This year was, unlike the previous few, without any major travel. Although I did move from the UK to Switzerland, which did give me a new place to explore and photograph. Even with that I took a fraction of the number of photos I usually take in a year in 2020, which left me with not much to choose from for this selection. I chose to still put it together though because I like that this has become somewhat of a yearly reflection (even if it does take me the better part of the next year to put them together) and I thought that given it was somewhat of an interesting year it could be nice to have this record.

August 01 is Swiss national day, and one of the few days of the year that it’s legal to set off fireworks here in Zurich. I decided to head out in the evening with my digital camera to see the fireworks and take a few photos, primarily just for myself and maybe to put a few on my Instagram story (hence the vertial compositions). In the end I thought I had a nice little atmospheric photo series which would fit nicely here.

2019 was another active year for me, with a trip to Venice in July and then a long trip to Barcelona, the U.S, Vietnam, Thailand but mostly Taiwan. I only shot colour film in Vietnam and Thailand so those won’t appear here, and my film from Thailand was actually the first film I’ve posted to a lab due to running out of chems and Corona, and they were annoyingly lost before they made it there.

I was recently looking through all the photos I took during my 4 years living in Nottingham to see if I could come up with some kind of series out of them. After cutting it down to all the black & white images that turned out reasonably I had just over 200 photos so I needed to come up with some more specific ideas. One theme I tend to shoot a lot is where nature meets the built environment, which lead me to put together this series. I got the title, and some inspiration, from Robin Friend’s Bastard Countryside (watch this video for a good introduction).

Just 15 months after I posted my Singapore Architecture photo series, I have decided to revisit this theme with some photos I took in New York last September. Despite what this series might suggest, I did explore beyond Manhattan but not as much because I found Manhattan to be the most interesting photographically.

It’s 5 months since I posted my project Campus Lights. Sadly I didn’t manage to make any progress with getting anything changed on campus, the person I’d emailed didn’t get back to me and my exams & dissertation took precedence so I didn’t pursue it any further.

Having finished my last portfolio at the end of 2017 I can now start doing them yearly, so this one covers 2018. This includes two trips to the Canary islands, one to Gran Canaria in March and another to Fuerteventura in December as well as another long trip around Asia in the summer.

As an astronomy student and hobbyist, light pollution has sort of become my environmental issue of choice. Not only is it an annoyance to astronomers, but also damaging to wildlife as well as our health and is a large energy sink. I have taken particular notice of the amount of light pollution on my university’s campus lately as I am back living on campus after 2 years of living elsewhere, and my dissertation involves using the telescope on the roof of the physics building. This is a university that seems to boast about being green but seems to ignore this aspect of the environment.

"The pariah curs were baying the moon - it was only a quarter full and nearly down by midnight, but the dogs slept all day in the heat, and they had begun their moon-choruses already"

In another attempt at post-shooting photo series creation, I have put together a collection of architecture shots I took during my brief stay in Singapore in June of 2018.

This set of images begins where the last portfolio leaves off and primarily shows my travels during the summer of 2017, with the last image being the only one outside of that. I have again chosen to stick to black and white images taken with my Hasselblad for consistency, and because it’s what I primarily use. I am planning on doing one of these with the colour photos that I’ve taken since I started shooting square format.

This is a pair of photos that I took from the top floor of a pagoda in 小鱼山公园 (Xiaoyushan park, or Little Fish Hill Park) in Qingdao, China.

This series of photographs represents approximately a years worth of work, starting in April 2016 when I got my Hasselblad. I chose to start then not because I feel that the change of camera increased the quality of images that I was producing but rather I wanted to keep the format consistent throughout. Also it was about a year after I started shooting film, and when I started pursuing photography as a hobby.

This is the remnants of a failed attempt at a photo project looking at Birmingham’s pedestrian subways. I never really thought it was a very good idea for a project but I decided to give it a go anyway because I wanted to try shooting a project and it was the best idea that I had, also the subways are the sort of thing that I usually like to shoot anyway.

I took this photo in Ma Tau Kok, Hong Kong on the way to visit the Kowloon Walled City Park. I don’t really remember much about my intentions behind the photo beyond this looks cool, although that is how I shoot most of the time. In hindsight, I would’ve liked to have framed slightly to the right to show a bit more of the truck and a bit less of the side of the building but I think overall the framing is quite interesting. The depth of field puts a slight softness on the shop fronts which I think works well to make the two guys on the trucks stand out a bit as well as giving the road, and that piece of litter, a more noticeable softness in the foreground. The one guy on the right stands out really well, framed perfectly in front of the white board, but I think the other guy, especially his head, blends into the background a bit.

I don’t actually know if they are scrap collectors, but that’s what it looks like to me.