My Top 3 Photos
Happy Friday!
In today’s blog I’m going to tell you why the photos below are my personal favourites but more importantly, provide some context to each one.
In this world, particularly in the creative space, everything we do gets judged. Either we are being judged or we are judging. It’s just natural human being behavior.
Sometimes that can be a good thing and other times not so much but it’s something i’m comfortable with as long as it’s constructive. If you worry too much about what others think of your work then you won’t enjoy the basic beauty of being able to create something and offer it out to the world to see, and best case scenario- enjoy.
The three I’ve chosen aren’t special photos. They aren’t amazing. They aren’t going to win any awards (although one did get some media attention 😂).
They don’t have to either because they are special to me, regardless of what others think.
That’s what matters most.
With that in mind, let’s dive in!
NUMBER THREE -FERNANDO
This was the first photo I took that made me believe I just might be “OK” at photography.
One of my dreams growing up was to be an F1 photographer and to be so good that I could stand “the other side of the fence” at racetracks across the globe to shoot these awesome machines in their natural habitat.
I’d decided that Silverstone 2021 was the time I would be ready to get some world class photos (hold your horses there mate 😂).
I practiced the ‘panning’ technique for a few months in the lead up to the big day. My first efforts using this mode of photography resulted in me stood next to a village road shooting slow moving traffic and as you can imagine they were terrible.
The goal though was to try my best to use panning and not just have a 100 images of cars frozen on the track (fast shutter to freeze the car but doesn’t show blurry movement). They can look good but really the best photos of racing cars are ones that show the speed and velocity. Panning does this (Car in focus and moving the camera with the subject to get the blurry effect) but is harder to do.
As the date was getting closer I decided I needed to practice on vehicles moving a bit quicker than on an old village road so I went and sat by a motorway and snapped away until my eyes went blurry.
The results……………………..? POOR.
80 percent of the photos looked like a highly intoxicated person had taken them. Needless to say, as we headed down to Silverstone on the Friday I wasn’t very confident of getting many photos to be proud of.
So there are two reasons I’ve chosen this image.
Fernando Alonso is my favorite F1 driver and I spent the weeks leading up to the race telling everyone who would listen how I wanted to get a money shot of him. The second reason is because IT WAS THE VERY FIRST CLICK OF THE CAMERA! Unbelievable!
Myself and a friend settled into our seats for first practice. We were sat on the exit of Becketts leading down the hanger straight and the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz came past, followed by Lewis Hamilton in the Mercedes. I was conscious and nervous that the session was only an hour long so I had no time to waste. In the faint distance I saw the striking blue colour of the Alpine moving closer. I stood up, pointed the camera at it, half pressed the shutter button down and moved my body along with it as it screamed by.
I checked the LCD on the back of the camera and BOOM! Nailed it, one shot, one kill. Car in focus, blurry wheels, blurry background! After that the pressure was off a bit so I managed to get quite a few decent shots (which I lost due to a hard drive failure later down the road). Ah well.
As I said, it’s a good image but really the little story is what’s great about it. To get it on my first attempt was a massive thrill.
Fernando Alonso - Alpine
NUMBER 2 - HOLLYWOOD
The City of Angels!
When I was a kid everything I ever watched was American. Kenan and Kel, Saved By the Bell, Fresh Prince of Belair….95 percent of anything I liked was American.
Into my teens I was obsessed with west coast hip hop and all the movies I’ve ever enjoyed have been American. I should have been born there basically.
LA seemed like a magical place where only the rich and famous lived, very unattainable even to visit for a pauper like me!
Fast forward 30 years to a glorious day on a mid-March afternoon where I was stood next to the Hollywood sign overlooking the city of Los Angeles, thinking to myself, “MAMA I MADE IT!!!
Unfortunately not as a ridiculously good looking actor or musician, just a regular tourist.
But it felt very special and surreal to be within a few minutes of some of my favourite celebrities houses. I’m fascinated by the celeb thing. I recognise they’re very privileged but I find it interesting how they navigate their lives and the prices they pay for being famous. As Sly said, “It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.”
As a (sort of) adult now, I come to realise that LA isn’t just rich people.
There’s huge poverty in the city, lots of dangerous neighborhoods and homeless people.
As we drove towards Hollywood I remember feeling a little uneasy about the difference between the rich and the poor. The feeling is exacerbated because the wealthy literally overlook the less well off due to the massive hills surrounding the city. Multi-million dollar mansions looking down on the middle and lower class. It was quite poignant.
However, for one day in my life I felt pretty special up there. The photo below included some of the famous buildings in the downtown skyline that pop up frequently in films, particularly superhero ones!
This is number two simply because I never thought I’d ever get to visit ‘The Entertainment Capital of the World.”
LA-LA-LAND ticked off the bucket list.
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AND ON TO….
NUMBER 1 - THE FOX OF OSLO
Perhaps no surprise to the people who know me and have seen this image before!
If you haven’t, here’s the story.
Me and a couple of friends went to Oslo on a long weekend adventure. On the last evening there we decided to head up into the terrain, have a BBQ and try to get some sunset images.
We had been up there for a few hours and the sun was starting to disappear. I set my camera up on a tripod and left it there overlooking Oslo waiting for the right moment to start shooting. We heard a group of people come up just above us to have their own chillout when my mate Dean started talking to them.
One of them happened to be a pretty blonde girl (as he has a girlfriend I must emphasise that that was absolutely NOT the reason he was talking to her, it was purely circumstantial) but this chat was the reason I was able to get the fox photo and provides context to the story.
I thought it would be funny as the great friend I am to put my long lens on, hide in the undergrowth and get some “paparazzi” style evidence to send to his missus. I grabbed the camera, changed lenses and hid behind a massive rock to gather what I needed.
A few minutes went by when Steve, our other mate whispered, “FOX” to me. I was like, “What?” and he said it again. “There’s a fox right near us.”
I crept down the hill and sure enough this beautiful little fox was roaming around us, looking for food and assessing it’s surroundings.
First time I’d ever seen one and what a stunner!
I spent the next few minutes trying to get it to look at me which was difficult as I didn’t want to scare it off and it was being distracted by a couple who were throwing food to it.
After much swearing on my part (sorry for my potty mouth Norway) and annoyance that I wasn’t going to get the photo, finally it turned towards me and tilted it’s head slightly as if to say, “What are you up too over there buddy?”
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.
This is how it came out!
This one is special because things really had to align together to give me the opportunity. If Dean hadn’t spoken to that girl in the first my camera would have still been on the tripod with a wide angle lens on, which would never have had enough zoom to capture this portrait. The fact I was being a dickhead actually worked out for me for once!!
Also, It’s one thing to take a long lens into a zoo or sanctuary and get good shots of the animals but to get one so crisp in the wild with a very small window of time was amazing.
A huge highlight to round this story off happened a while after, when I woke up to hundreds of notifications on my phone one morning “liking” my photo. Confused, I opened up Facebook and Twitter to see that Chris Packham had shared the image on all his social media accounts! For the next few weeks I was getting thousands of messages from people who loved old foxy!
What a buzz.
