[You can find part one here if you missed it]
Sometimes you just get lucky.
And sometimes you spot some lighting that could come straight from Caravaggio’s studio, and make the most of it.
A sight you don’t see all that often, snuffling through the bushes at dusk on the south coast. I tiptoed as close as I could, with virtually no light available for focusing.
The next three are all about Hot Summer 2018 – Morris Dancers invaded my street, I wandered into a French square a few minutes after the World Cup Final, and one of my small chaps found a doggy friend in an ice-cold mountain stream.
And I actually got to PuntCon for once! Thanks to Bill Thompson for this, and so much more, as ever. (That whirly effect in the background is down to the steampunk Petzval lens – pretty much the perfect piece of kit to take to this gathering.)
Lots of dogs this year – working with Battersea, and dogs muddy, clean, and above all, safe.
Nice when an event for event people goes well – September’s venues showcase for The Collection had some moments of sheer delight.
A maestro at work – again, corporate events don’t have to be dull, and splashing some music around is highly recommended.
Probably the highest-pressure shot of 2018 – the gathering of new members of The Academy, at a big Oscars London party. Tricky to prepare the lighting in an art gallery (lots of restrictions on what you can use and where you can put it) but it all came together beautifully…
…and a bit of stardust liberally sprinkled around the party itself.
Talking of liberal sprinkling, I went for a big run in October and stumbled across a massive pile of abandoned strawberries. Weird things have been happening.
Back to landscapes, and I added Nikon’s latest bridge camera to my bag, just for its ability to do extraordinary feats at super-telephoto lengths that not many other cameras can get close to. It means that cityscapes can look radically different – this is the City taken from Epsom Downs, about 15 miles away. I’ll be doing a lot more experimenting with this in 2019.
The legendary Peter Gabriel, joining a host of technology and business leaders for dinner in November.
Lovely invitation from Historic Royal Palaces in the same month to shoot the moving installation in the Tower of London’s moat. And as chance would have it, bumping into the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs.
Always a joy to work with, “web developer” Sir Tim Berners-Lee kept everyone entertained on stage, and enthralled off it.
And finally some peace in the Alps, with a week of skiing and about ten minutes of photography over Christmas (a proportion that seemed eminently sensible after 200+ shoots for the year). The Giffre Valley, just after sunset, filling up with mist. Here’s to hoping some of the fog clears next year, for all of us.
