Cardiff International Festival of Photography

This festival has been running throughout May and ends on the 31st so this Bank Holiday weekend might be the chance you need to go and see what looks to be a really impressive range of exhibitions. as it says

A month long festival of exhibitions, discussions, screenings, performances, events and celebrations in both physical and virtual spaces and places.

And Where are We Now?

This was the question we asked artists, cultural producers, curators and programmers to address with their contributions to Diffusion2013, and the one we will be exploring with audiences and participants.

People encounter photographic images daily not only in newspapers, magazines, on TV and in advertising, but also through online channels, mobile phone applications and social networking sites. We live in a time of image glut, and with the boundaries increasingly blurred between artist and audience, amateur and professional, we might ask and where is photography now? The world has never before been so visualised, yet the nature and meaning of photography and its status in art has never been so hotly debated……MORE

 

Maybe the most famous photographer showing is David Bailey, no the real one not the one you are associated with every time you bring out your camera as in “who do you think you are….”

Lewis Merthyr Colliery, Trehafod, from The Valleys Project, 1985 (c) David Bailey

At The Tramshed

Attack of the Killer, 2012 © Paul Duerinckx

Paul Duerinckx is a documentary photographer based in Swansea. His practice is based primarily on documenting people and place with a specific interest in street photography and the evolving roles of documentary photography and photojournalism as they respond to the ever-shifting mediums and institutions in which they manifest.

Tom Leyshon Watching the News, 1985 © Mike Berry at Tramshed

Drift, 2011 © Tim Davies at National Museum Cardiff

There are many more exhibitions, photographers and artists have a look here

How to take a photography portrait in 10 minutes

When time is short or the location is a disaster, every photographer needs some tried and tested ideas to fall back on. Here are a few tricks of the trade

David Bailey once said, “I’m very quick. Ten minutes, that’s about enough time for a portrait.”

How long should it take to shoot a portrait for the Guardian? Probably longer than the time our photographers are often given: interviews run over; subjects are busy people; it’s a daily newspaper, and arrangements are often made at the last minute; the pictures are wanted for a pressing deadline.

So you’re the photographer who has been assigned the job, you’ve rushed at the last minute to arrive at an unprepossessing building where the subject is finishing an interview in a dull room. It could be in a bland hotel or an office decorated in an even blander shade of beige. What do you do next?….READ MORE HERE

This useful article in The Guardian doesn’t really tell you anything you couldn’t work out for yourself by looking at pictures of important people in newspapers and magazines. Most photographers have their style, their go to way of photographing and rarely shift far from it. Jane Bown, who photographed for the Observer was a case in point. See how she always uses light from one direction with preferably a dark background. Very effective.

We teach about natural light portraiture on our Portrait courses

One photographer who makes is living photographing the very important and to whom 10 minutes would be luxury is Ander McIntyre his website is absolutely full of images of presidents, politicians, scientists, artists and others in the public eye and all photographed in about 2 minutes. Go and have a look at his remarkable portraits and learn.

 

 

All images ©Ander McIntyre

Photography galleries in London

There is nothing better for the keen amateur photographer than to spend time in photographic galleries looking at the work of great photographers. If you are in London then this guide to galleries on the Time Out website might help you find your way around

London has produced many of the twentieth century’s greatest photojournalists and fashion photographers – Terence Donovan, David Bailey, Don McCullin and Norman Parkinson among them. And although the medium sometimes struggles to be accepted as fine art, the first (and so far only) photographer to win the Turner Prize, Wolfgang Tillmans in 2000, was also a Londoner, albeit an adopted one.

 

The capital’s thriving and ever-expanding art scene is home to galleries that show and sell photography in all its forms, from the earliest nineteenth-century daguerreotypes to limited-edition fine-art prints and documentary shots of celebrities and pop stars.See all the galleries listed here

50 photography tips from jobbing pros to famous photographers

Advice. It’s a funny thing. If we applied all of photography’s apparent rules and dos and don’ts to our work, there would be little, if any, room for creativity and surely that’s the point. So you’ll find no textbook photography tips here; instead we asked 50 top pro and famous photographers to share the secrets they’ve gleaned from years of shooting day in day out.Expect to be inspired and challenged by the advice of famous photographers like David Bailey and Mary Ellen Mark, as well as up-and-coming names and photographers who make it their business to take amazing pictures for their clients each day…..READ MORE

Here is no 1 of 50

6 – Bob Aylott
To never miss a street picture, always have your camera set to 1/250 sec at f/5.6, ISO 400. When the clocks change for summer, change the aperture to f/8 instead.

Bob is an award-winning former Fleet Street photographer who has gone on to interview the world’s best shooters.

 

Here is number 13

13 – David Loftus
I remember being told at art college: ‘Always shoot with the sun behind you or to the sides to avoid flare.’ Some of my favourite shots have been taken when I’ve allowed flare to happen – fashion shots, portraits and interiors have all benefited on occasion… Keep some thick black paper and a roll of gaffer tape in your kit bag so you can extend your lens hood into more of a funnel shape, so that the flare isn’t too excessive, and shoot away.

David is one of the big names in food photography, having worked with the likes of Heston Blumenthal and Jamie Oliver. He shot Jamie’s last six books.

