Negative feedback on photos you like and your projects

Is negative feedback an issue and how does it compared to the culture of praise on Flickr and similar?

Let me set the picture: You know your interests are a bit leftfield (unusual) and that what you are really interested in photographing isn’t mainstream interest. The feedback is largely positive but you occasionally get some negative feedback; some pretty scathing – how should you feel, and how should you react?

Flickr

Flickr is a great website; and one that I probably use most frequently to discover new work from a worldwide audience but also as a gallery for my own work. It also is a forum for critique and feedback but it is patently obvious that little negative feedback is posted (and you can argue why should it) and a lot of back patting is going on; some very justified, some dubiously so.  It is easy to get used to positivity so it would seem that where negative feedback arises a very knee jerk spat can come out, or a defensive attitude. Sometimes it just results in what is negative feedback going to achieve.

We have all in some way, become accustomed to positive feedback over negative feedback.

YouTube

 I put a short slideshow together on YouTube to show a range of pictures I was exhibiting two weeks ago at the Open University. It seems fairly well received for what is essentially my rather (as the mainstream would have it) dull subject of suburbia and a town called Milton Keynes. Today I received some negative feedback, which the author seems to have deleted but I still had the email notification. The nub of the criticism was that it was a waste of five minutes of their life.

So how should you react?

Instinctively, the natural reaction is to defend yourself. And a good measure of that is no bad thing in my book. Without some defence of the self, where is your self integrity going to go? But should you feel that perhaps you’re not cut out to take pictures, or that your project is a doomed idea?

Of course not. The best way to take it is actually for what one person has said, that my pictures were a waste of time for somebody. It’s also worth taking on board that a lot more people will have seen my pictures and have brushed over them and have been bored by them, found them dismal or indeed just bad pictures.

This is a fact.

I myself don’t like every photograph I see, or every piece of music I hear, nor every painting. So neither should I expect any different about my work.

So your attitude to negative feedback should be to take it on board if there is useful criticism; but if one person or a few are dulled by what they see of their work; don’t give up. Reflect, look at your work and ask yourself whether it works for you. If it does, keep going but don’t be adverse to taking on people’s points of view, they may have some very useful to suggest to you; ways in which you can improve.

I believe in my Milton Keynes project. It’s very much leftfield, it’s perhaps rather dull to some people (maybe even most people) – but I’m, not giving up on it, because I know I may push this project as much as I can and it may never go anywhere. But I’m getting satisfaction from it and I’m enjoying it. It is worth hanging on to this because at least you’ll have a finished article you are pleased with.

So the message is, expect criticism, expect savage criticism, and be prepared to take some onboard. But also be prepared to stand up for yourself where you honestly feel you can. If you can’t stand by your favourite work, then who will? If you like one of your pictures but no one else does, it doesn’t really matter, does it?

Back to Brighton

I haven’t posted on my blog properly for some time. In fact last year I didn’t post very much at all. But I have been very busy working on the Impression Milton Keynes project and my new novel, Fourth Wall. So apart from the usual stuff anybody gets up to, going out, going away, meeting friends, Christmas and all that – there hasn’t been much to say. Particularly as I have been spending time taking photos, processing films, researching, writing, and everything else. I’ve even been getting ready for an exhibition at the Open University on January 25^th to exhibit some photos of mine : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv1cXKVWajE

But back to home.

I’ve been living in Worthing now for over three years, and away from Brighton for four years. I like Brighton a lot but it’s just too expensive to live there for what you get. The town is great and all, but it’s a very overcrowded place that I love to visit but I’m glad to come away from at the end of the day.

I didn’t have an exceptionally long visit (a Saturday afternoon) as I was dropping off the files for my exhibition prints mainly but that didn’t stop me taking my Leica and Minolta Autocord along too! I was last in Brighton back in December but at night and the place takes on a very different feel then. It’s good to be in streets which are absolutely thronged with life. The North Laine and Lanes are just a great asset to Brighton (lots of small independent shops although in recent years there are an increasing amount of chains) and make for a paradise for the street photographer. I didn’t have much in the way of resources except for an old roll of BW400CN which I need to use up (it’s fine stuff, it’s just a pain to print on black and white paper, unlike XP2 which is another chromogenic film) and about 3 frames on my Autocord which had some Tri X I had been pushing to 3200.

It was just great fun, and the TLR is a fab tool for doing the street work. The thing is you can stare right down into it and people are just not even aware you are photographing them because there is not even a hint of eye contact. The camera becomes the all seeing eye.

