All photographers recognise that juxtaposing opposites in an image, or in a pair of images, creates an interesting tension for the viewer. Life is made up of opposites: big and small, old and young, light and dark, and yes, full and empty.
-
-
There are some places that stay with you forever, whether you spend just a few hours there or many days. Places that almost haunt you. Places you long to return to some day. Sometimes you fulfil that longing and return, maybe often. And sometimes you never go back, but never forget.
-
A few months ago I published a post featuring serene moments around the world. My focus then was on the places where I have enjoyed some serenity while travelling, slowing the pace to enjoy the peace and quiet of different environments. For this post I have chosen images of other people enjoying some downtime.
-
A still image freezes time for a fraction of a second. Life stands still, and we don’t know what happened next. But a movie, while in reality a fast-changing sequence of still images, shows us life in motion. Is that an easier way to tell a story? Perhaps; however our imaginations alone can often create multiple stories out of a single image.
-
The Roman poet Horace said that 'a picture is a poem without words'. Of course he would not have known about photography, living as he did over two thousand years ago. But I’m sure if he had, he would have looked for poems in photos.
-
The colonial city of Vigan is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for good reason. It is one of the few Spanish colonial towns in the Philippines to remain relatively intact. Its unique architecture fuses native Filipino and Oriental building styles with more typical colonial Spanish features.
-
A good portrait photograph is shaped by the connection between two people, photographer and subject. Without that connection the image is at best less interesting, at worst lifeless. When we look at an interesting portrait we discover something about the person portrayed: their life, their character. But we only do so if the photographer has discovered this and brought it out in their image.
-
I have been taking photos since I was ten years old, so for almost sixty years. As a child I photographed my family, mainly on family holidays. As I grew older I documented school trips abroad, my time at university, and of course holidays.
-
The Ifugao are the indigenous people of the Banaue, the area of Luzon Island famed for its UNESCO listed rice terraces. The name means ‘people of the earth'.
-
The people of Sagada traditionally followed a unique burial ritual, hanging their coffins from cliffs or placing them in a cave. They believed that the higher the dead were placed, the greater chance of their spirits reaching a higher nature in the afterlife.