The camera industry.

March 11, 2025

Imagine you want a high resolution camera. Imagine you want it well built, but without too many bells and whistles. Imagine you can live without 8k video, and that some rolling shutter or a slight crop when shooting motion won’t kill you. Imagine you can tolerate a slow frame rate, but not a screen that won’t flip. Imagine in other words, having preferences.

Tough.

You might’ve noticed that currently the camera makers don’t ask. Instead they make guesses at who you are, and further guesses at what you might need and want.

So I ask you to use your imagination again. What if you got to tell them what you wanted? What if instead of just buying your camera, you built your camera. What if you added features you needed and removed those you didn’t in the process?

Profit aside - and I appreciate that’s a big thing to park - why isn’t this an industry built on tailoring? Camera bodies are more similar than different. Let’s be clear, they’re black boxes with grips for your hands, so why can’t we buy a camera body and then pick the organs ourselves?

Just a thought.

My complicated relationship with travel photography

March 10, 2025

Hi all!

I’ve been overseas for 3 of the last 4 weeks (start the violins…) and having walked back through my front door covered in recycled air and full of rage about baggage handlers, I’m contemplating all things travel…

How lucky I am to do it, how amazing it is to get to see different places, how air travel can be mind bogglingly convenient and stupendously infuriating all at once, the works…

But my main reflection is one about photography, and its relationship with exploration.

Things that are novel to us will often seem more interesting than things/places with which we are familiar, but I’m finding these days that while it’s fascinating to see new places, or places new to me rather, photographing them is often a somewhat hollow experience.

I can’t break the feeling that this is because my relationship to that place is, well, hollow. I’m skimming the surface when I spend a week somewhere, I’m floating around a culture rather than immersing myself in it, pressing my shutter with what is at best a rudimentary understanding of what I’m pointing my camera at.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but in recent years it has lead to a strong correlation between how close to home I was when I took a photo, and subsequently how close that photo feels to me.

I’m often asked by other photographers for advice on taking photos when they can’t travel, and this is what I typically say:

Shoot what you can, in a way others can’t. In other words, use your relationship and familiarity with your location to your advantage.
Reframe your perspective. You are interested in far flung places in a way that people in those places would likely feel about where you are. It’s perhaps boring to you because it isn’t new to you. Often when I talk to people about this stuff I head to Google street view to look at the places they’re calling boring, and if it’s new to me I’ll often think it looks fascinating.
Take heart from the fact that I’m far from the only person who seems to get the most joy out of finding photographs close to home.

I don’t know if that’s helpful to you or not, but it’s advise that I need to take onboard myself now more than ever, as from today I’ll be staying at home for a good while waiting for our second child to arrive, and then after they’re born I’ll be a canvas to be vomited on for several months at least before I’m back on the move.

Admittedly, I live close to a National Park and the coast, I’m lucky in that regard. But I plan to use this time to hopefully see beauty in the familiar, rather than to constantly lust for the exotic.

Speak soon,

James

A comparison of files...

January 29, 2025

Hi folks,

I made a video this week where I compared images from 3 cameras across different scenes to work out which I like best.

I thought I’d share those images here so you can take a slightly closer look. The aim of the game here as I said in the video isn’t to consider anything to do with image quality, but rather the look of edited files in the hope of working out the differences I’ll end up with should I only take one of these cameras out on a shoot.

Here are the files…

Personally, I like the results from the Sony best :)

The Fatigue of Bright Packaging

April 10, 2024

A few weeks back I was trying my best to avoid emails and thus stuck a podcast on.

I was listening to Colin & Samir interviewing Grammy award winning musician Jacob Collier, and early in the episode he referenced a concept he called “the fatigue of bright packaging. He didn’t massively expand on this term, but it got me thinking about the undeniable shift in popular culture that seemingly has lots of us lusting for the imperfect.

These days I prefer YouTube to Netflix. I listen to more albums produced and mixed in bedrooms than in studios, I check the score of Ryan Reynold’s 4th division football team before searching the Premier League results. More than any of this though, I’m finding I no longer care for photographs that try too hard for perfection, like this…

Photos trying too hard - for me - typically display a couple of symptoms:

They’re normally flawless. Void of noise, perfectly sharp, exposure bracketed, focus stacked and everything you think might’ve possibly needed cloning has been, be it footprints or floppy flowers.
They’re loud and dramatic. Blazing golden hour light, stretched out mountains and a model clad in a yellow anorak for good measure posing slightly unnaturallly. You’ve seen these shots. If these photos could scream for your attention, they would.

Anyway, I bring it up because thinking about perfection has become a huge part of my workflow, and while I’m doubly sure not everyone will agree with this take it’s been food for thought for me, in what is increasingly my quest for a portfolio full of scenes that look as though I’ve just stumbled across them.

It turns out the best way to build that is, well, to stumble, in the middle of the day when most do, warts and all.