I dropped the files off and will hopefully inspect a print on Monday to make sure it’s going to look good up on the wall. But it’ll be dark by the time I get to Brighton which will be a shame as I would like to do more street work, but such is life when you have a day job you must go to as well.

After that I went to a small coffee house and read my book quietly and finished the roll in the Leica snapping pics of peeps in the coffee shop and then went back through the lanes and used the three remaining frames on the Autocord. I popped into a bookshop and bought a book on The Beats and finally, W.Eugene Smith’s “Dream Street” – the much vaunted Pittsburgh Project. It’s not the full collection (there are some 6,000 photos from the Pittsburgh Project, and some 1,200 master prints…) but I don’t know if there ever will be, as that was its problem, it was un-publishable. The guy behind the counter was friendly and said the Autocord was a nice accessory. I explained it wasn’t an accessory and its misfortune was being used and abused every week by me!

That is the only thing I can say about Brighton, there’s a lot of soul, but there are also a lot of people who go around like fashion manikins with stuff draped over them to look the part but they don’t know what the hell it is they are wearing or using. I suppose a TLR does make for a fairly nice fashion accessory but there’s nothing fake about me or the reasons I use one that’s for sure.

Recognisably your voice – Fourth Wall

I’ve been thinking about the book I am writing which I would say I have written half of. Since 2006 I have had a number of fairly strong ideas for books but had very little way of perhaps making them stand in their own right. There’s the story of my somewhat hidden from view darker persona (nothing scary, I’m just a deeper thinker than may be apparent in person.) There’s the story of my American adventures. There are the stories of my exploits in this country with dubious tales of the night. There are all sorts that don’t really stand in their own right as a book when I sat down and tried to write them. When this is combined with the constant flow of new books that I read and the desire to be like certain authors who I really admire it can make it difficult to write something coherent with a good amount of weight behind the ideas to drive it through. I’ve struggled to do this up until earlier this year when something began to click after reading JG Ballard’s Super Cannes. I have long been a fan of JG Ballard but something clicked when I read his book which combined with my current photographic project Impression Milton Keynes – the idea was born: Fourth Wall.

I won’t give too much away at this stage over the plot but it takes the essence of many of the things I have experienced rather than trying to take them all and put them in verbatim. It also puts them in the third person because I have made no bones about the fact in previous first person exploits that the characters have been very much real. Iona and Tammy in Fourth Wall are as real as any character except they are not any one person but many. Some of their traits are very much from me and others are a combination of traits and peculiarities I have found in other people over the years. That is a major departure for me and probably where the jigsaw really began to come together.

As a very brief synopsis, Fourth Wall is the story of a couple who happen to be partners, Iona and Tammy. Iona is left behind by Tammy’s departure to work as an architect in a new town (guess where that idea came from…it isn’t MK where she goes to work though!) leaving Iona behind. She acknowledges that unless she moves to be with Tammy, they have no future and that is something too unfathomable for her to contemplate. Jumping in feet first, Iona moves and gets a job at a local government quango. Her new boss Jack Addison-Perry is a shadowy character she can’t quite work out and seems to have something of the night about him but Iona can’t place her hands on what it is. In their attempts to make the move work, Iona and Tammy begin to slip into brooding nightmare of drug-fuelled hedonism which will prove to be their undoing when it leads them to the truth about Jack Addison-Perry…

The clearest sign that this is working is because I really do feel my voice is coming through in this. The scariest part of it is how unrecognisable it is from me or certainly how I am largely perceived. In person and in reality I’m pretty bubbly to say the least, probably too much so. I’m a bit hair brained and at a cursory glance some people haven’t taken me very seriously in the past; purely because I can come across a bit like the Joker in the pack. That is very much me but on the other hand I have a pretty dark outlook on things, not in an overly negative way but I’m intensely curious about the underbelly of things. This is what is showing in Fourth Wall. There is a bit of wit in the dialogue; there’s a fleck of Ballard with his dystopia in there, a bit of Hubert Selby Jr with his stories of delusions and absolute freedoms, a sprinkling of Kerouac telling us how it was and maybe a bit of Will Self in there too with his eloquent description. It’s a bit of everything but with something quite original at the heart of it. It is on one hand complete fiction and has no actual precedent in real life but is also on the other hand very firmly rooted in the reality of things that have happened. As much as it is a work of fiction it is not quite as inconceivable as some of Ballard’s work sometimes can be accused of; what happens in Fourth Wall could happen although is terribly unlikely. I’m a realist and it’s the everyday that I am interested in. I’m not interested in battling aliens on a far off planet, I’m interested in boring things like people sitting in front rooms staring at sunlight streaming through blinds on a come-down, I’m interested in people smoking cigarettes looking out into the seeming nothingness ahead of them except for what is in their head, and I am interested in the way people live their lives today. It makes it possible and it fuels me passionately. How else would I be interested even excited in taking copious photos of a new town? I acknowledge I have a very weird outlook on things at times but I’m not really looking at it that differently; I’m just peering just a little bit beneath the surface and finding all sorts of intrigue.

