An urban apocolypse

Sometimes I swear my photography has a will of its own. I picked up my camera with the explicit intention of going out to take a bunch of colourful urban photos. Halfway through editing my pictures decided otherwise.

Colour became monochrome, darkness crept into my work and the sky went from vivid blues to dark and ominous greys. The world and the language of my photos had suddenly changed and instead of riotous colour. I was now looking at a world nearing its end.

It was changed in short order to a very urban apocolypse.

Life amongst the dead

Life and death are innately connected to each other, as one thing breaks down new things thrive in their stead. No where is this clearer then in a graveyard, filled as it is with plants and trees bursting into life. Multitudes of birds and a diverse array of animal life.

Its comforting to know that even as our lives pass we can be buried to provide life and nutrients to such beautiful and diverse life and that our loved ones will place us to rest amoungst such peaceful beauty.


I set out with my camera to explore this recently, to capture the beauty that remain when our lives have past. To prove that in the places where our remains are placed we will still find life amongst the dead.

Broken glass and falling stars

 After a warm month of May I decided to go out and about taking pictures of what I could find outdoors. But despite the beauty of the natural world around me what I ended up being drawn to were the puddles upon the ground around me.

They reflected the sun and clouds beautifully and tinged with oil and blown by the wind the reflections they produced unraveled and became abstract shapes and patterns upon the ground.

Broken glass and fallen stars exploded in their depths or morphed to become some strange moon filled sky. I was enraptured by the abstract beauties they produced.

And so even though I set out to capture the beauty of May I caught in puddles broken glass and falling stars.

Where refrigerators come to die

A few weeks ago I had nothing to do for a weekend afternoon, so instead of spending it inside the house I arranged to hang out with a friend. He was fascinated with decay and rust so I decided to take him to a beach that I had told him about, one where it seemed that refrigerators came to die.

The beach in question backed out onto a steel works, a power station and a rough housing estate and so the area itself was filled with rubbish, twisted bits of metal, tires, sheets of cloth and concrete. But what was ugly about it was also extremely beautiful.

The decaying beauty along with a cloudy dramatic sky gave the whole area a apocalyptic feel and made each object seem sad and strangely person like. As if they had come to that beach in order to find a place at the ends of the earth as their final resting places.

We spent the day there before climbing the nearby hill to take in the afternoon sun casting spears of light upon the city of Cardiff.

As we left we came upon some European truckers who said they wanted to show us something. At first I was a bit nervous but once we got shaking hands and chatting it turned out they had seen my camera and wanted to show me something. They had been parking trucks near the steel works overnight but when they did so they had found that the trucks had been repeatedly vandalised costing them alot of their livelihoods in petrol. These friendly people had just wanted to point this out to me in the hopes that someone would tell their story. Hopefully that way they would get someone to install a security camera where they parked. I promised them I would so the last photo of these is me fulfilling that promise.

I was glad I had come to this strange place, to the beach where refrigerators come to die.

Unnatural vectors

Recently I've really been on a drive to really push myself and my photography in new and interesting ways and directions. This week I mainly focused on me exploring unnatural and man made structures as a focus for my photographic style.

In doing so I was able to find buildings that really accentuated broken lines and strange vectors. This along with the almost sickly light that fell on the nearby trees was able to create a series of images that were by turn strange, jarring and distinctive in the extreme.

As a rule of thumb my photographs tend to create images that blur and celebrate the natural world to the point that they begin to reclaim any man man influences upon them. These works were almost in opposition to that showing the warping effect that man made structures have upon nature.

To this point I was able to create a series of unnatural vectors, ones that would pose troubling questions about our effect upon the fragile world around us.

Turner by the sea

Turner is one of my favourite artists; his eye for colour, his capturing of light, his obession with water. I look at his art and realise how much it has inspired a lot of my more abstract work. I look at his work and it speaks to me on a level deep in my soul.

I took the train down to Barry island today. The moon was nearly full and its light fell down on a distant, far out sea and in its glow the beach became luminous and beautiful. I wanted to capture that ghostly feeling, that feeling of the awe and subtle mystery found in nature that's so present in Turners work.

As I took photos I reveled in the oranges, blues, whites and yellows found in the pictures I was taking. I took pictures of the light reflected upon the sand, the moonlight reflected on the water and of the glowing multicolored neon lights of the nearby lights of the attractions there.

And as I took pictures I imagined what Turner must have felt like capturing pictures by the sea.

Creating abstract images: Is it still a photo anymore?

In the wake of the tragedy that has befallen Paris I would like to extend my well wishes and prayers to the people who live there and have been affected by this tragedy. I would also like to say that it's important to remember that the people who did this want to inspire hatred and violence in others from religious and non religious sides alike. To quote mr Lincoln "we are not enemies but friends, though passions may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection"

This week while editing my photography I was left with a condrum that I usually try to avoid; my photos looked better when the tonal levels were heavily altered in photoshop. Now this led to an interesting question that held up a mirror to my own work. If a photograph becomes too heavily altered through an effect is it still a photograph?

In our day and age it has become common place to take images and stitch one sky onto another foreground (often with some extra interesting features stitched in to enliven the picture). I've always had mixed feelings about this process, after all if you have to alter an image so completely to make it a great photo should you be spending more time improving your photographic technique? On the other hand to photoshop well requires skill, an artistic eye and serious technical expertise.

So it might be a little hypocritical to say that when I take an abstract photo, I normally justify in my head that the fact that I have captured it in camera (normally through utilising different shutter speeds), somehow stops it from feeling like cheating.

But this week when I was editing my work I really had to stop and think about the processes I was using and how that reflected on my own work. The photos I were editing were so far removed from their starting point, were they even the same images anymore?

At the end of the day I very much come down on the side of turning photography into art and while I'm having my cake and eating it by posting these pictures while writing a blog post about it I feel like anything that pushes the medium of photography is worth exploring. Are these images true photographs anymore? Maybe not, but are they art though? Most definitely and therefore worth showing to the world.

A beautiful blur

 Sometimes I forget why I do photography and need to be reminded. See its not for me about the pictures I take when I travel (although I enjoy that) or about experimenting. For me I'm most alive when taking pictures when the photo I'm taking speaks to my soul and most of the time it does that when its abstract, when the world is a beautiful blur of color and motion.

I went out tonight and I took photos for me, I twisted the camera trying to create the images I wanted. To capture the feeling that would refresh my soul and for me that's not found in static images or people protraits but in an abstract expression of how truely beautiful the world is.

When the world you capture with your camera is a beautiful, colourful blur its all you need to keep the art in your soul alive.