Liverpool ONE Wheel

The Liverpool skyline has been changed dramatically with the addition of a gigantic carousel towering over the Liverpool ONE shopping centre. This wheel not only looks stunning when viewed from the ground but offers amazing views of the city in every direction.

My wife & I went for a ride last night & seeing Liverpool lit up, especially with all the Christmas decorations adding a festive edge, was something really special. Unfortunately, it’s only a temporary attraction, so it’s well worth a visit if you get the chance.

Wirral TweetUp

Having already answered the question “What the hell is a Twestival?”, I decided to find out what exactly a TweetUp is all about. Last night was the inaugural Wirral TweetUp held at Cromwells restaurant in Irby & I managed to get on the guest list along with my good lady wife.

My initial findings are that a TweetUp is all about good food & excellent company in some very pleasant surroundings. Not to mention chocolate cake that is well worth selling your first born child into a life of hard labour for. It was also great to finally meet another member of the FAB Collective, Mark McGowan, whose photographs adorn the walls of the restaurant.

The camera stayed firmly in the bag all night long but there were plenty of other togs capturing the evening as it unfolded. In fact, some of the images, taken as the evening descended into sexual debauchery, are particularly interesting. A massive thank you to Kay, Kate & the rest of the staff for putting on such a fantastic evening & raising over £250 for Clatterbridge cancer research charity. Look forward to the next one.

Santa Dash

Everybody loves Christmas right? & what iconic image better symbolizes this festive period than jolly old Saint Nic, with his bright red suit, fluffy white beard & big round belly? How about 7,000 of them?

That was the scene down on Liverpool’s Pier Head at 0930 this morning as a herd of Father Christmases gathered, ready to take part in a 5K charity run around the city streets. This is an annual event that’s growing in popularity by the year & the view of thousands of Santas stretching as far as the eye could see, all raising money for a good cause, was truly impressive. Even some local celebrities took part, like none other than Big Brother’s first ever winner Craig Phillips.

Obviously, the whole event was a magnet for Liverpool’s photographers & other sets of images can be seen on the Flickr photostreams of Dave, Sam & Pete. Even the fact that the snow was falling out of the sky pre-melted couldn’t dampen the festive spirit of the morning.

Family Photos

After a discussion about the importance of capturing images of those close to us in order to preserve memories whilst we had the opportunity, a photographer friend of mine directed me to the website Days With My Father. This photo diary details a person’s last few years with their elderly father & is truly one of the most emotional & moving things I have ever seen.

It just goes to show that whatever time we have with the people we love is finite. Every moment needs to be treasured & every effort made to capture the memories because one day you won’t have the chance to. This is even more important to me as a first time father. Looking through my Lightroom catalogue the other day, it really surprised me to see how much my daughter, Isobel, had changed over the course of a year. You almost don’t appreciate it on a day-by-day basis.

New Years resolution = take more photos of the family.

Disposable Shoppers

When I was asked to join the FAB Collective, one of the first photography projects that was discussed was the idea of a disposable camera photo walk. The plan was simple. We would leave our collection of Nikon, Canon, etc, DSLRs at home, along with their wide variety of accompanying lenses, & head out onto the streets of Liverpool armed with nothing more than a £1 disposable camera & a winning smile. There were no rules as such, apart from a 2 hour time limit & 1 mile radius from our starting point, the Ship & Mitre pub.

Many people kept to a theme, others just took shoots of things that looked interesting. My original plan was to approach random strangers in the street & ask them to pose for a photo with me in it, camera held at arms length, a la the hundreds of thousands of images posted on Facebook each day. But when it came to the crunch I bottled it. I didn’t think that people would be too keen when approached by a 6 foot unshaven bloke brandishing a cheap camera with cartoons of badgers printed on it. Fortunately, Sam had far more courage than I, although admittedly I don’t look as pretty in make up, sparkly pink T-Shirt & feather boa.

Instead, I tried to take advantage of the fact that the little disposable camera was far more discreet than my usual Nikon weapon of choice & capture some candid street portraits. Scanning the crowd of shoppers in Liverpool town centre, I would try to pick out the most interesting characters, plot their course, stand in a position to intercept & at the last moment…..snap!!! A lot of people just hurried on by, some people didn’t even notice & the girls with rollers in their hair threatened to track me down & kill me whilst inserting said camera into a very private part of my anatomy.

All-in-all a very enjoyable day of photography fun & the rest of the images can be viewed here.

Ride With The Homies

The first time I went skiing was about 6 years ago &, whilst I haven’t been able to fit in a winter break every season, we’re fortunate up here in the North West to have the Chill Factore on our doorstep. Located next to the Trafford Centre, the massive sloping structure is one of the largest indoor snow domes in the country. Great for keeping your skills sharp when you’re not in Chamonix.

Friday night is freestyle night, when they set up one half of the slope as as miniature snow park, with kickers, rails, boxes & all other manner of things for me to avoid whilst snowboarders half my age hurl themselves over these obstacles in an attempt to break their necks.

This Friday night saw a group of professional snowboarders, calling themselves the Homies, put on a demonstration of their skills before premièring their new film. The whole event was sponsored by Monster energy drink &, whilst there was a professional photographer & film crew doing their thing, they graciously let me take some shots of the borders & skiers pulling some sick moves.