So Fourth Wall excites me because it’s the first work which I have penned that will shock people that I wrote it. I genuinely think that because I am taken aback at the things I have put into this myself. It’s not shock tactics; it has a real grit that I didn’t think I could write. But it’s not inhuman and perhaps the greatest tragedy in the story of Fourth Wall: what I have done to Iona and Tammy is pretty gruesome. Not because it’s gory, not because it’s violent, not because it pushes taboos too far for cheap shock factor. I think it’s gruesome because at their lowest there is humanity and something we can connect to and it will frighten you.

Fourth Wall isn’t no walk in the park and it’s certainly no bedtime story or BBC period drama, but it might give a glimpse on what may happen when you push someone enough so much that they break through their own reality; their very own fourth wall.

the centre:MK – A building worth listing in Milton Keynes?

the centre:MK (erstwhile Shopping Building) could shortly be in line for a grade II* listing which would prevent unsavoury (ok bias immediately present there) additions and changes to the central shopping precinct in the city. Some may say this all started the moment doors were put on the place; but its real degredation really begin with Midsummer Place, an extraordinarily ordinary building plonked next to the original 1970s Miesian building.

Unfortunately even the building’s management have described it in less than savoury terms, presumably because they want to be able to hack it about within an inch of its life to add more shops to the building and further the break-up of the orthogonal grid in Central Milton Keynes by closing the Secklow Gate flyover. This is the only flyover in Central Milton Keynes (and indeed most of MK, apart from the few junctions on the A5D and of course the M1) compared to other new-towns such as Peterborough and Runcorn that are full of high speed grade seperated junctions and flyovers.

Of course, much a-do about this listing has caught the interest of the Conservative leaning papers. I’ll bear my political clothes here but I am right leaning myself; but then I don’t have much time for politicians full stop but that’s another matter.

Between comments of ‘surrounded by concrete flyovers’ and ‘concrete eyesores’ – it doesn’t take much to work out what the papers think. They live seemingly in the romantic vision of England loved by Prince Charles and his somewhat disturbing Poundbury. Compared to most shopping centres in England, the centre:MK has is bursting with natural light, intricate but seemingly simple detail, elegant loading and unloading for deliveries (at first floor level hence the Secklow Gate flyover), the amazing steel-work and glass cladding and extensive interior planting that is by no means an after thought. Of course there was Queens Court at one time, but now that public space is being overturned into privatised space; squeeze the pounds out of every square foot is the mantra of business at the end of the day.

Maybe what they should be thinking of is building a counterweight. It’s no big secret the only reason the shopping building is the complete opposite end to the station of the 2km long city centre is because they had to guarantee that the project wouldn’t be cut down in size and trashed by short-sighted British incompetence. (And yes it is incompetence, short-term quick buck making for people who largely couldn’t give a toss.) And it worked as CMK now exists in its fully intended size but it needs an injection of life into the western end; so why not push the boat out architecturally and create a counterweight to the the centre:mk away from the heavily loaded eastern end?

There is plenty of room (because the designers thought about the future!) to do this if they had the vision but that doesn’t seem to have ever figured in the imagination.

You only have to see Midsummer Place (the extension built in the late 90s, opened in 2000 I think) is an alright looking thing but no work of art and certainly pretty run of the mill. The Shopping Building however is far from this uninspired building.

The book “The Story of the Original CMK” may be a little too rose tinted but it does deliver on 120 pages worth of excellent material the scale and sense of vision those guys had, if a bit naive – they created in part due to that what we see today. What we will create afterwards will likely as always be run by bean-counters but will be a watered down piss poor architectural tour-de-force in butchery.

Of The Times excelled themselves, take a look at this rather grotty picture of Central Milton Keynes:

It does look pretty rank from that photo, but there’s a small problem here given it is an article about The Shopping Building.

