An interesting job at a haunted castle this week. Very friendly and helpful staff there, but sadly this doesn't extend to the top brass. Like another guardian of our heritage they seem to delight in making life difficult for photographers. So my office wanted pictures to illustrate the well documented ghost stories at a certain property, but the top brass decided to throw as many spanners in the works as possible. My job is to always come back with a photo wherever possible, and thats something I take very seriously.

This was shot in infra red as thats what was requested. I can't pretend the ghostly presence appeared on my film after it was developed or that I just happened to get lucky and spot her walking through the wall at the precise moment I arrived.
It is of course a bit of photoshop and in-camera trickery. I'll let you into a little secret-the ectoplasmic stream just visible in front of the ghostly lady is in fact my assistant/friend Bob Caddick moving as fast as he can away from the wall during a long 1 second camera exposure!

It's not every job that sees me up at 6.30 a.m. digging worms up from my garden. I was setting off early for an '11.30' job at Willaston in Cheshire, namely the World Worm Charming Championships.

Arriving early, I discovered that there would be nobody turning up before 1 pm and that the half hour contest started at 2 o'clock.
Oops! The latest the office wanted photos by was 2 pm. So I shot a few pics, including the old chap in my photo-the Chief Worm Charmer and organiser Mike Forster. Next was the Elvis impersonator and clarinet player Stan. I drove off and wired from the wifi point I had sussed out earlier. Sods law then cut in. The photos took AGES to wire as unbeknown to me my Mac had developed a bit of a fault and wasn't working properly.

I arrived back at the event 3 minutes before the half hour contest finished. Not an ideal situation, but even superman has a job to be in two places at once. Unfortunately for me the World Record was broken and the office wondered where all the photos were of worm charmers with their bounty during the contest and the winner waving their 500 plus worms in a pot triumphantly in the air after the two hour long official count.

Perhaps a case of great expectations and the early bird not always getting the worm.

Competitions... I've entered a few in my time and even won a small number.
Latest one I've entered is more in the spirit of the thing and hardly for the prize-which is another photographer's secondhand and now obsolete i-phone 3G. The photographer in question is US-based Chase Jarvis who has held a photo competition to decide who will get his old apple phone after upgrading his own to the new 3GS.

I don't own an i-phone, although I'd love to upgrade my own Nokia N82. The irony is that much as I hate my N82 and it's tiny buttons and shiny reflective case,(which makes texting a nightmare), the camera in it is the best bit. It's 5mp as opposed to the 3mp one in Chase's new apple phone. My Nokia has a Zeiss lens too, which is a bit like putting F1 tyres on a Ford Anglia.

Sifting through the nearly 3,000 photos in Mr Jarvis's competition, one thing is certain. It doesn't really matter what equipment is used to take a photo, it's the creativity that matters. Like here for instance.

Flipping through the photos several subjects seem popular. Yellow lines on roads being just one. Perhaps they represent the boundaries of how far we can push things as photographers. I don't expect to win with my offerings on there, but I have enjoyed looking at each and every one of those images on Chase's competition.

It seems metal has taken a bashing in the Midlands. For the last twenty years there has been a steady decline in the traditional heavy 'metal bashing' industries in this part of the UK.

I was at Marshalls Pressings where 80 years old Connie Marshall runs the show. Mind you, she is a spring chicken compared to the 150-year-old Taylor and Challen press in the background on my photo of her. It made a wonderful clacking rhythmic noise, which combined with all the other presses sounded almost like the background beat for a piece of music.
In the true spirit of muti-media, click on the button below to hear the press working away,(thanks to my friend Armando for explaining how to do that!)
The enormous spanner seen on one of my photos was used to adjust the old press-heavy metal!

Lets hope Connie's factory keeps going for a lot longer. While I was there they were turning out hundreds of pans for baking pork pies. The scrap offcuts of steel filled several bins and were carted off for melting down at a nearby foundry.






Press -

I'm getting addicted to the daily phone camera photo uploaded to Facebook and Twitter. Here is today's-a fern from our garden.
It was given to us by our daughter and was touch and go if it would survive after the snow earlier in the year. It's doing very nicely now and I'm surprised at how well the textures show up on a dull day with such a basic camera.

Alternative camera number two was reeled out today by Olympus Cameras. Thanks to Eleven Eight for this photo of it with an 8mm lens. The EP1 looks like an interesting little camera. A compact with a 12.3 mp resolution and interchangeable lenses.
At £700 'ish with the kit 14-42 lens it's not exactly a steal but if it produces photos as good as the specifications suggests it might be a useful alternative to a DSLR or even, (dare I say it), a poor man's Leica M8. I think I'll wait until the price comes down a bit-and wait for one in black.

A portrait of Ross Brawn, head of Brawn GP, whose team is doing so well in F1 racing at the moment.
He is a very busy man right now, so after a one and a half hour wait I was lucky to get five minutes to photograph him in between meetings. The car was a last years one, re-sprayed in this years colours and on display in the foyer of the former Honda offices.

