Only 344 more days before the need to subject ourselves to the only meat with the potential to be more dry and tasteless than chicken, our friend the turkey. Long may cranberry make you edible!
Yes it has been quite some time since my last post and I must thank all those kind yet persuasive messages I have received to "get up off my arse and get back to it".
I am happy at least to report that I have been snapping away in the interim, as well as planning some projects and spending a bit of time on my business set up. More on these to follow over the next few weeks.
Though this festive season was the first time I haven't been able to go home to Dublin and see family, Santa was good enough at least to deliver some inspirational books to keep me going. I was obviously a good boy this year as a nice hardcover edition of Rankin Portraits found it's way under my tree. I love photography in all its forms but my truest love is that of portraiture, and where that's concerned Rankin is genius.
I also received a copy of A Shadow Falls and On This Earth, both by Nick Brandt (another amazing English photographer). If you haven't heard of him yet please take a moment to visit www.nickbrandt.com or check him out at a bookstore. To say he is a wildlife photographer is to do him a disservice, to me he is one of the greatest fine art portrait photographers, but his subjects happen to be animals.
He shoots (not literally) animals in their natural habitat in East Africa, the land itself is as much a subject as he captures an ever vanishing world. His pictures are mostly sepia in tone and he uses some form of magic (he isn't willing to share) to get some really interesting depth of field.
While I'm certain he isn't the first photographer to create pictures in this way his compositions are breathtaking. So far I haven't been able to put either of his books on a shelf, they sit by my bedside table so I can wonder at them in a moment. Brandt's work has made me look back at some of my own photographs of wildlife and apply the same technique. By that I mean colour and tone, artificially creating the depth of field doesn't feel like me (though I would love to know how he does it 'in-camera'). Sadly my pictures were not created in the open air of Africa, these I took in Fuengirola Zoo in Spain.
Perhaps I can convince a friend when they visit Africa they should take me too :-)
Happy New Year to you all (2011 - The start of many new things).
