Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Abstract & Art
I had this idea a while ago that I have been keen to try out for a while, but I only recently managed to do it. I have some colleagues who are visually impaired, and I was thinking about how people use photography as a way to collect memories of a trip or a momentous occasion, and I wondered what the equivalent might be for someone who was visually impaired. So I had the idea to try recording a soundscape.
In the world of digital imaging, it's often easy to get overwhelmed by the number of images we create. I personally have hundreds of thousands of pictures, and managing them can be a real chore. It’s also very easy to import a set of images, go through them once or twice, maybe share a few and then never look at them again. I know I’m guilty of this, but It’s important to occasionally revisit your older photos.
This may seem like something of an obtuse question at first, but bear with me and let me explain what I mean. When you take a photograph of something, what is the most important thing to you about that photograph? Is it the subject of the photo - the person, place or object that you captured? Our is it the photograph itself - the art of the image, the style of the photo, or the creative way that you captured it?
The other day I was sitting in the window at one of my regular Starbucks pit-stops, and I was trying to write some content for my blog, but I was struck by a bad case of writers block. I was sitting there staring out the window hoping for creativity, and then I began playing with my camera while I sipped my coffee.
I've been suffering from something akin to writers block when it comes to photography lately. A lot of things are getting to me and frustrating me creatively. While Autumn had been my favourite time of the year for photography for many years, a few weeks ago it was the anniversary of my mother’s passing away, and that has changed my feelings about the season. Autumn is now a reminder of that sad time, rather than the celebration of colour that I used to see. I'm sure with time this will pass, but this year was difficult. On top of that, the weather has been dark and cold, so that hasn't exactly helped things. I wanted to try and channel some of these feelings and reflect the mood of both the environment and myself, and so I headed out the other day to try something a little different.
I’ve always been quite fond of textures and patterns. I find that, even in the seemingly harsh and cold medium of concrete and glass there can be beauty. I spent a few hours the other day in one of the newest parts of Dublin City, where there are lots of modern buildings as well as ongoing construction, and the light was just right to really emphasis the aesthetics of these elements.
I received a very generous and cool present from a good friend of mine for my birthday last year. It's a Russian Fed 2 range finder camera. My friend is a collector and I've always loved these old Russian cameras, so I was chuffed to get my hands on one.
I love images of patterns and textures, which I guess comes from years working in design and animation. However, I do love how some modern (or relatively modern) architecture can make some really interesting graphic shapes when taken in the right light and from the right angle. Dublin's Trinity College has some great buildings for taking these kinds of shots.
Having been pretty much home bound for the past two weeks thanks to a nasty chest infection, I’ve been going slightly crazy from cabin fever! I’ve been having the urge to photography something….anything at this point, and this got me thinking about things to photograph when you’re stuck at home, and in particular something I had been dabbling in recently: toy photography.
One of the interesting things that I've noticed after years of Photography, is that certain types of light act as a sense memory to me. In much the same way that a smell can trigger a memory for many people, I find that seeing a certain quality of light often triggers memories and feelings of nostalgia.
As you walk along the quays in Dublin City, there's a haunting but strangely beautiful memorial to the Irish Famine. The set of statues which makes up the memorial represent the starving and dying people of Ireland that were forced to emigrate during the horrific famine of the 19th century. They were erected in 1997 and are sculpted by artist Rowan Gillespie. On a bright morning last week I was walking by and I noticed that someone had put flowers in the hands of the statues, which were beginning to wilt, which I thought was kind of metaphorical, so I got some shots of the scene while I was there.
A lot of the time when I'm out photographing, I take pictures that, while not exactly the most fascinating subjects, I still like to take. Sometimes, there's something about an otherwise bland scene that I really like, and it's usually to do with the way the light is falling in the scene. Sometimes people don't get what I see in a scene, and that's ok. Not every photo has to be a masterpiece, and not every photo has to be art gallery worthy. Photography is, of course, all about light, and sometimes I love an image because of the way the light interacts with whatever is in the scene.
There's a stretch of walkway that runs along by the canal that has a regular metal railing. The position of this fence is such that in the morning, when the sun is shining you get really strong shadows of the bars on the bright concrete slabs that make up the walkway...