Here is an eyewitness account by film maker James Longley detained whilst working in Iran after the recent election where Ahmadinejad won a landslide victory suspected by some to be the result of fraud or manipulation.

"I was interviewing people on the street in downtown Tehran with my translator, not far from the Ministry of Interior building.

There were some riot police about 100 meters away at the other end of the street.

A couple people spoke to the camera – one young woman was saying that “The riot police are beating people like animals. The situation here is very bad; we need the UN to come and help with a recount of the votes!”

At about that time a plain-clothes security guy started grabbing my arm, and together with several uniformed police they dragged me and my translator off to the Ministry of Interior building.

I fared much better than my translator, whom they punched and kicked in the groin. They ripped off his ID and snatched away both our cameras. A passing police officer sprayed my translator in the face with pepper spray, although he was already being marched along the pavement by three policemen.

Unfortunately my camera was still recording and the battery was dislodged in the hubbub, destroying the video file of the interview.

As we reached the Ministry of Interior building they separated us and dragged my translator by his arms across the floor and down a flight of stairs; he eventually regained his footing on the second two flights of stairs leading downward to the holding cell, where about twenty people who had already been grabbed off the streets were kneeling on the floor in the darkened room with their hands tied behind their backs.

All during this process my translator was being kicked and sworn at. The police told him how they “would put their dicks in his ass” and how “your mother/sister is a whore” and so on. At one point he was beaten with a belt buckle. At another moment, they beat him with a police truncheon across his back, leaving a nasty welt.

My translator kept on insisting that he was an officially authorized translator working with an American journalist – which is perfectly true.

At this time I was above ground, in the entrance to the ministry, yelling over and over at the police to “Bring me my translator!” It was clear that they didn’t intend to beat me – although they may have wanted to – because I was a foreigner.

After a few minutes they relented and sent someone off to retrieve my translator from their holding cell, three floors down in the Ministry of Interior building.

They came into the holding cell and shouted “Where is the translator?!” and then, when he identified himself, they beat him again for “not telling them he was a translator.”

An English-speaking riot policeman tried to sweet-talk me, saying that in a riot situation anything can happen. I might have taken him more seriously had a riot actually been taking place when we were arrested. He also asked my translator to convince me not to report what had happened.

Eyewitnesses are reporting that fully-credentialed foreign journalists are similarly being detained all over Tehran today. The deputy head of the Ministry of Guidance just told me on the phone that other journalists have also been beaten, and that the official permissions no longer work. Also, foreign journalist visas are not being extended, so all of those people who were allowed in to cover the elections are now being forced out in the messy aftermath.

All in all, it made me really question what I am doing in this country. It has become impossible to work as a journalist without the risk of physical violence from the government."

- James

I can't talk about my Wolverhampton job today because it's not been published yet. So here is a photo I noticed in the window of Visual Arts Productions while I was wandering around looking for somewhere to get lunch before my shoot. Based in the Dudley Road area of Wolverhampton, Visual Arts is run by husband and wife team Jugan and Nisha. Nisha did the photoshop on Jugan's image with some motion blur feathered in to give a striking background.

A photographer for over 23 years, Jugan specialises in asian weddings which he covers in both stills and video. Apparently asian weddings can involve 3 days shooting and an immense amount of work afterwards.
Thanks to Jugan and Nisha for letting me post their work and apologies that my shot has reflections from taking it through the window!

It's not always you come away from a job as friends with the subject. But that happened with Jeannie, a lovely lady who Suzy and I visited out in sunny Suffolk the other day. Jeannie had a rough time in her first marriage when she was just 18 years old-her partner used to beat her up and even threw her down the stairs when she was pregnant.

Now Jeannie campaigns against domestic violence. Speaking to her you would never realise what she has been through all those years ago. Thank goodness she is married to a lovely bloke now and enjoying her life in a sleepy little Suffolk village. We photographed her in her garden and even performed a spot of chicken wrangling when the hen I'd asked her to hold on one shot made a bid for freedom. She was really pleased with the photo and story in The Guardian and that is always good to hear.

The Telegraph shoot was a rather quick one in the brick library at a Travis and Perkins outlet. Geoff, the Chief Exec., turned out to live just a mile or so down the road from me. He didn't have a lot of time to spare, but very sportingly agreed to go for a different image than the usual 'man in a suit' city pic which Business Telegraph tries hard to get away from.

Americans offloading from a troop carrier into the sea off Omaha beach on June 6th 1944, sixty-five years ago.
I wasn't at the anniversary ceremony in Arromanches, but like a lot of other people watched it on the TV from the comfort of my lounge. Old soldiers, sailors and airmen braving the rain and thinking about their comrades who didn't make it back home.
Many people have said this will be the last big ceremony of it's kind, but I doubt that. I don't think we can afford to forget the appalling suffering and extraordinary courage of those who fought in WWII.

Here is a quote from an interview with an old soldier in The Telegraph......

And what was it like, really, 65 years ago?

"What was it like? If you were not there you will never know. Go to a cemetery and look at every cross and think of each one as a son or a husband or a father of children and count them, and then you might know a little."