I was just sat half-watching reruns of the classic British TV series The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (or H2G2 for short). Right at the end the main characters Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect have crash landed 2 million years ago on Earth and are trying to teach some cave men scrabble so that the spaceship full of some other planet’s castoffs that crash landed with them won’t out-evolve them (it’s mad stuff and if you don’t know the story then either read the books, listen to the radio show, watch the TV series or buy the film on DVD – and what rock have you been hiding under?). They eventually give up realising it’s futile and walk off into the distance.

And at exactly that point I looked up at the TV and exclaimed: “I know where that is!”. Here’s the final scene:

And here’s a photo I took in March of 2007 just above Dove Stone Reservoir near where I live:

You’ll note that it’s exactly the same place – although at a different time of year! The notch on the horizon at centre-left, the straight line of trees in the distance from lower left to upper right, the boulder which is right at the front of my shot but further in the distance on the TV and the position of the river.

It’s a small world indeed but it just goes to show when you look through the viewfinder to take in a scene, compose a shot and click the shutter to capture a photo – it gets not only imprinted on a digital card but in the back of your mind too! A lot of thought goes into every photograph I take and every one feels like a personal achievement. Which is why I never forget a photo I’ve taken – although I may well forget where it was taken as my memory’s not always the best!

I haven’t really taken many photographs over the last six months and I’ve been trying to figure out why. I’ve taken plenty of snapshots of random things but I’m talking about getting my SLR out, maybe with the tripod, and taking photographs. If you’ve had a look through my Flickr stream (particularly the My Favourites set) you’ll see that I have some pretty strong photos in there and when I put my mind to it can capture something pretty good. Here’s one of my favourites – arguably one of the best natural photographs I’ve taken:

I spent quite a while going on shoots with my friend Ade on a near weekly basis but eventually I just had to stop and take a break from it. He loves taking photos – and is far better at it than me – but I just can’t keep up his relentless enthusiasm for trawling around Yorkshire taking so many pictures.

I recently watched a series on BBC4 called ‘The Genius Of Photography‘ and that’s where I really understood the power of photography to change the world and shape people’s view of it. The series charted the history of photography and how it was at first a novelty, then used for propaganda, war reporting, art and a host of other purposes – but underpinning everything was how photography has charted the history of humans over the last 170 years – from our greatest achievements to our greatest atrocities. Some of the most important pictures ever taken were shown and discussed and only by closely looking at some of them did the true genius of the photographers who took them come through.

If I ever get any ideas that I’m a good photographer I just need to look at some of the photographs featured in the series and realise that I have a very great deal to learn indeed. Knowing how to compose and expose a photograph properly is only the beginning – it’s what you take the photograph of, when and how you choose to do it that’s the key.

I guess that’s the thing I’ve been struggling with. I’ve found over the years that if I’m ever to stick at anything I need to have an underlying reason and sense of direction. I need a purpose. One of my character strengths and weaknesses is that I can be remarkably single-minded about things, but if I don’t have a goal in mind then I tend to drift aimlessly. And I think that’s been my problem with photography – I really enjoy it, but I’ve only been going out to take photographs. I haven’t been going out to take photographs of ’something in particular’.

So my challenge is to think of a photography assignment to set myself and then go about fulfilling it. I’ll do my best to document the process and keep you updated on how I get on.

I wrote a guest article on my friend John Topley’s site about my Life With a Mac (since he was the one who got me in to Macs by writing a guest post on here I thought it best to write about the results on his site). Since it was quite a few paragraphs of me rambling I decided it needed a photograph to add a bit of interest and break up the text. I wanted to somehow involve my Mac and to a lesser extent me (since I’m the owner).

In a flash of inspiration I thought I could take a picture of me using the Mac, looking over the screen which would show off the Apple logo and not show off much of me (since I’m actually not into pictures of me and I’m sure nobody else is). Then I thought that if it the light from the screen illuminated my face, that would be cool like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction – you never get to see what’s inside it but you get to see it glow when John Travolta’s character looks inside it. The shot would hopefully capture the joy I get from using my Mac and hint at the warm glow I get inside from it. I set it up, took the shot and ended up with this:

I think you’ll agree that it’s not quite what I was intending! I quickly realised two things when I opened it in Photoshop. One was that it was only going to work in black and white. And two was that there was no way I could make me look anything other than evil! I look like a scheming super-villain planning something fiendish. I really like it, although not for the reasons I originally intended.

I’ve often said I’d rather be lucky than talented and this is the sort of thing I mean. Had I actually managed to create the exact shot I wanted, I’d have been happy and that would have been that. But instead I got something completely different that I didn’t expect by sheer luck and am delighted by the results – much more so than if I’d got it “right”. Talent is over-rated!

Those good people at Moo have come up with another cool way to enjoy your photographs. They started with MiniCards (some of mine are pictured right) which are half-sized business cards that you can decorate with your own pictures (whether they be from Flickr or elsewhere). You can put what you like on the back of them and they’re the sort of thing you can give out at parties or just randomly show off to people. Very nice.