James

7 Days in New York City

February 08, 2024

Well, I’m fresh back from the Big Apple with a face battered by icy winds and feet broken by at least 30,000 steps a day in barefoot shoes, but what a trip to kick the year off with.

Like all great world cities New York is a cocktail of diversity in people, cultures, food, architecture and luckily conditions when I was there. I’d visited once before as a wide-eyed 18 year old with Emily many years ago, but we didn’t stray too far from midtown on that trip for fear of being out of reach of restaurants dedicated to fleecing tourists, so this time I was keen to get a little further afield. The trouble is, doing so makes you realise how woefully inadequate a 6 night stay is.

I’ll be back, maybe in summer next time, but here’s a selection of what I saw on this trip…

My favourite photos of the year...

December 07, 2023

I remember getting the chance to go on holiday abroad a few times as a kid, and being utterly bewildered as to why people in airports looked so grumpy. In my little mind these people were knee-deep in the most exciting thing known to man; travel. Yet their faces suggested they were in prison.

Fast forward a few decades, I too now stand in the security line silently raging inside. Nevermind that I’m about to travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours in relative comfort, the process can only reasonably be considered completely unbearable.

It’s fair to say then that my days of travelling internationally by choice are numbered. This year though I’m glad I continued to suffer the duty free mazes, the hidden fees, the delays and lost bags, as they helped me get most of my favourite photos of the year.

A lone tourist surveys and photographs the remnants of a huge swell from a big storm the day earlier.

After a morning spent in a cab on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi searching for scenes of interest this is the best I got back to the hotel with. For whatever reason it has been growing on me ever since. I think it’s the colours and weighting. And I’m a sucker for clean lines too.

A fisherman, a ferry, a volcano and seagull, all bathed in the best light I’d seen in a week. Another grower, but again it’s the weighting I like best I think.

*Wild Atlantic Way, Ireland. (May 2023)*

Early in the afternoon I’d lined up a shot of this camper only to have another tourist come and park right in front of it. Lucky really, because it spurred me to head back at sunset when the light was much nicer.

I’m adding this 2 days after posting, since I’ve just printed this photo and sat at my desk in December those summer colours look completely irresistible. And sure, this was also well past my bed time because it’s June, but worth it I think.

A morning strolling around a little fishing village didn’t offer as much as I’d hoped, but I did catch this conversation bathed in light. My kind of photo this.

I’m no wildlife photographer as you know, but if you see a polar bear for the first time and get a decent shot, I think it’s likely to make your list of favourites for the year.

A very wet 2 hour stomp on a hilariously remote Arctic island proved a real treat. One of the least accessible places in the Northern hemisphere, in other-worldly conditions.

An abandoned weather station set against a fjord full of icebergs. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything that better fits my obsession of finding manmade things draped on nature aesthetically.

This guy was contemplating a plunge for a long time, and I don’t blame him. The North Sea isn’t the tropics. I do love it when a single frame taken in a fraction of a second somehow genuinely manages to tell 1000 words though…

I ran past this scene in the middle of nowhere in rural France and couldn’t not return in decent light for a photo. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear this looked exactly the same 10 years prior, but a good example of a shot that presents more questions than answers, to me at least.

The very last and best photo I took on an intensive week-long shoot in Switzerland. The cloud cover came at the perfect time and presented the cabin perfectly.

It’s hard to capture the essence of a world city in a single shot. This is my attempt in Amsterdam and I don’t know if it achieves it, but I am taken back to the city instantly when I look at it…

One of the simplest photos I took this year, and I think one of my best. Complimentary colours, a blend of human and nature, and close to home too. I doubt it’s to everyone’s taste, but caring about that is always dangerous.

A bit close for comfort was this bloke. Still, I should thank him for making a nice silhouette, even if he did almost busy the emergency services.

So a year I'm delighted with all in all. And one thing I’ve noted, most of these shots came after a period of frustration (hours, days or weeks) and therefore act as a reminder to me to stay sharp, since you don’t know what’s around the corner.

Thanks for your support this year, it means the world.

James

A week in Portugal

November 15, 2023

Last week I split 7 days in Porto and Lisbon with my photography nerd and friend Roman Fox.

Thankfully for me Roman had previously spent a lot of time in both cities, which ultimately meant I didn’t have to engage my brain much as I just followed along like a lost puppy. But I did learn some stuff too, namely:

I’ve never encountered more polite drug dealers.
Shorts is still an option in November if you’re willing to have locals stare in disbelief.
Other than that, the locals are all smiles.
Compared to the UK it’s an incredibly affordable place to travel. Food is both fantastic and cheap.
The mix of Atlantic coastline and rustic cities makes it a phenomenal photography destination.

I’ve been told for years I should visit Portugal but for some reason never moved it to the top of my list. I now realise I’m an idiot. Here are some photos.