Photos from the Eastleigh by-election campaign

Today I spent the afternoon photographing the Eastleigh by-election campaign.

The voting takes place on Thursday 28 February. I will be back to get Labour's John O'Farrell and the Tory candidate, Maria Hutchings.

Here's a few photos. Larger versions can be seen by clicking on the photos.

Liberal Democrat candidate Mike Thornton checks out his receipt

Lib Dem signs

UKIP were the most visible party in the town centre. Pun unintentional

Health Action's Dr Iain Maclennan, a candidate battling privatisation and commercialisation of the NHS

An NHS building today in Eastleigh

LOCAL COLOUR

Lib Dem fruit?

Strong lager

Valentine's day - the flowers of romance

Click on photos for bigger versions.

All photos © Paul Russell 2013

Print sale – fighting ladies

Hi there. I have five (UPDATE: ONE) 15 by 10 inch pristine prints of this well-known image waiting to go to good homes.

My usual price for a print of any picture at this size is a modest £100 but I am offering these for £25. (Due to a mix-up with a gallery they have been sitting here wrapped in tissue paper for a while.)

The image has been exhibited at venues in London, New York, Berlin, Warsaw, Cardiff, Derby (Format Festival), Tel Aviv and (currently) Bangkok, and published widely. So, don’t miss this rare opportunity!

Details
Paper size: 15 by 10 inches (image with small white borders). Digital c-type print, printed on gloss Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper.
These unmounted prints are despatched in sturdy poster tubes.

Price is £25 plus p&p @
UK/Europe (£4)
Rest of World (£6)

Please contact me to express an interest or for payment details on paul.russell99@btinternet.com

The Independent newspaper

London poster advertising the Street Photography Now exhibition

In-Public: Bangkok bound

I am exhibiting some of my great photos in the upcoming In-Public group show at the TCDC (Thailand Creative & Design Center), Bangkok.

The exhibition runs from 5 February to 24 March 2013 and features photos from all 21 members of In-Public, including latest recruits Mark Alor Powell and Jiri Makovec.

In-Public movers and shakers David Gibson and Richard Bram will be giving a talk on Tuesday 5th February at the TCDC auditorium to launch the exhibition. They will also be in Bangkok to lead a 3-day street photography workshop on the 1st-3rd February.

This manifestation of photographic loveliness is promoted by TCDC and the British Council.

Photo by Matt Stuart

Digital contact sheet #1. Punch & Judy

Digital contact sheet - DSCF6025-6030 - Punch & Judy loudspeaker
I've just been going through my photos from last year, generally deleting and tidying up. I came across this interesting seqence, taken on 14 April 2012. Click on the "digital contact sheet" for a larger version of the six-shot run of photos.

"Final":

Contact sheet:

Festive Greetings

Merry Christmas and an exciting New Year to you.

Yes, I mean you.

Bath, 2012. © Paul Russell 2012

Well covered: Embracing the Ordinary

Photo © Paul Russell, cover design: Lewis Csizmazia

Photo © Paul Russell

Currently in bookshops is Simon & Schusters’ Embracing the Ordinary by Michael Foley, author of the bestselling The Age of Absurdity. The cover of Foley’s latest book features one of my photos from the Beside the Sea series, and is my first book front cover.

As I remember it, I got the impression that the man next to the supermarket trolley was a foreign tourist who just had to touch the trolley to confirm it was real. Maybe he was thinking “Who would leave a shopping trolley on a sandy beach? Surely it can’t be real. Crazy English.”

Embracing the Ordinary is a witty celebration the quotidian and seemingly mundane, and considers what insights philosophers (particularly James Joyce and Proust), anthropologists, psychologists and neuroscientists have given us. The parallels between the subject matter and street photography, which is often described along the lines of “finding the unusual in the everyday”, is clear.

My photo has a thematic link with the cover photo from Foley’s previous book, The Age of Absurdity - a photo by The Caravan Gallery

© The Caravan Gallery

Dialogues with student photographers, part I

Over the past year, I've had a steadily increasingly number of independent questionnaires from students interested in street photography. Last week I had five of these emails, which was a record.

It's great to get these, and most of the question sets are well thought out and intelligent - occasionally I answer them straight away if they seem easy to do. But usually they fall into the file marked "will do, when I get time (i.e never)".

