If you were a Medieval knight, one of the best ways to sort out problems was by hitting people with a pike.  Doing so in a tourney, helped to sharpen the skills for warfare.

The knights’ features are obscured by the helmets.  Unfortunate for photography but probably a good thing for their faces.The Portaloos are not a period detail.

I had my aperture wide open as usual, increasing my shutter speed.  This is a necessity if you want to take action shots in the murk of the English sun but by a happy coincidence, the result of throwing the background out of focus helps to separate the knight from the crowd.  Where would sports photography be if optical physics worked differently?

Perhaps Kodak will do an ‘Ilford’ and emerge as a solvent company with a plan for the future.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of a monument taken on monochrome film and then worked on a lot in Photoshop.

I cropped it and then worked on the levels until all the shades of grey were just about gone.

Also this week, I finally caught up and looked at all of the comments to a previous post of mine, about photography magazines which you can read here:

http://mostlymonochrome.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/why-i-hate-photography-magazines/

The comments largely agree with me.  I was looking through a magazine earlier this week in the local library and one thing that struck me was how much mention of video there was in the articles.  Its photography but not as I know it.  Still the same emphasis on kit and product over technique and simply great photos.  I contend that you can get more out of a half decent photo book than from a magazine, especially if you browse it for half an hour in a book shop and then leave without buying it.

Here ends my rant.

EOS 5 with Fujicolour.

This was taken with the largest aperture I could get out of the lens – 3.5.

As it’s New Year, I’ve taken some time to update my pages underneath the header.  The wordpress.com annual report is linked up there together with the ten most popular images from 2011.

This image above is not one of them but the young lady with her attention fixed on her phone shows why mobile technology is ruining street photography.  More and more, instead of looking up in case there’s someone trying to take a picture, people are tweeting and updating their status on facebook. Eyes down will be the pose of the 21st Century.

One of the great photographic cliches and like most cliches, it’s hard to resist.

Canon EOS 5 and Fujicolour C200.

The is the sun just moments before it set, in a forest.  I’m not sure if it works or not.  Comments and criticisms are welcome.

Update:

Thanks for all the comments.  I think that problem is that I took the shot too late.  A few minutes before and there would have been more detail on the image.  It’s been cropped and lightened to try and get less black and more detail but there isn’t much to work with.  A better image would have been ‘The Second Last Rays of the Sun.’

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of people walking into him.”

Doctor Johnson