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.

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.

Dancing in colour

I felt the need to escape this weekend, to run away from life and have an adventure so I followed that urge and booked my bus ticket to London. There is so many touristy things to see and do in London that it can be easy to become blinded to some of the exciting smaller moments that happen in the city everyday.

After wandering through the city I returned to my hotel just as the sun was setting. It was coming home that I stumbled across a number of teenagers performing bike tricks in an alcove next the thames river. I was fascinated by the colour, energy and joy that these people found as they leapt through the air on their bikes.

As I followed them with my camera I tried to capture them flying through the air. Dancing in the light, shooting past coloured walls, landing tricks and occasionally landing flat on their arses. It was like they were dancing in colour and I was there to capture every glorious moment of it.

A metal and plastic sky

A year or so ago I discovered the joy of finding reflections in unorthodox surfaces; puddles, rivers, concrete and windows. All these I poured over looking at new angles from which to take photos at.

One day I was at a bus stop with my camera and when I looked up I was inspired for above me was a second sky, one of metal and plastic. I always meant to return to explore more of the strange sky but I never did, until now.

Its been raining over Cardiff today, so I was taking shelter under a bus stop with my camera when I looked up. Immediately I knew what my latest blog post would be about. I explored a number of stops in my area as the light over head changed from a grey grizzled sky, to a deep bruised colour before finally setting into night.

It was a new world, a colourful and bright on that shimmered and shivered with all the colours and reflections of a metal and plastic sky.

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.

Urban brushstrokes

After spending the last few weeks focusing on nature I decided that I wanted to push myself in a different direction. The urban world isn't one I explore often with my photography but it was very much one that I decided to explore this week.

I wanted to apply my more impressionist technique to the streets of Cardiff and with the recent wet weather the streets had become glowing canvases on which to paint with light.

The colours, the lights, the people wandering its streets became the perfect subjects from which to create an impression of the city at night. From these elements I sought to capture the neon soaked painting of passing cars. The feeling of strangers passing through the night and the ghostly outlines of the houses that lined the way.

It was through these that I sought to create something different. To build up a picture of the night, build upon a thousand urban brushstrokes capturing the shimmering Cardiff night.

The golden glow of autumn

Autumn has fully rolled in now and with it came mist and long golden nights. I took the opportunity to explore the streets of camera as it did so.

I hadn't tried my had at softening the focus of my pictures in a while but with the world outside covered in a layer of mist I decided it was the perfect chance to do so. I took the urban streets as my starting subject but slowly that changed as my route led me towards the rivers of Cardiff.

Railways, road, houses and power lines slowly gave way to trees, plants, reflections and water all shining in the gold of nearby street lamps. The world is heading towards autumn once again all shining in the gold glow of autumn.

The colours of decay

For me autumn is a time for the beautiful and slow creep of decay as the season ticks slowly over into the depths of winter. The leaves change colour and sweep off the trees, the air becomes crisp and cold and wind and rain lash member of the public poor enough to be caught without an umbrella on their commute to work.

It was this sense of colourful decay that I set out to capture with my camera today. At first I was setting out to capture the changing of the season through the subtle shift of nature in the urban world, but as usually when I actually got halfway through taking pictures the emphesis had begun to change.

I grew fascinated by the disintegrating posters that had peeled away to leave layers of vibrate colour behind, the rusted garage doors now covered in metallic street art and the vibrate graffiti scrawled over the streets of Cardiff.

Entropy had caused the world to drip and melt with a rainbow of hues and shades. And what I had come out to photograph had changed, instead of the natural oncoming of autumn I had caught instead the urban world's vibrate colours of decay.