Of course, many of the questions are repeated, so I would save myself a load of time by creating a FAQ document to put on my web site. While I do this, I thought it might be "fun" to create a dialogue here, with the permission of the questioners, just see where it will lead... Maybe nowhere.

I hope that the questioners (and others) will respond, and I will use the question-and-answer format to create a more interesting FAQ than I would come up with myself. And maybe force myself to give more than the rushed responses that I have given below.

So here we go. The email below is reproduced with permission:

"I hope that it is okay that I am emailing you, as I am in my final year of a BA Hons in Fine Art and have been producing work very similar to what you explore in your photographs."

---- Hi there, I get quite a few emails from photography students (a couple a week usually), but never from anyone studying Fine Art before.

"I am very interested to know how you achieve such great images, and whether they are snap-shots or carefully considered, because as a young person with a camera in a public place, I often get frowned at!"

---- Both! They are carefully considered snapshots. I just spend hours walking around looking for good compositions.

I take them very quickly and move on. As a (I guess) young female, you probably should arouse less suspicion than me, a middle-aged man. Maybe try to look less like you are a serious pro and more like an amateur having fun.

"Is this something you have had to deal with [I often get frowned at], and if so.....please can you tell me how you do it."

---- I only occasionally get asked what I'm doing. I look for situations where I can get close to people without them feeling threatened - where people are lost in thought, busy or in a crowd.

There are videos online of serious photographers shooting - Joel Meyerowitz, Matt Stuart.

e.g. Joel Meyerowitz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCCs_nedFhY

Or look at

"Street Photography resources" on the right-hand side of this blog, some way down.

http://www.sevensevennine.com/

"I'm hoping to do a shoot in a bingo hall next, but legalities keep blocking me out!"

---- Good luck.

"Hope you can get back to me, even if you really cant reveal your secrets of success!"

---- unfortunately "success" only in terms of producing results that some people like, and coverage in newspapers, etc. Which is great but it is very hard to make money directly from this sort of photography.

*** BTW, is it OK if I stick this on my blog? Verbatim, as above? ***

Brighton meandering via GPS

On Saturday, I went to Brighton for the day. I recorded my wanderings with a little GPS gizmo. The results are, to me, strangely fascinating.

If you're a fellow map addict, click here, chose "Map View" (i.e. the left-hand circle of the three on display), then zoom in to taste.

I guess this is not a novelty to people with new-fangled mobile phones with GPS capability but I'm about 10 years behind with technology. Like a human version of Comet.

I covered an impressive 181.21 km due to accidentally turning on the device at the beginning of my train journey from Weymouth to Brighton.

Dorset County Show, September 2011

Some photos from last weekend.

See the full slideshow here.

Melplash Show, August 2011

Some pictures from yesterday's Melplash Show (click images to enlarge):









All photos copyright Paul Russell 2011

Listen to the show, courtesy of artist Joe Stevens

Bournemouth Rowing Club: Aide-mémoire

While photographing around the Bournemouth Airshow last weekend with artist Dr Stephen Riley, by chance we were invited into Westover and Bournemouth Rowing Club for a balcony view of the show. I wasn't planning on photographing the aircraft but the invitation into the building proved fortuitous.

The coastal rowing club was founded in 1865 and is not usually open to the general public. Unfortunately, the council has asked the club to vacate the building by the end of the month, and the building will be redeveloped. The building includes features designed by Bournemouth architect, H. E. Hawker.

The club's boats have relocated to Hengistbury Head but plans for a new club building in Bournemouth are subject to the club finding sufficient funds…

I've walked past the club, near Bournemouth Pier, many hundreds of times, so it was good to see inside before it closes.









All photographs copyright Paul Russell, 2011

Weymouth’s stripy huts: going, going, gone...

I took this photo in March 2004 while a small team were struggling to erect the hut.* Weymouth has long had a posse of these stripy huts selling fast food and essential seaside tat. There were precise council specifications about building materials and colour and width of stripes.

The huts generally were erected at the beginning of the “season” and dismantled at the end. Except for this hut, which remained standing continuously from March 2004 as the owner, Pete Townsend, liked to trade over the weekends out of season (either that, or he couldn’t be arsed to take it down every year).

It was decided this year that the red, white and blue designs were a bit too loud and Non-Olympic, and had to be replaced by new designs. Weymouth beach was to get a Gok Wan style makeover. This hut was the last stripy hut standing, but was smashed up a couple of weeks ago. The day after, I rescued some small wooden red, white and blue remnants.

