A couple of weeks ago I went up to Scotland for a short retreat with some colleagues, staying in a cottage near Gatehouse of Fleet.

It was great to get out of the city for a while, especially to somewhere so remote. For the first few days I was still getting used to the lack of unnatural sound and light, and by the time I’d settled in to the simple life, we were back in London. The weather wasn’t amazing – it was Scotland, after all – but it didn’t rain on us too much, and I managed to lug the camera up several hills in thick fog without causing any (lasting!) damage. I must, however, find a better solution to carrying my tripod than the case it came in.

This view is from a hill overlooking Loch Whineyeon, which we walked up to a couple of times. I had a sneaking suspicion that the sun would rise on the left of this shot, in the small dip, but never managed to get up early enough to get there for it. (I’m sure the beers every night didn’t help!) This is definitely a place to go back to – I really want that sunrise shot!

The full set on Flickr can be found here – it will be updated every day for a while.

Given recent developments following the election, I figured it was about time I posted this image that I took on Sunday 2nd May, less than a week before Britain went to the polls. I’d been invited down to take some shots for Chuka Umunna, Labour’s (eventually successful) PPC for Streatham, for what was a bit of a surprise visit – I had my suspicions, but they weren’t confirmed until I arrived at the New Testament Church of God in Brixton  and saw all the live transmission vans outside.

While I don’t want this blog to be about anything more than my photography (I have other places to discuss my opinions on other matters), I will say this: the Prime Minister, as he was then, gave a thoroughly impassioned speech about his core values. Referencing the parable of the Good Samaritan and other biblical stories, he made the case for not passing by on the other side when we should be doing all we can to help others less fortunate than ourselves in this world. The next day he gave his speech to Citizens UK, and it was that Gordon Brown that I saw in Brixton.

Plus, it was quite fun to be in there with the couple of press photographers, being ushered to the front by aides and being let into the inner circle of what’s going on. That, and hearing people afterwards making sure they’d got the radio mic off him as he left for the car…

(On a technical note, I shot this event at ISO 3200, and the shots look like they’re at about 200. I haven’t even applied noise reduction in Lightroom. The 5D mkII still amazes me, even after a two months now.)

After a long week spent in Scotland with (mostly) glorious weather – more on which in a blog post soon – I came back to the downpour in London with over 1,000 frames to sort through and edit. What more could I want than to take even more photos of yet another event?

Thank goodness this one had my girlfriend in it…

Harmony on Heels are an all-female choir based in North London who sing quite fantastically; next time you get a chance, go and see them! I’ve got a little bit of video from the 5D mark II as well, which I’ll post soon.

I’ve not been abroad properly for a holiday for a long time – when I went to Tallinn two years ago and saw this amazing sunset, it was for a debating competition! – but when I got the chance to spend a week with family in Duras, I couldn’t turn it down.

We travelled around quite a bit, visiting Bordeaux, the immensely impressive Dune du Pilat, and various small towns along the way. The mirror-like water feature on the riverfront in Bordeaux gave some stunning shots, the largest dune in Europe was difficult to shoot in a way that really showed just how big it is (I’m still not happy with this shot), and the markets offered plenty of cheese, meat and veg, although a little later in the year would probably be more colourful.

This being the first big excursion with the 5D Mark II, I wanted to make as good use of it as possible. This shot of the chateaux in Duras is at 17mm, and you can really tell on a full-frame sensor, where my 17-40mm f/4L is coming into its own.

Being used to the grey misery of London, I did find it quite difficult shooting in the bright sunshine of southern France – often at f/8 or f/16, the glare on the LCD screen often made me unsure whether I was getting a good exposure or not, since the bright sunshine/dark shadows made me wonder if contrast was going to be an issue that even Lightroom couldn’t handle.

You can find more shots from the holiday here on Flickr.

Payday came around again (hurrah!), but this time I decided to make my final great-big-purchase of this 12-month job. It’s my first one since graduating (technically still a student, actually), and while I have the benefits of an interest-free overdraft to dip into when I need to, I figured I could probably treat myself.

And boy, did I treat myself.

It’s been out for long enough now that I don’t need to explain what a great camera the 5D Mark II is. One thing I will say is that I find the camera tends to underexpose in its metering, which is a bit annoying but not a massive problem. (I’d rather bring up the exposure in post rather than trying to cope with loads of blown-out highlights.) Of course, that could be a ‘problem’ with either the camera’s LCD (which automatically adjusts its brightness level dependent on ambient light), or my (forgive me – uncalibrated!) iMac display.

Even more luckily for me, this month I’m heading to both France and Scotland for holidays, so I’ll have plenty of time to put it through its paces.

Since the usual guy was stuck doing the lighting (very well, I might add – if a little high-contrast for my taste!), I was asked to step in and shoot the annual UCOpera during its dress rehearsal last weekend.

Aside from enjoying myself by being able to listen to an opera while I worked, the production itself was fun to shoot. Although being a dress rehearsal there were still a couple of lighting issues (in the wrong place, not bright enough and so on!), there were quite a few scenes involving characters in one part of the stage being watched by characters in another – and with a 70-200mm f/2.8, this gives you a good opportunity to play around with what’s in focus and what’s not. Although this shot here has the main action in focus, I took a couple where this was reversed,  which worked well.

You can see more in this Flickr set – there’s not many, but I think they offer a good selection of what was on offer.

Yes, the best camera is the one most readily available (trying to avoid use of the trademarked phrase!), but it’s no use if it’s not easy to use, pleasing to use and produces decent results.

I’ve seen a lot of pics recently from @Documentally on twitter, and they all have something of a really interesting feel to them compared to the bog-standard shots I get from my iPhone, and of course it turns out he’s using a funky app to produce them. Not one with ‘recipes’ and an ‘ecosystem’ behind it designed to self-promote an already highly-promoted professional photographer, but an app designed simply to simulate an old bit of kit.

Hipstamatic is awesome. It’s not quite as fast on my iPhone 3G as the demo suggests, but it’s still fun to use and produces some cool results, like this shot of a 393 bus opposite Sainsbury’s in Camden. It’s not a technically brilliant shot – there’s camera shake, for a start – but it looks damned fine to me. And that’s all that matters.

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.

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…!