On a hillside above Pyongyang, commanding a wonderful view of the city, stand row on row of granite blocks, each topped with a bust. The figures portrayed gaze out over the wooded slope of Mount Taesong to the rapidly changing cityscape below. These are North Korea’s fallen, martyrs in the cause of freedom from Japanese occupation.
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Some say that a photo should be a direct representation of what we saw as we clicked the shutter. I say, that is impossible. The eye, like the camera, may see the true picture, but the brain tends to see what it wants to see, and the photo may therefore disappoint.
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Please don’t ask me to pick my favourite landscape – it’s impossible. I love the drama of high mountain ranges, and the huge open skies of the desert; the haunting light that illuminates certain lands close to our poles, and grassy savannahs strewn with baobab trees; gentle green rolling hills, and roaring waterfalls.
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Everyone needs food to survive, but some of us are fortunate enough to be able to appreciate not just as a necessity of life but also one of its pleasures. And when food becomes not only delicious to eat but also beautiful to look at, it is truly a special treat.
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Today, everyone is arguably a photographer, shooting images with their phone cameras almost every day. But when I started, as a child in the 1960s, photography was a hobby, and a relatively expensive one at that. Only the keenest photographers went on the journey from taking family snapshots to an obsession with getting the best from a camera, trying to create something both memorable and beautiful.
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Any photographer knows that light is everything, and that the best light is often found at the beginning or end of the day. Sometimes you can plan to be in the right place at the right time, but sometimes it just happens.
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Despite the invasion of modern living in many parts of their country, the Maasai cling proudly to their traditional way of life. They never cultivate land (they consider it demeaning) but instead graze cattle, which hold a god-like status in their culture. The cows provide almost everything they need to live: meat, skin, milk, dung for the walls and floor of their huts, and warm blood extracted from the neck of a live cow and mixed with milk as an iron rich food.
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'Nature does not turn out her work according to a single pattern; she prides herself upon her power of variation.' Sometimes the most effective photographs of natural subjects (plants, animals, even entire landscapes) can be achieved by getting so close that the subject’s outline disappears.
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There's nothing like a carnival parade to stir up the emotions. There’s the anticipation among the spectators as they wait for the parade to arrive – can we see it in the distance yet? The excitement when finally it arrives, with all the colour and spectacle. The joy on the faces of the participants in the parade as they see the reactions. And the slight feeling of let-down when it has passed, seemingly so quickly after the long wait.
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London is a city of contrasts, where famous sights and almost palatial homes can rub shoulders with the worn and neglected. Just as its people are diverse and eclectic, so too are its buildings.
