Having two PPCs in one room isn’t particularly remarkable, especially as we draw ever closer to the much-expected May 6th general election date, but when one of them is the drummer from Blur, and the other has been described as ‘Britain’s Obama’, it becomes something a little more interesting.

This wasn’t the first time I’d come across Chuka Umunna, the Labour PPC for Streatham, and I doubt it’ll be the last, as he’s asked me several times recently to do some photography for him, but this time he had Dave Rowntree with him – who’s the Labour PPC in Westminster.

Both seem equally passionate about Labour, but Chuka comes across as – not unsurprisingly – more of a politician. Rowntree struck me as much more subdued (perhaps because he knows how hard it would be to win in his chosen constituency!), taking some time to become animated and engage with the audience as naturally as Chuka seems to.

The talk itself was interesting – taking place over lunchtime it was short, but the small lecture theatre made it something of an intimate setting. Both talked about their view of politics briefly, before spending the rest of the hour taking questions. Entertaining, informative and a britpop star. What more could you want from a Wednesday lunchtime?

Anyway, you can find more photos from the event in this Flickr set.

(The title of the post comes from the awful pun Chuka made in reply to one of Rowntree’s comments…)

I’ve not tinkered with the site for some time – I think the last time was messing about with the Flickr widget in the sidebar almost a year ago while I was meant to be revising for my finals – so I thought I’d have a little play around and produce an actual logo for socialphoto. It was pretty simple to do in Gimp, even considering my otherwise complete lack of skills. (The only thing that annoys me about Gimp is that it opens in X11.)

Of course, adding it into the header and removing the previous stuff in the header should have been completely easy. Except, of course, it ended up not being quite so simple, after a few minor CSS quibbles I had. I think it’s pretty much sorted now, although in Firefox and IE the logo has a noticeable white frame, which doesn’t appear in Safari and Chrome. Why that happens, I’m not entirely sure – it’ll get ironed out in time, I hope.

Anyway, I have a few more plans for the site to get done in the next couple of months: firstly to move it to a blog.socialphoto.co.uk subdomain (which given wordpress and all the plugins I have may not be entirely easy), and to make myself a nice little front page with bells and whistles to boot. I can’t promise it’ll be done soon, but hopefully it will be done at some point.

Even though the UCLU Modo fashion society faced quite a few setbacks this year – their traditional venue within UCL was unavailable except at reading week, when no one would be around, and alternative venues were both ridiculously expensive and available for just one night, rather than their usual two, they pulled ‘The Green Fashion Show’ off spectacularly.

The Russell Hotel was a quite brilliant venue, and (from my point of view) the lighting was much better this year. Well, I say much better – I really mean there was some improvement. There was still a massive dark spot halfway down the runway, which happened to coincide with exactly where the models had been instructed to stop and pose… Luckily, the end of the runway was pretty well lit, and my new Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 wasn’t exactly unhelpful.

Unfortunately the for-one-night-only show this year meant I couldn’t cover both backstage and the runway, although I managed a few shots of models dressing and being made-up before the show started. Nor this year – it being a Sunday, when I was editing a whole bunch of shots from Celebrating Streatham – could I get a timelapse done of the set-up: being in an external venue for just one day meant a 6am start for the crew, and probably a similar finish the next morning!

I’ll get a gallery up when I’m not quite so busy – for now, this shot should suffice to illustrate what in the end was the best Modo show I’ve seen over the past four years.

I noticed the other day a post about the ‘rule’ that you shouldn’t decapitate or amputate people in photographs. Needless to say, the post went on to say that actually, doing just that could be perfectly acceptable. Not much of a rule, is it? Don’t get me started on the ‘rule of thirds’ – another one you can choose to break, for aesthetic effect.

Of course, you should never under- or over-expose your shots, unless it looks good.

And always – always! – focus on the eyes in a portrait…

The thing is, there’s no such things as rules when we’re talking about photography (or indeed any other creative pursuit – poetry, painting or piano playing). There’s some guidelines to make casual shots at least half-decent, like the ‘don’t decapitate’ rule, or the rule of thirds. Following these will give you, I’m sure, perfectly acceptable shots. But it doesn’t mean that anything else won’t be just as decent. You might have to practice a little more to get rule-breaking shots that work, but then how are you going to develop your own style unless you do what you think looks good, and not what someone has told you is a rule?

All these ‘rules’ are nothing more than tips, starting points and suggestions. Calling them rules gives them, in my opinion, too much weight, and they’ll be understood by some to be actual rules.

