it’s a date…

Edited and updated historical post from www.steers-gallery.co.uk

Some years ago, when I had delusions of being an adequate photographer, I was given the opportunity to shoot a corporate calendar for my employer. You see, I’d made such a fuss about the quality of the previous year’s effort that I think they decided it was the only way to shut me up. Late 2003 it was. My deadline was very tight, but I managed to deliver a dozen nicely exposed 6×6 slides of moderately interesting views, and even got involved with the graphic designer on the layout. In truth, the print quality of the final calendar didn’t do me any favours, but that was well beyond my control, and having sold a number of the images as framed cibachrome prints, I’m happy in the knowledge that my personal quality control was up to standard. It was a fun project, and I wrote an article describing the experience and speculatively sent it off to Amateur Photographer magazine. Joy of joys, it was published, and only slightly edited. Surely I was now set… the big league beckoned… a stellar career in calendar photography, or journalism, or both, was a certainty…

 

Continue reading “it’s a date…”

Up, up and away

Edited and updated historical post from www.steers-gallery.co.uk Originally published 16/04/13

It’s easy to see why aerial photography by the likes of Yann Arthus-Bertrand has become so popular. It’s probably the driving force behind the current rise in popularity of camera drones. There is something quite compelling about seeing “the earth from the air”. It’s a perspective we seldom see, and can be breathtaking.

However, remotely controlling a drone from terra-firma cannot possibly compare  with actually being up there like the girl in the “nimble” ads… (ask someone who remembers the 1970s).

So, July 2012 and I’m in a big wicker basket suspended beneath a big red balloon. It was a warm, slightly hazy and remarkably still morning at Etchinghill. In fact, so little wind was there that, after drifting lazily this way and that trying to find some direction from breezes at varying altitudes, we eventually came back to earth on the same golf course from which we had taken off some 90 minutes earlier. Continue reading “Up, up and away”