What’s the problem?

That picture DOES NOT CONTAIN any view of the shopping building!

 

I leave the final sentiment to Derek Walker, the shopping building should never have had bloody doors fitted on it. And the moment that happened, public space became private space…

• The Telegraph : Characterless Milton Keynes shopping zone at centre of culture clash
• The Times: English Heritage in move to save ‘concrete eyesores’ (you may note though I don’t disagree with them over Brum library but I never liked brutalist architecture)

North Downs Way (epilogue)

I haven’t written anything here for ages have I!

I guess I have been so busy enjoying the world.

In fact I cannot write a great deal now but only to say that I am hoping to get started on scanning in my North Downs Way slides this weekend. It will take me some weeks yet as there are about 500 or so to get through although I have already marked off the winners from looking at them projected.

I just cannot believe it is already four months since I took the first step on that 160 mile hike across the South East of England.

I’m already looking back on it with melancholic whimsy of , “what I did then. That was the day!” And I realise, that we all do this, looking back on a time when we did some when we were free and the memory paints it with warmer tones and it was just fantastic. Almost an American Beauty moment of looking back on the job flipping Burgers in the summer or being asked how you feel, and when you look back on it all. We all have those moments and they seem to stop at some point. Trapped in the wildfire of bills and general working life, and families and so forth. It seems apparent to me to never stop having little adventures; after all, why stop if you’re still free? It makes looking back not so painful when you are absolute in the knowledge that you can still strike out and do your own thing to this very day.

I don’t know what I’m going to do next year. Maybe Southern France, maybe/probably the Cotswolds Way, maybe the USA again – I’m just not sure. Just so much to do in such a short amount of time it seems. There’s so much to see and do, breathe and live! I’m glad I made it through the shit-storm I found myself in 2006 and moved on from all the crap that got towed out of that year; life is a much better sweeter thing. I’m not rich, I scrabble to pay bills, my socks now have holes and the hoovering needs to be done; but I couldn’t be happier with my lot and it’s not much but it keeps me content

Long Man of Wilmington

Olympus OM2n, Ilford FP4+, Zuiko 28mm, Lee RF75 + 0.6ND Hard Grad

Melancholy and Returns

Kodak seems to have mislaid one of my rolls of Kodachrome which I shot walking the North Downs Way in June. Ahhh good times, sun, the open track, hard graft, great views and a sense of achievement. Wonderful, much more meaningful than a lot of the crap in day to day life I guess.

Anyway, if anything it’s a blessing in disguise because I’ve been feeling a bit sad that my adventure for this year is over. I had a tremendous amount of fun as ever, I guess I just love being out there and free.

So, in lieu of me feeling a bit melancholy and missing that adventure, having lost a roll of film and indeed the weather on the day concerned being what we call in the trade, “thoroughly pap” (i.e. crap) I thought I’d walk it again one weekend in August.

That’s basically Ranmore Common to Westerham via Box Hill, Reigate Hill and Tandridge Hill. I have 5 rolls of Kodachrome still in the fridge so I can take two rolls, shoot it, do a good job on some good weather and hopefully not have Kodak mislay these rolls (in fairness, this is the first of however many rolls of KR64 I sent them that got lost, I’ve probably shot around 80-100 rolls of Kodachrome in my time…)

It’s a bit crazy as I know the day I walked from Ranmore Common to Godstone was a long old day but damn was it good fun. Hard going fun.

The kind of thing that makes life thoroughly amazing and worth living. The best things in life have to be worked at, and are often hard going. But there was never any sense of accomplishment of watching Jeremy Kyle. Though, on second thoughts, anyone who can make it through a whole episode of that without wanting to throw the telly out the window has my admiration.

So, back off to the North Downs then

All in between me enjoying the South Downs and finishing my B&W Photography Magazine, B&W Photographer of the Year entry… Eeeep!

Nostalgia and This time last year

I haven’t written much here lately. Not for bad reasons, just been busy making the most of summer and that is in some respects why I am updating my blog on Saturday afternoon – I have been out and about so much that my flat has turned into a dump! So I’m having a day of cleaning up, mopping, hoovering – everything. Later on today I’ll be off out to take a photo of a subject I need for my entry to Black and White Photography Magazine’s B&W Photographer Of The Year competition (something I don’t anticipate getting anywhere with but I’m giving it a go, and the end result is 4 prints I will like and hang on the wall even if the critics think they suck!

