I posted a long time back that I wanted to compile a set of 32 (or 33) images, one from each of the London boroughs. I thought this would be a good challenge, get me out to new places and let me practice photography all at once.

I have singularly failed actively to pursue this project. I may as well have set myself a 27-photo challenge, one for each EU member state. (Are we at 27? I think we are. Maybe 17, for the Eurozone – but better hurry…) Or 192, for each UN member. I digress.

Doing something new was what I wanted to achieve, but it was the challenge of actually getting out and travelling round that led me, I think, to failure. I had no purpose other than to go and take photos of something, and that purpose didn’t really make me jump out of my chair.

When I was home for Christmas in 2009, I did manage an early morning start to catch the sunrise at Britain’s most easterly point; I tied in an existing trip with a photographic goal. I tied a visit to the Isle of Wight with the goal of taking some great photos of splendid wooden boats at sea; I went on holiday and photographed common, garden birds feeding.

Sometimes we just need that extra little helping hand to meet our photographic challenges; setting goals that tie in with other activities is one of them.

The great series of photowalks run by PhotowalkLondon (of which I count myself part) takes us all over the city; maybe, if I can make sure I’m there on the last Saturday of every month, I’ll get my 32 boroughs after all.

We’ve been on holiday in the North, and inbetween some lovely little canal walks and long cycle rides, I’ve been watching the wildlife in the garden. There’s a couple of feeders by the kitchen window, and while here we’ve seen:

• Jays
• Greenfinches
• Sparrows
• Pheasants
• Collared doves
• Blue tits
• Great tits
• Blackbirds
• A woodpecker…

This is mainly a test post to check whether some changes I’ve made to the RSS feed have worked, but while you’re at it you can see some of the ingredients for a rather large meal I cooked to celebrate (belatedly) Valentine’s Day and me getting a job.

The five courses were:

• Grilled portabello mushrooms with stilton
• Moules marinieres
• Blood orange and vodka sorbet
• Cirtus braised lamb shank
• Individual treacle tarts

You can see them all in glorious technicolour on Flickr.

I may have mentioned PhotowalkLondon once or twice before…but this time we ventured slightly outside of the city, to the calm and peaceful Virginia Water.

This is ‘The Cascade’, an artificial waterfall at the corner of the rather large artificial lake built for the pleasure of the royals, some time ago. It’s not as peaceful as once it was, as there’s now a rather busy main road running near to it, but it’s still a little calmer than central London.

You can see more of my shots from the walk in this set on Flickr, and from others around the place – a search for #PhotowalkLondon on twitter might throw up a few images.

In other news, the task of organising the next event has fallen to me (I drew the short straw in the pub after!) – you can RSVP here for a boatride down the Thames. We’ll be hopping on and off the boat at each pier to see what we can see, ending up at the O2 for a quick drink…

It’s been a while since I posted – it’s been a while since I’ve really been out with the camera. The recent snowfall in London gave me a good excuse today, so here’s my favourite from those I took today.

I’ve taken plenty of snowy shots before, so took this little blue man with me to have some fun. He ended up doing all sorts of silly things, but making a snow angel was the best.

Enjoy – and merry Christmas to you all.

I’ve written here about fireworks before, and how easy it actually is to take photos of them, so I won’t repeat myself. (Although I must admit, standing on Blackfriars Bridge, I had to check my own site on my phone to remind myself – a little bit rusty after nearly a year since Ally Pally!)

The display was fantastic. No matter how many times I go to a display on the Thames (and in my 5th year of living in London now, I’ve been to a few), I always love how the noise of the explosions bounce off the buildings either side of the river, resulting in a quite heart-pounding experience.

I particularly like the reflections in this shot, not only the reds beneath the fireworks, but the other ones: a subtle purple streak from the National Theatre, and another smudge of red from the Oxo tower. Also, unlike later shots, there’s not too much smoke. Unfortunately for us on Blackfriars Bridge, the wind was somewhat towards us, meaning later shots aren’t quite as tidy.

I’ve just about recovered from my first all-night photowalk, organised by the lovely people at London Flickr Meetups. We started off just before sunset on Saturday night, going all the way through to sunrise the next morning. It’s an annual event to coincide roughly with the shortest night, the summer solstice on 21 June.

