Women In Photography

Over the years I've witnessed numerous conversations, blog posts and articles on the subject of women in photography - but every time those involved seemed (to me, at least) to miss a key point. 

It's good to own a woman for many reasons, but an important one is the blocking of lens flare in telephoto situations... when your long, manly arms just don't have the reach required to do the job adequately. This has been a problem for me, despite being roughly 6' 5", more times than I can count on both hands (one more reason to bring your woman, and her fingers along) - but was never more evident than on my recent wander along the south side of the Swale...

New Images!

I've just spent an afternoon uploading a 6 month backlog of photos to my site - so thought I might add a wee blog post to summarise what has been changed/added. All of the photos below can now be found at www.matrobinsonphoto.co.uk - so please do take a look. There's also a buy button underneath each image taking you directly to the page relevant page. 

There's a selection from the Yorkshire Dales, Peak District, Lake District, Yorkshire Coast, York, Richmond and some general North Yorkshire ones - so quite a nice range! 

Ribblehead Viaduct, Yorkshire Dales - buy here.

Rachel: Part 3

I know, I skipped parts one and two, but you can see the photos from those on my Facebook Page... so here's part three. There are few people I'd want to photograph this many times in such a short space of time - having only ever even seen her for the first time busking in town about this time last year... but it's hard to get enough of this face. Quite a nice person to go with it too!

So, to summarise, she was originally one of my 100 strangers, I subsequently asked if she'd fancy some photos taking, and she has turned into a bit of a regular. She's also a somewhat (ha!) talented musician... for evidence you can watch this... (keep in mind that this is live, and filmed by some random tourist!)... 

You can find her, and a few more of my photos on her Facebook page. 

The Finger

A few times in the last few weeks the conversation about avoiding lens flare has come up - so I thought I'd just put up a quick post about this well known, but underused technique...

I'm not going to go into the details of merging photos and whatnot, there's plenty of information out there for anyone wanting to learn more about that, but I am going to show you how important this is even when the sun itself is not in the frame. When the sun is in the frame, there are often obvious flaring problems visible in the image - made worse when adding further pieces of glass to the front of the lens when using filters... which is just one of the many reasons I prefer to blend exposures instead. For example:

Excuse the blown out sky!

2014: People

I've split my 2014 summary into two parts, you can find the landscapes part over here. This section is focused solely on people - mostly of the model variety. Whilst my photographing strangers has slowed down somewhat this year, I've still captured a few and met plenty of other lovely new faces. Instagram and Twitter have proved an endless mine of pretty faces yet to be photographed - to the extent that I now have quite a backlog to get through (there are worse problems to have!). I'm constantly amazed at the oddly positive responses I get from what I would class as being a weirdo - sending random girls messages asking if I can photograph them - but I suppose the beginnings of a decent portfolio now at least help me with that initial contact.

2014: Landscapes

2014 has been a busy year for me, so I've decided to split my 2014 summary into two parts - the first of which will be concentrating on landscapes and the second on people. It's always interesting to do these posts, just so that I know that in a year's time I'll have something to look back on, cringe a little, and see how much more I've come on in the past 12 months. That, and it's also fun to look back through my year of pictures - something I don't do often enough - and remember all those amazing, fleeting moments of beauty that I've been lucky enough to enjoy.

The Year Of The Rainbow

It's getting to the time when I've got to start thinking about my 2014 review post... but in doing so, I've realised that one thing has stood out more than anything else this year... rainbows.

For some reason, whether by luck or (lack of?) judgement, I've not really photographed many of these lovely things until this year... but following on from a pretty wet and windy sunrise on Curbar Edge last January I've been lucky enough to find myself out in the perfect conditions on numerous occasions. Sometimes this has been through forecasting errors, I've expected blue skies and had torrential downpours, sometimes through careful planning and picking a location that will work for them, and sometimes I've been in the right place, waiting for them, but to no avail. 

Whilst rainbows are obviously beautiful, they tend to come in the most challenging of conditions - when wind blows heavy showers through and light shoots down in and around them. To make matters worse, the wind always seems to be blowing into the lens, so with all the water flying about it makes shooting them quite an ordeal. You mentally compose your shot, pick your settings, push your camera to its limits in terms of technical stuff, then quickly put it to your eye, shoot, hope for the best, dry it off and repeat - until you've got one you're happy with with minimal rain spots to clean up.

So anyway, here are a series of rainbows that I've seen this year - with each photo being on a different occasion.