Blackpool

Sunday afternoon saw a few members of the FAB Collective, Pete, Sam, Jane, Pedro & moi, descend upon the sunny quaint seaside town of Blackpool for a nice photo walk. Did I say sunny? Sorry, I meant howling winds & driving rain the likes of which resembled a Perfect Storm. & did I say quaint? What I meant was the tackiest, most culturally deficit place on the face of the earth. But that was partly the reason why we were there.

What once was a pleasant holiday destination for people looking to get some sun, sea & sand without the expense of travelling abroad, is now a combination of boarded up shop fronts, vulgar comedians, strip clubs, abandoned piers & empty fairground rides. All-in-all an ideal venue for a bit of photography.

To give the place it’s due, once the weather began to break, the promenade, which is currently in the process of being redeveloped, was transformed by an amazing light. There was also some great little cafes hidden away, which served amazing combinations of hot chocolate & were ideal places to try & warm our numb fingers. The people I met were also incredibly friendly, although that may have been because they were trying to get me to either buy a necklace made of shells or play their obviously rigged game to win an oversized cuddly toy.

We didn’t hang around for too long after the sun went down due to a combination of freezing temperatures & a distinct lack of any tripods. The seafront does come alive at night though, with the illuminations creating a totally different atmosphere to the place. Still haven’t made it to the top of the tower yet but I’m heading back soon to go to Them Crooked Vultures gig at the Empress Ballroom. Very rock’n'roll.

Image Theft

When I first developed an interest in photography just over a year ago, I used to upload the resulting full resolution images directly onto my Flickr photostream. At the time I didn’t really have a grasp of what was meant by the terms copyright, licensing or creative commons. If someone wanted to appreciate an image I’d posted & leave a comment, that was good enough for me.

After a few months, I put up some images taken on a hike in the Peak District & was contacted by someone enquiring as to how much it would cost to use the photos for commercial purposes. Not having a clue how to proceed, I turned to my fellow Flickr buddies for advice & contacted the person in question to try & establish how the images would be used & in how many places they would be reproduced so that I could provide them with a fair quote. Needless to say, I didn’t hear back from them & they removed their comments from the images & their Flickr account was deleted. Now, this could be because they were no longer interested in using my images, & I wouldn’t blame them if that was the case, or it could be because as soon as real money was mentioned they decided to help themselves to the full size digital images from my Flickr account.

From then on, resizing my images before uploading to the web became part of my work flow. By making the image smaller I hoped to retain enough quality so that people could appreciate the image online but low enough resolution to prove useless to anyone who wanted to reproduce it without my permission. At the time I discounted using a watermark or any other text overlay because I didn’t want anything to distract from the photo, plus I’ve seen some horrendous attempts of watermarking done badly.

Unfortunately, a couple of day ago I learnt of a friend who had one of their images stolen from their Flickr account & reproduced for commercial gain without permission. To make matters worse, he only came across the offending image completely by accident & the organisation carrying out the deed was a local media design company that really should know better. This problem is obviously rife & can effect anyone who innocently shares their images online with others. To that end, I’ve decided to bake in a text box to the images I post to the web &, if anything, it may even drive some traffic to my blog.

As I use Lightroom 2 to process my digital images, it appears that a plugin called Mogrify is the best solution to create watermarks, text overlays, frames, borders & many other cool things during export. PC users will also need to download & install ImageMagick as well to make the whole package work. I’ve posted an example of the text overlay I’m proposing to add to my images at the top of this post & any comments on whether you like it or how it could be improved would be much appreciated. Finally, for those who may be concerned that your images are being used elsewhere on the web without your knowledge, TinEye is a reverse image search engine that may be able to help you find them.

M & H Academy Soccer Tournament

Today was a rather special day for me personally, it was the first time I had been asked to use my camera for a client & get paid for my photography. The job was passed on to me by a mate to photograph a youth soccer tournament held at the 5-a-side soccer dome on the Trafford Park, capturing some action shots & the trophy award ceremony at the end.

I wouldn’t say I was nervous but the conditions were challenging to say the least. The lighting was awful & a very quick shutter speed was required to freeze the motion & stop everything resulting in a complete blur. The images looked horrendously dark on the LCD but fortunately it’s amazing the detail you can wring out of a RAW file in post-processing. Don’t worry, the images on display here aren’t representative of the final versions.

The kids were great, all of them asking where the photos were going to be posted & mugging it up for the camera. Just finished the mammoth editing task because I took shots of everything just in case I missed an important moment. Next time I’ll have to be more selective in what I try to capture. Think I’ve just about whittled them down now & I’ll be sending them over to the client via Dropbox, along with my first ever photography related invoice.

Heavenly View

The Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool is an amazing & enormous piece of architecture that dominates the city’s skyline & it can be seen at numerous vantage points from miles around. It almost goes without saying that the cathedral tower offers the best views of the city from its roof & over the past few weeks the opening hours for visitors have been extended well into the evening every Thursday night.

I finally managed to get up there this week with John & Will, who also kindly lent me his spare tripod. After a torrential downpour we braved the weather & took the two lifts & narrow twisting staircase required to reach the top. Then the clouds cleared, a rainbow came out on the horizon & the sun appeared briefly for a stunning finale to the day. Seeing the sun go down & the lights of the city come up was absolutely fantastic & I would have stayed there all night if I could. Although, if I was to do that, a hat & gloves would be strongly recommended.

Will has got some brilliant time lapse videos taken on previous visits to the tower roof, which go some way to portraying what the experience is actually like. I’ll also be posting some more images, taken with my new Tokina 12-24mm f/4 wide angle lens. to my Flickr photostream in due course.