Season's Greetings 2014

I'm not a complete Luddite, - I'm writing this after all.  However, I will admit to being more comfortable or intuitive with some forms of digital technology than others, - and have made no secret of my distaste for phones as devices for image-capture.  I find them too small, too light, and consequently, too prone to camera-shake.  I also find anything with a touch screen pretty frustrating, and am regularly tripped-up by the yawning shutter-lag (on my phone at least).

However, I am also aware that much of my regular photography is marked by a somewhat habitual formality, a heavy reliance on careful composition and exposure, (both in-camera, and in post production), and that it may be overly static and DSLR-centric in general.  

I certainly don't intend to put away the big Canon any time soon, but taking more experimental, and certainly more dynamic, still photos, through the windscreen of my moving car with a Digital Video camera, around this time last year, certainly persuaded me there's more than one way to skin a cat.

That's something that I was reminded of whilst viewing my friend, and fellow artist, Shaun Morris' recent phone-grabs of nocturnal lorry parks on his own blog, - full as they are of light bleeds and trails, imperfect exposures, and other visually interesting, random elements.

Inspired by Shaun's shots, and in search of a few festive photos with which to toast the season, I quickly harvested these phone images, on the way home from a last-minute Christmas shopping excursion, earlier this evening.  Apart from a little judicious cropping in a couple of them, everything you see is exactly as my phone grabbed it.  I certainly appreciate the rapidity with which working this way allowed me to get the post up, and also the quality of festivity-through-gritted-teeth-on-a-wet-December-evening that the images contain.  That certainly derives, in part, from my ham-fisted employment of a cheap device, - clearly up against its own technical limitations.  It also seems highly suited to the current state of Britain, in all its increasingly alienated austerity.  

All Images: Stocking Farm Estate, Leicester, December 2014

I realise this is all the kind of stuff most people have taken for granted for years, but I've never claimed to be an early adopter.  It also makes me realise that, even in an era when everyone is a prolific photographer by default, my own motives for taking photos may still differ from those of many around me, (perhaps everyone's vary, in reality).  Anyway, enough with the philosophising. It's time for a few days of unquestioning festivity.

Happy Christmas.