These valuable heirloom seaside artefacts from the last standing hut are coming to an eBay auction near you, with prices starting in the mid-thousands. Any takers?



*The photo was featured in the RPS’s International Print Exhibition 2005, which was my only success in this competition despite entering about 45 million times. In the end it dawned on me that they were only interested in pictures of poor people in India, diving seabirds and portraits of famous people. But that’s another story.

Last chance to see... Street Photography Now

This weekend is the last for the Street Photography Now exhibition at 18 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE. The exhibition was initated by Third Floor Gallery and features one photograph by each of the photographers profiled in the Thames & Hudson book. The show is part of the London Street Photography Festival.

"From Manhattan's Fifth Avenue to London's Oxford Street, from Mexico City to Moscow via Bombay and Bournemouth, Street Photography Now also features the work of a truly global group of emerging photographers working the streets today."

The last day of the show is Monday 18 July!


Me and David Gibson sign books for imaginary fans

All photos by Rachael Ward

Shooting from the hip - street photography tutorial

My handy, 10-point "power guide" to (literally) shooting from the hip:

(1) Are
(2) You
(3) Crazy?
(4) Use
(5) The
(6) Viewfinder.
(7) (That's
(8) What
(9) It's
(10) For)

Video to follow.

The ongoing characters

I was just looking through some pictures from the weekend, and something seemed familiar about this couple.

Bournemouth, this Sunday, 26 June 2011:

Then I realised where I had seen them before:
Swanage, July 2007:

Michal Walczak - West Midlands street photographer

Michal Walczak is a participant in the upcoming street photography workshop in Bournemouth. He has been "shooting street" around the West Midlands for less than a year, but his work already shows great promise.


Barcelona (near Stafford)


Liverpool


Birmingham

Photos copyright Michal Walczak 2011.

Bournemouth Street Photography Courses

This is a unique opportunity to join two experienced street photographers in a vibrant coastal resort.

Paul Russell (In-Public member) and Justin Sainsbury (UK Street Collective) will be leading engaging one-day courses around the town on 11 and 25 June 2011.

Through personal, in-the-field tuition we will encourage you to develop your own style and create interesting and inspiring street photographs.

Aspects of the day will include:

– Looking at the practical factors to consider when taking pictures of people in their environment.

– Learning to anticipate and make the most of interesting situations.

– How to best utilise your existing equipment, plus hands-on assessment of specialist cameras – the Ricoh GRD II and the Fujifilm FinePix X100.

– Maximising impact and creating rounded photo stories through selective editing.

By having a maximum of four participants we will ensure that you receive a concentrated level of advice and insight into this fascinating and challenging photography genre. The course will take place in situ on the street but we will have this beach hut base camp close to Bournemouth Pier!



For course fee of £80.00 you will also receive the benefit of a review of some of your previous work prior to the day in Bournemouth. Following the day’s shoot we will also provide an in-depth review of your pictures.

Paul and Justin are known for their humorous and poignant take on everyday life. If you enjoy non-confrontational photography of people without relying on long lenses then this may be the course for you.

For more detail please contact paul.russell99@btinternet.com

The one-day courses will run from 11 am until 6 pm plus assessment of your portfolio of best shots via the Internet and a review of your Bournemouth shots subsequent to the day out.

Practicalities
Bournemouth is less than 2 hours from London Waterloo by train and is served by two trains per hour.





Photos copyright Paul Russell and Justin Sainsbury

Street Photography at the Museum of London

A reminder that the Museum of London’s excellent exhibition, London Street Photography 1860-2010, is now on and runs until September 2011. I am lucky enough to be one of the 59 photographers chosen to represent the genre.

Over 200 images are featured, and photographers include Paul Martin, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Humphrey Spender, Wolf Suschitzky, Bert Hardy, Roger Mayne, Tony Ray-Jones, John Benton Harris, Paul Trevor and Stephen McLaren.

In-Public are well represented, with Richard Bram, Adrian Fisk, David Gibson, Nils Jorgensen, David Solomons, Matt Stuart and Nick Turpin all included.

Entrance is free and the show has proved so popular that a timed ticketing system is currently in operation during weekends and school holidays. “Tickets can be collected from the Museum front desk on arrival, tickets cannot be prebooked. Entry to the exhibition remains free, please allow extra time for your visit.”