Bailey’s East End

Bailey is Newham’s most famous son. The exhibition of pictures of the East End, taken over 50 years, will see him return to Newham while the world’s focus is on east London. It is little known that David Bailey has photographed east London streets and their inhabitants from the early 60′s right up to the present day, returning time and again to the stomping ground of his youth. The photographs that will be displayed, many of them large-scale prints, document the changing physical and social landscape of east London showing streetscapes, characters and scenes of east London life. Some famous faces appear but they are nestled in among the renowned ‘faces’ of the area. Bailey’s photographs also provide a visual record of the different groups of immigrants who have settled in this part of the city. The exhibition will take place in London’s first new Enterprise Zone – the Royal Docks, which was the largest man-made Docks in the world when constructed 150 years ago.….MORE

14 July – 11 August 2012. Royal Docks, Newham.
Entry: £6, £4 conc.

Diane Smyth writes in the BJP about this exhibition

“My mum used to call it ‘us and them’,” says David Bailey. “Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree [two of his girlfriends and models] were posh to her. I stayed at her house one time with Jean, and in the morning Jean asked where the other sheet was. My mum took a dislike to Jean then because she thought she was she was being really snobby – to her, you got one sheet and a blanket and that was it. Art’s great because there is no ‘us and them’, no one cares where you come from. Art gets rid of all that.” 

Bailey shot to fame in the 1960s for his fashion photography, and for his East End roots. Along with Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy he embodied a new kind of fashion photographer who was hip, heterosexual and working class – or, as Duffy put it: “Before 1960, a fashion photographer was tall, thin and camp. But we three are different: short, fat and heterosexual.” Born in 1938 in Leytonstone and brought up in East Ham, Bailey’s earliest memories are of air raid shelters; he went on to photograph East End gangster Reggie Kray’s wedding. “Reg asked me if I would shoot it and I thought ‘I’ve got no choice’,” he says. “There’s no reshoot – the reshoot would be concrete shoes.”.…MORE

David Bailey took this picture in London’s East End in 1968; this summer it will be included in a large solo show called Bailey’s East End which will be held in the Royal Docks as part of the Create2012 summer programme. Untitled, 1968 © David Bailey.

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2165078/david-baileys-east-homecoming#ixzz1sPLFKSWf
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Rankin – todays Great Photographer and a thoroughly decent bloke

To many people, those not interested in photography, there has only ever been one photographer of note, certainly in the UK anyway, it would be interesting to know if there were similar examples in other countries, but I digress. Everyone who owns a dslr or before that a film slr would have, at some time, had said to them, who do you think you are, David Bailey?

Bailey was and is a fine photographer, he defined the look of the the 60’s a halcyon time for some. It was his pictures that made the time swing, he was influential and popularised photography made it aspirational. It does seem a shame that he is the only photographer known even today, some might hazard a guess at that royal bloke (Lichfield [Lord]) or the one that photographed Diana (Mario Testino) but do we have someone to define our times and who should be known?

I would suggest that in the UK we have a perfect opportunity to supplant Bailey in the general populations’ mind as the photographer with the excellent Rankin.

You probably know his pictures even if you don’t know his name, his work is fashion, advertising, portraits, beauty and special projects. I think he has everything Bailey had, he is supremely talented, a technician and artist. Have a look at his beautiful website

In 2010 he traveled to South Africa, you may have seen a documentary about his trip, through encounters with legendary conflict photographers the Bang Bang Club, documentary photographer David Goldblatt and photojournalist Alf Kumalo amongst others, Rankin went on a compelling and moving photographic journey to see the nation through their gaze.

There is a portfolio of Rankin’s pictures from the South Africa trip on the Independent Newspaper website here and here is an interview where he talks about the trip to The Guardian

He also went to DRC (Congo) for Oxfam

There is an Oxfam book of Rankin’s portraits from Congo which you can buy here

Rankin kicked off 2009 by inviting people across the UK to participate in his most ambitious project to date – Rankin Live! A show of two halves, Rankin Live brought the museum-scale retrospective of the last 22 years in Rankin’s photographic life together with the portraits of 1,500 of today’s British public. This was a huge undertaking that involved Rankin photographing the ordinary people of Britain. Known for his celebrity portraits he brought his skill and vision plus his humanity to a new project. You can see many of these portraits on his website here is a link

Rankin from the models’ viewpoint

James Anthony by Rankin. Photograph: Rankin

This is what James Anthony says about the experience…”

It’s a cold, wet February morning and I’m schlepping down Brick Lane in east London to have my photo taken by Rankin, one of the world’s most famous portrait and fashion photographers. The studio is a vast exhibition room in the Old Truman Brewery, a fascinating and spooky place whose former owners are mentioned in David Copperfield.

I’m here for Rankin Live!, a staggeringly ambitious project to photograph 1,000 people from around the UK. Rankin will shoot, instantly project, print and hang a portrait of each subject, with the finished photographs being exhibited in the gallery. They will also be made available to buy for £50, with profits going to Oxfam……more

So are you impressed yet by this extraordinary photographer? I think it must be time to go and have another look through his portfolios this will take you there