Crikey, what a week! What with the wedding last weekend, my trip to London this week, and the family holiday which starts tomorrow, its all been a bit manic!
The trip to London revolved around a visit to the Tate Modern to see the "Street & Studio" Exhibition. The trip was worth it for this alone – a tremendous show featuring work from artists ranging from Charles Negres to Philip-Lorca diCorcia and from Brassai to James van der Zee. While I do like a lot of studio work, my heart is really with the street stuff, and trust me there is some fantastic work on show. I was especially taken with Cindy Sherman’s Bus Riders series from the 70′s in which she photographs herself in a series of portraits recalled from characters she has seen on buses. She makes no attempt to hide that these are staged studio shots, as she has left the shutter release cable evident in each image. Very imaginative work indeed. I didn’t buy the accompanying book as I couldn’t be fagged carrying it around all afternoon with me, but as soon as I return from my hols, its going straight into my cart.
Whilst in London, I took the opportunity to get as much street and urban landscape photography in as possible – which basically consisted of two 12 hour days! Despite a run in with security and the press office on Canary Wharf (they wanted £200/hour so as I could just get my camera out of its bag), spending the "golden hour" on Wednesday morning getting lost on the tube, getting seriously blistered feet and sunburnt, I had a whale of a time! I filled 2 and a bit 8GB memory cards and I’ve only just got round to going through them (I’ve really gotta get my hit rate up – plan to use film again for my next project so as to discipline myself a bit more). I’d post more details of my trip, but I’m quite literally nodding off as I type. Maybe tomorrow if I get the time…
I’ve been using a trial of Lightroom 2 to process the London and wedding shots, to see if I can really justify the $99 upgrade fee (still quite pissed at this!), and I’m really impressed. The dual monitor functionality, I find is marvelous and makes life a great deal easier. I’m also seriously digging the Adjustment Brush which also improves processing time. It has crashed once on 2 separate XP machines, and there also appear to be some difficulties launching into Photoshop, but its a thumbs up so far.
Slightly off topic, del.icio.us have relaunched a new and improved service – see delicious.com/fabfilippini
And to finish off the week a few links for you:-
1) Came across this site in Prospect Magazine – guerillaphotography.co.uk. I quite like the concept of this kinda thing, though don’t know if I would have the balls to venture into some of the places myself.
2) This week in photography – twipphoto.com – a great podcast and great site.
3) And finally, the Aperture Nature Photography workshops have just been announced, but wait for it, they’re invite only…"This is a year-long adventure and TWIP audience members will have the opportunity to enter a contest that might win them more than $2500 worth of prizes and an all-expenses paid trip to one of these parks." Read more here.
Can’t type any more, zzzzzzzzzz……..
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