See the Museum of London’s site for more details


A short film featuring Matt Stuart, Polly Braden, Wolfgang Suschitzky and Paul Trevor is being shown alongside the exhibition, and there is a slideshow of further contemporary photographs including several of my own works of humble genius

Finally, there is a rather splendid hardback book showcasing the photos from the exhibition available at Amazon and larger bookshops. A softback version is available at the show itself (I think it’s still available).

The exhibition is curated by Mike Seaborne and Anna Sparham.

Street photography and the Fujifilm FinePix X100

Is the eagerly awaited X100 a suitable tool for street photgraphy? Probably not, in its present state. In short, it seems that the autofocus isn't up to speed and the manual focus poorly implemented, with several turns of the focus ring required to get you from near to far.

Nigel Cheffers-Heard on this Flickr thread commented (my headings)

Autofocus
"The autofocus is leisurely to say the least, and for candid photography is a nonstarter (by the time it has locked on, the subject has seen you and the moment has passed).

Manual focus
"One alternative is to have the camera set in Manual Focus, and to momentarily press the AFL button to achieve focus. Frankly, too fiddly and time wasting. And the gearing! But more of that anon...

Another alternative is to set the focusing distance manually using the focusing ring and the scale on the rear screen. Sadly, the implementation of this is nothing short of disastrous. The actual linking between the focusing ring and the lens focus travel is electronic. So presumably you can have any “gearing" you choose to program in. For reasons best known to themselves, Fuji have programmed this so that to focus from infinity to minimum focus takes three complete turns of the focusing ring. Three turns!

I have to ask if they let any serious photojournalists used this camera during the alpha testing phase, because I cannot be alone in thinking this is not a good decision."

Street photographer John Goldsmith has written a detailed review on Street Reverb Magazine, and has similar misgivings (my headings):

Autofocus
"the autofocus is reasonably fast though not nearly as quick as my 5DMkII, even in great light. In short, I didn’t find the autofocus performance fast enough. In the case of the X100, the freezing EVF, the lack of a focus tool in the OVF, and the relatively slow autofocus, don’t leave any quick and reliable focusing options for speedily composing a street photograph. ...

Manual focus
"This focus ring, which seems to have been dipped in high-grade honey, can take as much as 5 full rotations to move to the opposite end of the scale. Fortunately, if I understand the mechanisms of the camera, the focus is electronic, or fly-by-wire, and this suggests that a firmware update could be an easy fix."

Format Festival in Derby, UK. Part 4: Monday

My last day at Format, and I bid farewell to the Kingsway Retail Park Travelodge at the crack of dawn. I have accumulated an array of portable food over the past few days – fruit and biscuits mainly – and the leftovers come in handy for a quick breakfast, as the hotel has no dining facilities.

The University is the main item on the agenda today – it is host to more than a dozen exhibitions, and is a little way out from the town centre. After getting the bus into town, I stop to study the outdoor Magnum display outside Quad in real detail for the first time. I get into conversation with a man with a camera who turns out to be Jack Simon – an excellent photographer whose work I have long admired online – who is exhibiting at the University.

Trudging out to the University – usually it would be a stroll, but my feet are still giving me gyp – I hear a Monkees song blaring out from a vintage clothes shop. Yes, them again. I pop into Vintage Romance to discuss the finer points of the Monkees career (including the experimental stuff) with the owner... She likes taxidermy.



I am tempted by these leftover chips but I had just eaten an egg, mayo and onion roll from The Cob Shop (awarded five stars by Derby City Council Food and Hygiene).



I spend about an hour at the University in the end – I wish it could have been much longer. The University is a very impressive modern building. Although a bit off the beaten track, the exhibitors generally have a lot more space here than at Quad. As well as Jack Simon’s pictures, of particular note are Andrew Glickman’s large subway pictures (within black frames but without glass – this seemed to be a great way to display prints), Alessandro Marchi’s large street landscape work, Stephen McLaren’s London work, and Laurence Stephens’s supermarket pictures. I chatted to Lawrence on the opening night, and he gets permission from the shop owners to shoot inside, but then takes candid close-up shots with a big SLR and flash, which must take a lot of nerve.

Then back to the town centre to see the In-Public show again, and then train station. I just make my 1 o’clock train.

UPDATE: Format is now officially over, although the exhibitions are still up at Quad and the Museum and Art Gallery according to the festival guide (please check before travelling!). The University shows are definitely no more.