'Tis the Season

Wedding season starts again soon, and my diary is already filling up really nicely. July and August are pretty much full, although September is pretty sparse. This is especially odd, as it was my busiest month by far last year. I'm really looking forward to getting back into the wedding photography swing - in fact, I've recently bought a new (nerd alert!) 70-200mm f/4 L IS USM lens, which was perhaps a bit too expensive for me at the moment, but it gives really fantastic results.

The first wedding is at the end of March, so I'll post some results soon!

Landscapes

I haven't ever been someone who takes landscape photographs, but I've been thinking a lot about the landscape that I inhabit recently. The area where we live is still being developed, and is in a constant state of change. Added to this, the (mis)guided busway passes close to our flat. It's a project linking Cambridge and the surrounding towns using a dedicated route for buses, and has been stuck in project management hell for over a year. The route is finished, but no buses have ever passed along it, as far as I know. It's basically a ghost road, used by cyclists and joggers, dog walkers and commuters, but not by buses. And I love it.





It's also unusual for me to shoot in colour, but I've been looking at a lot of Joel Sternfeld's work recently. He's not a photographer I've ever really paid much attention to - I know he has great skill, but I don't think I ever 'got' his images before. Now I've tried taking landscape photographs with a modern twist, I can see that he makes it look easy, when it really isn't.





Oh, and by the way - I've changed the design of my blog - I was getting quite bored of the blackness of the last layout.

Wedding Photography Website!

Hooray! My new wedding photography website is now totally live! You can see it here:

www.rowanlamb.co.uk

My old website, which used to be at that address, can now be seen at alt.rowanlamb.co.uk, if you're feeling sentimental.

I went to a wedding...

 

So, my friend Tom got married on Friday. I wasn't the official photographer - when you know 3 gabillion photographers, it's hard to pick one to ask. And we all know the old saying, 3 gabillion photographers are better than one, right?

So anyway, because I was 'off the clock', I was able to cut loose and take some fun shots. And break my flash into tiny pieces in the process. So here they are, in roughly chronological order. You can see the slow-then-rapid decline in decorum.

It started off so gently...


These two are handsome.


 See? Told you.

I don't quite know what's going on here. I also don't know who took the photograph, because that's me in the background there...

I'm not saying that this is how my glasses got broken, but...

A monocle suits you sir!

 Yeah, I was looking at your wife's bum. WHAT OF IT?

Congratulations to Tom and Tarana - I can't think of a nicer couple, and a better party.

Wedding Photography

As you may know, I am a part time wedding photographer. In the past, I've been happy to let this trundle on as a fun side-line to my day job. Next year, though, I'm going to try and take it up a notch. Phase one of this is a new website, so here we go. It's not completely finished yet (my excellent brother is building it for me in his spare time, a commodity that he has very little of); there are some tweaks to the home page to come, and perhaps some minor changes in content, but the skeleton is there, and most of the meat.

Preview!

Hallowe'en!

I took a lot of pictures, but you'll have to make do with these two, of my brother Leigh and his wife Shelley. All together now, BRAAAAAAIIIIIINS.....

Dead

The Cambridge University Museum of Zoology is cool.

Runners!

Went to a local 10k race on Sunday, with a borrowed 70-300mm lens. I've been thinking about buying something similar for my wedding work, but this one is about £450 on the web. It seems to be nice and sharp (softness in these images is a combination of bad focussing on my part, and the processing that the images went through. Plus I was shooting in jpeg, which I will never do again, even if time is limited), and the image stabilisation works really well. The copy I had had obviously been dropped or banged at some point, because the USM motor was whirring like a bastard.

Anyway, here are some 'portraits' that I took for fun.

Camping!

We took advantage of the great weather last weekend to take a nice little camping trip to the North Norfolk coast. As mentioned below, I've been shooting a lot more with colour in mind, so the sun really helps.

Long time

pool 1, originally uploaded by monkeyfinger.

Wow, I have totally neglected this blog recently. The intense period of activity involved in moving house, followed by a self-imposed period of little-to-no activity after moving in, alloyed with doing a few weddings in fairly quick succession, means that I haven't taken any 'arty' pictures in a long long while. The picture here isn't even that good, but illustrates nicely that now the summer is here, it's time to break out my colour photography hat. I find that colour photography is much more appealing in the summer - I suppose it's because it's sunny, simple as that. Anyway, more colour stuff on the way.