The Digital Economy Bill...

Just a quick plea to any photographers out their reading this, if you've had your head in the sand you might not have seen all the recent pant-crapping by photographers about the proposed Digital Economy Bill (orphan works) and the proposed ICO code that will make street photography pretty difficult if not impossible due to privacy laws. Please read the following if you get a chance - if certain aspects of these bills become law we could have a very difficult future ahead of us making a living from photography.

http://copyrightaction.com/forum/uk-gov-nationalises-orphans-and-bans-non-consensual-photography-in-public

What annoys me more than anything is the hypocritical nature of so much of it especially after my run in the with a security guard for photographing on private property recently - a plaza owned by some corporation, and the deal breaker being my use of a tripod. I was perfectly fine to be filmed by their CCTV but to take a picture was deemed hostile reconnaissance (see the article I wrote about it on my blog here).

Anyway please read it has I said, complaisance will only be regretted if it goes through into law.

Mum and Dad - Holga

Two shots from my Holga - shot on Fujifilm Neopan 400. The picture on the right was a double exposure.

Recent Tearsheets: Books Quarterly

Polaroid Studio Express

Another toy I recently got my hands on is the Polaroid Studio Express (model 485b) this shoots square format passport photos and after a little bit of fiddling I was able make it take Fuji FP-100B instant film - on which it will produce four images. Depending on the sequence you take the lens caps off you can have one image repeated four times or indeed four separate images and everything in between. The camera really needs to be linked to a flash via is PC jack or hotshoe so that you can create enough light for the f/8 aperture on the camera. My favourite feature is the in-built tape measure on the front of the lens.

Way Out

Recent Corporate Portraits

Some recent corporate portraits. Peter Winslow of BGL (top) and Julian Edwards of the Financial Service Authority (FSA).

Polaroid SX70 - The French Alps

Shot on a Polaroid SX70 and 'expired' film (... which is pretty much any film remaining at the moment)

Images from the Polaroid EE-100

Shot on a Polaroid EE-100 with Fuji FP-100C colour film

The last of the Christmas lights...

look closer...

Holga-tastic!

The Purbeck hills, Dorset

Just before Christmas I picked up a cheap Holga off ebay. I think recently, for some reason or another, whilst everyone has been getting excited about new technological developments such as DSLRs involvement in moving image, I've kind of backtracked and been getting more interested in film cameras and increasingly different types of polaroid and instant cameras (that's for another post). Nowadays with it increasingly easy to get technically perfect images there's something wonderful about a little plastic camera that refuses to be tamed. There's also something nice about the low tech side of it - its light, cheap, and looks like a toy which means snapping with it is, in my opinion, a guilty pleasure. Expect a few more random snaps to pop up in the next few months, I'm still getting my head round the scanning side of things (my other new toy being the Epson v600).