There were about 15 of us who started off near Tower Bridge to catch the sun going down around quarter to nine, and after that we headed through London – up over London Bridge to Monument, St Paul’s, along Fleet Street and up to Covent Garden, Leicester Square (where we stopped in the early hours for some Chinese!), on through Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, catching sunrise behind the London Eye from Westminster Bridge. By that time – sunrise was scheduled for 4.42am – our group had come down to 12, but another (rival!) group joined us on the bridge instead of their original location once they realised they wouldn’t have time to get there.

Conditions weren’t perfect for either sunset or sunrise, with clouds just in the way, but I think we managed to get some decent shots regardless. (If in doubt, expose for 30 seconds and it’ll look great, was the lesson I learned on the walk!) You play the hand you’re dealt, I guess, even if it involves an ugly platform stationed in the middle of the Thames that wasn’t there when the walk organiser did his recce!

My thanks go to Adrian for organising the walk brilliantly – he’s got some brilliant shots from the night, and you can see everyone’s here. I’m already looking forward to next year!

Stop-motion test from Josh Blacker on Vimeo.

With two weeks of leave getting underway, I thought I’d spend a good part of it trying out new things with my camera. Of course, I’m still hunting elephants here and there, but since they’re getting passé now, last night was my first attempt at a short stop-motion animation.

It’s entirely rough around the edges, for which I offer no apology. I wasn’t paying too much care as a) I wanted to get it done before my girlfriend got home and b) it was a test to see how well it would work. I put it together using iMovie (again, just testing!), which was a massive pain – there seems to be no way in the latest version of iMovie to import photos that aren’t in your iPhoto library. After a few fraught attempts resulting in a locked iPhoto library, I managed to just about get it done.

The individual frames are 0.2s each; rather than go for smooth 24fps motion (which would have required about 600 more shots!), I thought a slower framerate would preserve the ‘stop/go’ quality without ruining the action, which it just about does I think.

Anyway, I’ll be shooting another later this week, taking more time and care to get it right. Let me know what you think.

I posted the other day about the Elephant Parade in London, a series of 260 small elephant statues dispersed around the capital in herds or alone, indoors and out, to raise awareness of the plight of the Asian elephant. They’re a big hit not only with the general public, who seem to enjoy either climbing on or painting on them depending on mood, but also with photographers – whenever I’ve been out to shoot them, I’ve not been alone.

I mentioned also the difficulty in taking good photos of the buggers – a quick look through the Elephant Parade London 2010 group pool shows a lot of entirely uninspiring shots. An easy excuse is that a lot of them seem to be with point-and-shoots, but then again I’ve seen some exceptional photos coming out of non-DSLR cameras, so it’s a lazy excuse at best.

Lazy is what I think describes most of these shots. There is little attempt to think about composition beyond ‘get it all in shot’. When the comments I hear making about the elephants is often to do with their ‘character’ – as if they were a little more than decorated fibreglass statues –  I wonder why all these lazy shots don’t attempt to bring out that character in their photography.

These elephants all look the same, coming from the same moulds (well, two different moulds – but still, you get my point), but they’ve been decorated to stand out. In some cases, the decoration is intricate and in others entirely subtle.

The trick is to use the statue’s unique features and focus on details, tie it in to the environment it’s in, or shoot other people interacting with it. If all else fails, change your angle.

Anyone and everyone can walk up to an elephant and take a snapshot with a point and shoot. Do something different and you’ll get a decent photograph.

I popped down to Green Park the other day to hunt for elephants. Not real ones, obviously – but some of the elephant statues in the Elephant Parade.

There are over 200 dotted across the city, and although there are maps and numbers and a guide to which ones are where – just choosing to go and hunt is quite fun.

It’s quite hard to shoot elephants that all look, aside from colours, exactly the same (I think there are two models – one walking, one sitting) in a way that isn’t that dull, but using the patterns and environment around the elephants made it a little easier. I got some good shots shooting through the trunk of one elephant at another one behind it, which I’m sure will make it onto Flickr in good time. (In fact, here’s my Elephant Parade flickr set.)

Anyway, enjoy this one for now, and get hunting!

(There’s a PhotowalkLondon that’s doing an elephant hunt next week – you can see who’s going and RSVP here.