About Me

My photo
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
I am a father of two, who has been a paramedic for 15 years and a professional photographer for around 5. That is until recently, from the 1st of May 2017 I will no longer work on the frontline full time. Instead I have made the transition from specialist paramedic to advanced practitioner and will be working full time in primary care. This blog will chart the development of myself from my current role of specialist paramedic to an advanced practitioner. In the last year I was diagnosed with Ankylosing spondylitis. Which is a degenerative condition which affects the spine. While this diagnosis saddened me obviously. It also came as a relief as I had struggled for over a year and had no idea what was wrong with me. So the diagnosis also came with some relief as I finally had a name to put to my condition. It did help me to look forward and consider a new career pathway. I am the first paramedic to work in primary care in my practice area. This is quite an accolade.

Saturday 9 January 2010

Manual settings

Using the manual settings on my camera. 

I have really enjoyed using the manual settings on my camera and try to use them all the time. I always did use any setting other than auto. I've always experimented and tried different approaches. But using the manual settings, or rather understanding how to use them has really improved my photography I think. 

If took me a little while to get to grips with the settings. But now I feel really confident about how to achieve good results each time I pick up the camera. 

Over the Christmas period I decided to get to grips with apeture settings and long exsposures. I was very pleased with the results see link below : 

I took these images using a gorilla pod from the window of my car while at work. I tried several differing techniques and differing exsposure times before achieving the desired end result. 

Baltic trip

Baltic trip

We went on a trip to the Baltic Gallery in Newcastle, there was amongst other exhibitions a Martin Parr exhibition on. We have covered his work during our history of photography section of the course. I liked his work before we went on the visit. There was no doubt that seeing the large scale prints on  a gallery wall in all there glorius colour was an impressive sight. It inspired me to re-think my photography a little. I have always been interested in the use of colour in my photgraphy. This is an area that Parr clearly likes to focus on.  Parr seems to create photographs which both observe and mock at the same time. 

I also got a chance to visit the Laing where there was an exhibition called 'No such thing a society', named after the famous Margret Thatcher quote in the press in the 80's.

This was an excellent and thought provoking exhibition. I took notes of the names of several photographers who inspired me in particular I liked the works of  

Daniel Meadows : Portsmouth, John Payne and his two friends. 1974  

Chris Killip : Father and child, 1975  and Girl with hoop

What struck a chord with me about these images was that they had somehow captured a period in time be that intentional or otherwise. Those times have gone now, but without these important social documentary works they would never have been captured or recorded.