This time last year

Today a year ago I started walking the South Downs Way, and since then in June I walked the North Downs Way. A combined distance with all the to-ing and fro-ing of probably 380 miles. I’m quite a nostalgic person and I own a pair of rose tinted specs for every day of the year but it did get me thinking a little, of how awesome it is to be able to just get out there and walk, enjoy the countryside and take photos. I’m actually going to do a print tonight of Gander Down which is where I walked through a year ago today, pure coincidence but a happy one all the same. (My subject is the South Downs.)

About three-four years ago I had got myself into a rut, one that I progressively made deeper and deeper, it taught me a lot in hindsight but I got in with the wrong people (again) and it almost destroyed me. It’s only now I’m looking back thinking, “What the… why!” I got myself into something I didn’t need to, probably only because I felt lonely and was having a hard time adjusting to the difference of being in University and then going into work, hardly trauma central but enough to unseat you, especially when you get made redundant  and then progressively all your friends move away back to their parents and you’re holding the fort out of stubbornness, blind stupidity and mostly a love of where you now live. This was in 2005/6 (before this recession) so I do feel for people out of work who have strong work ethic, signing on at the DSS is the most humiliating thing I’ve ever done.

And then there’s the stupid things I did in that time too, at the time I felt I should be doing them, and I learnt a lot, saw a lot (and I already had beforehand, life really ain’t all roses and sweet-peas I’m afraid, not for everybody anyway, but you can make your own life pretty OK if you try hard) but even though at the time I felt I should be doing these things, I look back and think what I damn idiot I was. But c’est la vie; it got me to a good situation now of where I know exactly what I’m doing and most of all, I don’t really have much but I’m now happy and even feel that I’ve got to really cram as much in as possible because life is so short!

Next year I have plans to probably do some more chalk-hill walking, Cotswolds Way is likely. I did think of Offa’s Dyke but I also want to go to France for a week and 2 weeks of holiday one for walking, one for France eats half of my annual leave, let alone taking 2 weeks for Offa’s Dyke and 1 week for France, I’ll be left with nothing for the rest of the year virtually.

Nostalgia

Last night I sat down and went through 4 boxes of Kodachrome slides I got back from walking on the North Downs Way. (It equates to the first 4 1/2 days of walking) I swear that looking at projected slides is one of the biggest things people miss out on with digital photography. I don’t like engaging in any trivial spats like digital or film, Mac or PC etc. but the cost of a 1080p projector (which doesn’t have the resolution of projected slides) vs. a half decent slide projector and some well exposed chromes is an experience so many are now not enjoying. The richness of the colour, the detail almost dripping off the slides. Gorgeous stuff.

Anyway, it was lovely just to sit there and “re-walk” that part of the North Downs, really casts the mind back and it was most enjoyable. It’s much more enjoyable to look at a print or a slide projected than looking at something on a computer screen I think, much more detail and saturation (whatever you use, including digital) and this year alone I have had 4 or 5 people loose their PCs due to hard disk failure and you guessed it either no backups or very little, losing all of their photos!

They’re now backing them up thank goodness but it worries me people aren’t looking after their slides, negatives, JPEGs or RAW files as well as they should. Get prints, get photo books done (one of the amazing things we can now do easily due to digital), store those slides properly, just get hard copies and back up any scan files or pictures from your camera. It’s so so important, otherwise we all risk losing a great deal of photographic history of our time on this planet.

North Downs Way

I haven’t written anything since I got back about my sojourn across the North Downs, a 132 mile hike from Farnham in Surrey to Dover in Kent via Rochester and Canterbury. The biggest reason as it stands has been my:

• Very busy couple of weeks since I got back
• The depressing fact that a year on I have still to pull my finger out and finish writing about the South Downs Way which I did almost a year ago now.

But there have been other reasons. When I started the South Downs Way I knew and still will produce a photo book on the South Downs Way but the flaw was trying to shoot it all in ‘one-sitting’ and whilst this is true to the journey, it has produced some of my favourite photos but also some that I am less than enamoured with. The upshot is that I’m going to need to re-visit the trail and photograph it again. Not exactly a bad thing in my book! So this project whilst very much swept aside for me to get on with impression:mk is alive and I am sticking with it. I just have to get these things right and there is no need to rush (unless of course I die tomorrow in which case i need to get a shift on!)

The other reason is a biggie, but that hasn’t stopped me getting on with it in the same way that say my birthday, barbeques, the pub (a few times admittedly!) and doing some extra work outside of the day job has done. But it has made me stop writing about it in yet another diary like fashion. Why?