The only caveat I would make, however, is this: whether you choose to follow ‘rules’ or follow your gut feeling when it comes to taking a shot (and editing/developing it, of course), do what you’re doing for a reason. Don’t bounce the flash because someone told you, but because you want that quality of light. Don’t underexpose because you don’t understand how to use your camera properly, but because you want to. That’s all I ask: be deliberate.

The only rule there should be in photography is that HDR is rubbish…

Image: I figured since this post was a reflection on photography itself, we could do with a tree reflected in water. Bit lame, but there you go…!

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I hadn’t quite realised just how magical light can be at certain times of the day. I’ve always heard advice that ‘the best time to shoot’ is around sunrise and sunset, but never really realised just how good they could be until yesterday.

I’ve shot sunrise before, but that was sunrise itself, rather than anything else. And, having spent the last three years as a student, by which I mean ‘quite unlikely to be up at such an hour as to stand a reasonable chance of catching sunrise, unless he’s still on the way home from the night before’, sunrise hasn’t been the easiest of things to catch – and when it’s time for sunset, well, quite frankly drinking has been more of a pressing concern!

However, seeing the light catch on my sister’s face through the trees as we walked down a wooded path, I made her stop and walk back a few steps  (and then forward a couple, and then back one, and then forward half a step!) to get the perfect spot.

Of course, you can fiddle around with white balances and saturation and all that jazz – and just a little tweaking may have happened here – but you can’t beat the natural quality of the light, the long shadows, and of course the smug feeling that you’ve not cheated!

Boxing Day in my house is the day of the traditional family walk – we take the dogs, anyone who has been foolish enough to join us for the holidays, and head to the beach.

Being the middle of winter, sunset is very early, and luckily this year we had a clear blue sky, allowing the beautiful light of sunset to flood the scene. (My only complaint is that being on the east coast of the UK, once you descend the cliffs to the beach below, you’re stuck mostly in shadow, except at the very edge of the sea!) I must admit, until yesterday, I hadn’t quite realised just how amazing this light is -

This shot was taken quite late in the walk, once we’d come back up the cliff and the sun was almost lost, just hitting the tops of these trees.

This was  a shot I took of our tree last year (during decoration  - it wasn’t actually that bare, honest!), but I felt it illustrated nicely the festive message I wanted to convey. So, merry Christmas to you all – my apologies for not posting terribly often any more, it’s on my New Year’s resolution list!

(It’s also a shot from last year because I broke my 50mm f/1.8 back in July when I was demob happy after finding out my degree result! Buying a new one hasn’t been the top of my priority list – a brand spanking new 27″ iMac – but it’s just the kind of lens that’s perfect for low-light Christmas tree shots. Plenty of bokeh!)

Movember is a fantastic month. I get to grow a moustache, and people get to donate money to the Prostate Cancer Charity for the privilege of laughing at my feeble facial hair. I think it’s a fair deal, to be honest.

My donation page, for those interested, is here.

Last night I went up to Alexandra Palace in north London for one of the city’s best displays. Because the Palace is on top of such a big hill, you get fantastic views across the city, and every now and then there’s a little burst of fireworks in the panorama in front of you, even before the main display starts. We managed to watch most of a display in Greenwich while walking back down, which puts the view into perspective.

It was a bit crowded – something like 50,000 people – and there was a bit of a mad rush after getting food and so on to get to a half decent spot, on a fairly steep slope. Luckily, with my brand spanking new Velbon Sherpa 250 tripod, this wasn’t much of an issue. I took plenty of photos during displays last year, so I wasn’t paying much attention to the camera this year, except to have a little experiment with zooming in and out during a shot at one point – you can see the half-decent result here.

Taking photos of fireworks is pretty simple, really – so long as you do have a tripod. The basics are:

• Manual settings!
• Low ISO for best colour reproduction and least noise
• Quite narrow aperture for depth of field – I was using f/11 most of the night – so it doesn’t really matter if your focusing is off.
• Long exposures. A lot of my shots were on 2.5″, although at times I went up to 15″. Try out various combinations for different effects, and find your own personal style.

I’m off to the Lord Mayor’s Fireworks on the Thames again next weekend, so expect more soon!

The colours of Autumn are beautiful, even if not all of us are lucky enough to live in New England (see this picture from Maine, for instance). Luckily for me, as I’ve mentioned before, London has massive open spaces. I was able the other day to head up the BT Tower and the view from 34 floors in the sky over London really does show just how massive our parks are.

This shot, then, was taken at the weekend in Regent’s Park, one of my favourite haunts. The park’s trees are slowly turning into cold skeletons for the winter, and some of them are really quite stunning, like this one that’s green-orange-red. I’ve bumped the saturation of these colours up slightly, just to bring them out a bit more as the image was quite flat in its raw state, but it still remains true to reality.

Expect more autumnal scenes in the near future.