So as soon as I heard they’d come up with moo StickerBooks I went straight to the site and ordered myself some. I had no idea what I’d do with them but the good thing about stickers is that you can stick them to virtually anything! Here’s what they look like:

They come on little tear-out pages with 6 to a page and the book contains 90 stickers in total. You can choose as few or as many different photos as you like. For a fiver per book they’re a bargain so I got 2 to get me started! As usual with moo the quality is excellent and I’m looking around the office at the moment for things to stick them to. Expect to see a moo sticker stuck on something near you soon!

My friend Ade was on assignment taking photos of black and white cows (strange but true) and since I was there and we found a field full of the beasts I rattled off a few shots. My favourite of the lot has to be this one:

Since I'm much better at taking photos than coming up with witty taglines, does anyone out there have a suggestion for a caption? 

Quite often when I'm going out to take some photographs with my friend Ade I'm almost willing him to phone me and tell me he's not going to bother. I'll look outside and it'll be cold, wet, windy and rainy. Or even hailing. I'll picture in my head sitting in the car in the middle of nowhere praying for a break in the weather that never comes.

Except Ade doesn't cancel – he never does – we head out and more often than not we get lucky with some amazing spells of great light and I realise that if we'd cancelled we'd have missed some great shots. Ade really has a gift for getting lucky with photography conditions.

So last Sunday I was in a similar mood, it had been raining and sleeting on and off all morning and as soon as we left my house in his car the weather took a turn for the worse. When we arrived at our destination we had to sit in the car for 20 minutes while it lashed it down! When it stopped we headed to Goredale Scar and were treated to some fantastic light, as you can see below:

We then carried on to Malham Tarn and the weather was looking even more grim than before. If I was on my own I'd have just driven home but luckily Ade never gives up, and the sun briefly broke out letting me take the following picture, which in my opinion is the best photo I've taken so far (although not a patch on Ade's work):

I'm going to print this one out 20" x 30" and put it on my wall at home. Like most photos it looks much better printed out than it does on a computer screen and I reckon it'll look great poster sized. The detail on the full-sized picture is really quite impressive and shows what you can do with a not-exactly-high-end digital camera like mine.

It just goes to show that persistence pays off and a day spent in the cold and wet countryside is well worth it when you get something you can put on your wall like this. And having a friend who's not only the source of all my knowledge of photography but has the persistence and determination of a fanatic is pretty useful too! 

After Port Stephens we spent the next 3 nights staying in Katoomba which is in the heart of the Blue Mountains national park. The blue mountains are called the blue mountains because the eucalyptus oil given off by the trees gives the air a bluish tinge you can see below:

The place is absolutely beautiful and a photographers dream. I took a lot of photos and am really glad I'd dragged my tripod along. To be sitting in a cafe in Katoomba and within 5 minutes be in the heart of the scene above was amazing. You'd look around and see yellow-crested cockatoos (which I'd only ever seen in zoos) flying around alongside parrots of various colours and sizes. Australians are so lucky to live in such a rich countryside – and I was only seeing a tiny spec of it.

Katoomba itself was a nice little town full off cafes and book shops, not at all spoilt by tourism. I noticed rather a lot of people with dreadlocks, pink furry boots and a curious obsession with wearing black, which seemed a little out of place but who am I to judge?!

One of the main things to see are the Three Sisters (pictured above) that are towers of rock that are apparently older than the grand canyon in the states. All I know is they make a pretty impressive leading line into the jungle below! Talking of which, you can take a near-vertical train ride or a more leisurely cable car down to the forest floor and walk through the trees from the safety of a walkway:

Of course, you'd do well to read the warnings first – I hate leeches!

Australia is just an amazing place. Since the island was separated from the rest of the world's landmasses millions of years ago all plant and animal life has evolved differently to the rest of the world. Unique animals like kangaroos and platypuses developed there along with most of the deadly snakes and spiders of the world. Even the trees are different, shedding bark instead of leaves:

The blue mountains, from what I could see, is absolutely beautiful. Rather than prattle on about it, here's a photo just around sunset that illustrates my point rather nicely:

Oh alright, here's one more about half an hour after sunset:

It was lucky we dragged ourselves down to the viewpoint that evening as the clouds came in and it was foggy for the last day and a half of our stay in Katoomba. Apparently it had been raining before we arrived and the weather just  decided to improve for the duration of our stay. As with the rest of the holiday everything just flowed perfectly!

I've resisted playing around with some of the fashionable "photography" techniques to be found on places like Flickr because I'm a bit old fashioned in a way. I've always had the mindset that I want to capture a scene as you see it in reality, not some super-saturated, better-than-life version. However every now and then I soften a bit and try new things. One of them is HDR (or High Dynamic Range) photography.

The idea is that you take several photos of the same scene, ranging from very underexposed to very over-exposed (the photos, not the photographer). Then you use some software to glue them together that picks the best bits of each shot and produces an image that is perfectly exposed. Then it can do some fancy tone mapping that produces something quite amazing. This means you can take impossible pictures that a camera could never produce in a single shot, such as directly into the sun and on very bright days with dark foregrounds. Like this one:

I must confess that it does look pretty cool. Thing is though, it's unreal – the actual scene didn't look anything like this and was a bit of a nothing shot really. But with a bit of software jiggery-pokery I was able to produce something quite impressive. Nice though it is, it's not the sort of thing I plan on doing much – it's art in its own right but it's not what photography is all about for me. Unless of course I can't think of anything else to take a picture of at the time!