I have long shrugged off or indeed acknowledged/struggled to find that any work of mine (photographically or written) has a philosophy, there is one but it’s not exactly obvious and probably still isn’t to me. But I do know what I am interested in and I’m now old enough to not give a damn about whether people think it’s odd, weird, deranged or obsessive. Which is a good start because there is nothing wrong than wanting to say photograph in black and white maybe the underside and underbelly of industrial Birmingham with its urban motorways and canals and decayed industry and social housing but not being able to do so because you’re worried a friend or all your friends are going to look dimly on it. Now, the latter is also something I will do (when I get time) but I’ve completely got over the whole keeping up appearances for friends, I am what I am and if you don’t like it do yourself and me a favour and kindly show yourself the door darling.

But behind this in the things I have attempted to write, and the things I do photograph of my own volition have been informed by something, or a series of somethings that are never entirely in isolation but do quite often float in the ether encapsulated all by themselves. Quite often these things are entirely subjective, subvocal, hidden and emotional and its hard to explain them except through a photo, or a sentence/paragraph that forms part of that overall patchwork of experience which describes where I am at this time, and what has gone before to bring me here in this frame of mind.

Without drifting needlessly into the obtuse, walking has always given me the freedom to think clearly. Whether that’s drifting around London or Brighton, or out in the wilds of the Downs or indeed the North Downs it hasn’t really mattered. The car, and to a lesser extent the train give you a sense of movement and an interesting perspective on how the landscape and your viewpoint shifts with that movement, but it’s nothing like the view you get when walking, which awakens and feeds that curious appetite. The bus for me does none of these, there’s no romance or emotion in that transport. It’s as utilitarian as a girdle (unless you have a girdle fetish, not that I am suggesting bus buffs are… Someone help me out of this hole!)

Walking this time seemed to sew up some kind of philosophy, it’s very quirky but it makes some sense. And so rather than write just a series of daily diaries of each day on the North Downs Way I’ve decided to work it into a wider remit on photography, subjectivity and philosophy of an art form and indeed maybe even a little of life. It’s hard to explain succinctly otherwise there would be no point in writing a book but it’s non-fiction and most definitely not a Kerouac-inspired journey dialogue. It is really a photography book, it might not be “Mastering Photoshop CS4’ or ‘The Dummies guide to Digital SLRs’ (I have no idea if those books exist but I bet they do, and I bet they are really really boring, bit like what I write then *chuckles*) but it’ll be interesting none the less.

The photo that summed this up for me is one I am still waiting back for, but maybe that’s it, a photo can make sense even with it not present if the thought behind it is sound. I was sat at Gatwick Airport station, on the final leg back home to Worthing, Day 14 of walking and I had done it, I had walked every inch from Farnham to Dover. And I was sat on the floor of the platform in the sun, it was nice to stretch out the legs but you get interesting perspectives on different levels. Ahead a lady, perhaps a flight attendant still dressed up glamorous strolled down the platform towards the incoming train and ahead a train was moving north to the far-side platform, the sun was bright. And it was hot (never start a sentence with a conjunction – except when it works for effect.) Long shadows carrying the cerebral and emotional baggage we all hide following in tow and the sky was pitch perfect blue. The departure board scrolling across for the Brighton 1842 or something like that fringed by its bright yellow metal armature which burst out uncontrollably against the navy skirt-suit of the what I have now decided is most certain an air-hostess. And in that pitch perfect blue sky a plane is coming into land taking people back from their escape, and the train is here to carry some away too on a hot Sunday noon. Why and what is all this for, each little step and snatched glance, with every uttered word what are we doing it for. Are we always In Search of Sunrise?

And photo sums it up for me what this book is about and that’s the book concept/title too, In Search of Sunrise. It’s a quirky idea but it makes sense. It’ll be a good antidote to ‘1001 Digital Photography and Adobe Lightroom Skills: The Ultimate Guide to everything.’

A Leica, 160 miles hiking – How they fared

First things first: My Canon EOS 5 and then 3 never fell apart on any hike. But then I hadn’t walked 160 miles with either in one go, but they proved to be tough cameras. So the Leica’s first outing on a hike through Surrey and Kent in South East England for 2 weeks around my neck covering at least 130 miles up and down on the trail and 30 miles to and from pubs, accommodation and around towns would give it a gruelling challenge.

The result was the M2 holding up perfectly apart from one screw going walkabout somewhere in Rochester probably.