New (old) camera!

I've been away for a while in Essex with my partner so I apologise for the lack of input on this blog. Slowly I'll pick things up to at least one blog a week (no promises though, as I have a dissertation deadline in a few weeks). For my new projects I've decided to make the switch from film to digital and stopped using my EOS 1V and went ahead with buying an EOS 1D MK II N from a good friend Jonathan - check out his latest goings on over on http://jonathanjk.com/
The fact that I have no ability to process my own film over the Christmas holidays and that I need to shoot a lot of images, eventually lead to this (probably way overdue) decision. I hope I can be a lot more proactive with shooting work now that I don't have to worry about loaning a DSLR from university and the cost & time of 35mm film. Although I've started some new projects I'm waiting until I have more of a variety built up before I post anything surrounding that work. So in the meantime I'll add what I manage to shoot every week.
Before I left for Essex I quickly run over to the student protest in Swansea town centre to try out my new camera. Here are the results

Paris street work

Last bit of work from Paris, I thought it would be better for editing purposes to separate the Paris Photo images from these shots, apologies in advance for the textbook romantic stuff - I just couldn't help myself - when in Rome, I mean Paris.

Still low-res flatbed scans for now, once I have some feedback I'll get on the case with fibre-based printing and then upload a few onto my website (which is soon to be changing, I'll keep you posted).

Enjoy the weekend!

Paris Photo 2010

As promised, here are some images from Paris Photo. These 6 images are just quick flatbed scans to get some feedback before I make a smaller edit and print on fibre-based paper (I will then scan the FB print).
I'll add the final prints from my Paris trip to my website hopefully sometime before Christmas, in the meantime please feel free to comment and help me with making a smaller edit.

Kings vs. Storm

No update for a week, but I have a valid reason, I've been away enjoying Paris Photo 2010 since last Wednesday. Before I left for Paris I made the decision to take with me only my Canon SLR with a 50mm lens and 35mm film. After a few digital shoots lately it was really nice to get back to using a film SLR. I find that using film slows me down and I think about how I’m framing my images a bit more than compared with a DSLR (where 1000 images is an easy feat for one weekend). Also, when I only get 36 exposures in exchange for one of my hard earned £5 notes and there’s no option to immediately view an image afterwards, I take a little bit more care for each exposure (which I hope in turn lands me with better work, well, that’s how the theory goes anyway). Sadly though because it costs me £5 for 36 shots and it takes so much longer to process and print, I’ve had little choice other than to let digital slip in more and more these last 12 months, increasingly more I feel like I’m fighting a loosing battle, especially being colour-blind where post production on colour chemical prints can take a lifetime adjusting the filters on an enlarger. So while I have fun playing with chemicals processing my Paris work, here are some digital shots (Canon 5D mkII) to keep this blog going.

This work is an expansion on the training session with Kings Basketball earlier on in the month. They really liked that work and wanted me back to capture their game against Swansea Storm. I've decided to publish some stuff that is more about Kings Ball Club and less about the game, if you're interested in some action shots then please visit http://kingsballclub.blogspot.com/2010/11/everyone-kb.html

COD release night

This is the first bit of work that relates to my main project (no other clues yet sorry), the Call Of Duty Black Ops release night in Swansea. This game promised to be the biggest of the year and didn't disappoint with Worldwide sales figures reaching roughly $360m within day one.

Residents against Ffos-y-Fran

I've been working with http://www.stopffosyfran.co.uk/ producing images around the Ffos-y-Fran site and luckily I managed to free up some time for another visit this afternoon.
Here's an edit of three digital images from today and three 35mm shots I took towards the end of this summer. The 5th image down was selected for the Our Summer exhibition in the Swansea Grand Theatre last month.

Weather permitting, I would like to take some large format photographs of the area. This is the largest opencast coal mine in Britain and the scale of the "land reclamation scheme" (as Miller Argent likes us to call it) is truly massive.

Kings Basketball

Here are the images from Friday's training session with Kings Basketball (http://kingsballclub.blogspot.com/). I've been asked to cover a game some time in the near future so this won't be the last time you see stuff surrounding Kings Basketball.
All images were shot with a Canon EOS 1D MKIII, using a 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 lens.

Coming soon, images for http://www.stopffosyfran.co.uk/ around the Ffos-y-Fran site in Merthyr Tydfil.

First post

I've finally managed to put aside some time to start my first blog (well, first proper blog, I do have a twitter account http://twitter.com/alexdmiller but I rarely use it, although I will get better as time goes on). I'm hoping to keep this blog relatively busy with material that I've shot or found whilst completing my photojournalism degree at Swansea Met uni. I'll be shooting some new material this weekend for a Welsh Senior Division basketball team and hope to have an edit by Monday.

I was going to leave it at that (and I probably should have, it's now 4:50 in the morning) but I couldn't leave my first post without any photographs. So I tried to find some recent sport related images to link in with this weekends shoot and I realised that it's been a while, 3 years in fact. So, not so much through choice but more a lack of material, here are my most recent (2007) sport images...