Beyond the obvious

Flamenco is full of passion and fire. When these dancers tap out there vibrant rhythms the floor shakes. As you watch your heart beats faster, your temperature rises and energy courses through your veins. The dancers work incredibly hard. You'll see that in the images. We were fortunate enough to photograph an advanced dance class at one of the world's best Flamenco schools. Please take a moment to view the selected images from my photo-story . When the image opens you can click the i to see the accompanying text. Here are most of the same images on Flickr too. For those interested in the technical side, I used one flash, bounced on the white walls and 'dragged' the shutter to achieve a balance with the ambient light (which was mainly terrible overhead florescent). It was a real challenge. For the most part I used a 50mm lens. The wider shots were done with the 17-40mm on my Canon 5D. I did not use burst mode. It's too random and you miss vital moments - far...

Therese in front of her souvenier shop in Bruges. She has been there for almost 50 years. Nothing much changed in her shop in all that time. This year she is retiring. I've been thinking about writing this blog for quite some time now. It's not easy. I could take a critical line like I did in my blog post about the photographs I hate looking at (and why) but instead I decided on a more positive approach, so this post is in praise of all those photographers who respect and celebrate the relationship photography has with reality, truth and photographic 'seeing'. Arguably the real value and power of photography is in showing the world as we actually see it. Photojournalism has a strict code of ethics forbidding altering an image substantially. This has to be adhered to because if it were not then a photojournalist's images would be worthless. Likewise individuals taking family snapshots, or local photographers recording daily life as we see it make images that b...

Seaside, Whitby, UK. An invitation to discover the subtle details from the crack in the paving to the pink crocs. Click on the image to see a larger version. Seaside conversation - interrupted, Whitby, UK. Click on the image to see a larger version. Most photographs are viewed on screens at low resolution and quite small pixel sizes. Is this affecting the way we look at photographs in general and in particular our ability to appreciate the finer nuances in images? The way we experience images in different media affects our perception. When viewing photographs on the internet we click through very quickly to the next image. Pick up a large beautifully produced photo book and you are likely to spend a lot more time looking at each image. High resolution prints entice the viewer to look at the detail and explore an image. Large photographs hung on a gallery wall invite the viewer to spend even more time discovering every aspect of the image. Nothing beats a beautifully produced original ...

A man lies collapsed in the street, attended by a policeman who put him in the recovery position and stood by him waiting for the paramedics. Click on the images to see a larger version. This week I came across the event above and took two different images. The first is a clear no frills photo journalistic image. The second image uses photographic language and aesthetics to create an emotion. A friend said of the second image, "I would not qualify it as photo-journalistic as it is too artsy (in the right way) to be published in a newspaper. But man, it does have a strong impact!" I found that interesting. Thinking of the beautifully lit images that W. Eugene Smith made. Would they be considered too artsy for a newspaper these days. Which brings me to the recent debate about the beautifully lit image of the Thai prostitute discussed in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin's hotly debated article "Unconcerned but not indifferent" , which goes behind the scenes at ...

This bit of industrial design/architecture resides in the far corner of a supermarket parking lot in Belgium. At first it looks like and incredibly straightforward image but the more you look the more you discover. Click on the image to see the larger version. It never ceases to amaze me how diverse audiences respond to different images. Some images have broad appeal while others have a much smaller appeal but are liked with a passion. A word of caution to my colleagues out there. Popularity is not a measure of artistic value. If it were then most of the modern art museums would have to throw their exhibits in a skip. So what is an appropriate measure of artistic value. That's a tough question. I don't know the answer but what I do know is that if a few people respond passionately to an image I've made, it makes me happy. Cheers, Paul