bright colours is a nice change. The portrait-on-colour-with-silly-expression has the potential to be a portrait series, I think — maybe I'll shoot some more of those just to get a consistent set of looks that doesn't completely clash with what's already in my portfolio. I love that red-on-red image, but it doesn't fit with the rest of my work right now.

Creating more stuff that doesn't fit in my comfort zone is one of my goals for 2018, so this shoot is a good start.

550 days of evening.camera

Whitworth Street West, Manchester

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

It's Always Worth Doing Something That Terrifies You

Until very, very recently, I've never entered a photography competition. Well, that's not actually true: I entered, I think, one competition at the Lancaster Photographic Society some part in the last decade. But nothing national, or international, or indeed particularly outside my little bubble. Partly because failing was scary, but mostly because I was absolutely convinced that there was nothing in my output that was competition worthy.

If there's one thing that I've finally started to learn this year, it's that you've got to do the stuff that scares you. If you don't, it will continue to scare you, and you'll never know if you could have done it. Fear will have won, and all you'll be able to do in the future is make some excuse about not giving it a shot — "I didn't have anything that was a good fit for the competition," for example, which is just code for "well, I was too scared to try." If you're really honest with yourself and the people with whom you're talking.

So this year, I decided to throw my cap over the wall this year. And because I'm a lunatic and I don't like to do things by halves, I decided that the competition to enter would be the British Journal of Photography's International Photography Award.

Yes, I am that mad. I've got no illusions that I'm actually going to win anything. After all, I'm just a guy submitting some work. Maybe next year I'll do something more considered. Photo competitions like the IPA are about getting your work in front of the judges, and about making sure that people know you're alive. Other than that, it's pointless caring about winning — there are so many great photographers out there and so many stunning images.

I entered two sets of photographs this year: one of character studies — partly drawn from my Fifteen Minutes Portraits project, partly from stuff I'd shot on other commissions — and one of evening.camera images. Because after 400+ images in that project, why the hell not? 

Here they are for your enjoyment: hope you like looking at them as much as I liked making them.