The Antient Towne and Cinq Port of Rye

 I recently won a prize for architectural photography, and the awards organisation didn't tell me. It was last year, so I've already forgotten what it was - something about 'best historical exteriors series' I think. I have a feeling I might have entered into other competitions who also might not have told me so it would only be a teensy white lie if I called this series MULTI AWARD WINNING. 

Anyway, I've been photographing my current home town on and off for about a decade - the town itself is pretty much unchanged since the 17th Century and has preservation orders slapped on just about everything (except my humble dwelling and me).  If we get a sea mist, and I'm awake very early, I grab a camera and take some snaps. It's getting increasingly difficult  to get a feeling of how the town must have been as it gets more popular as a tourist destination. People park their cars all over the place and there are always bunches of tourists walking around, quite often in the middle of the road as if the place was a theme park. Anyway - here's a part of the series. 

Where does the time go?

My last entry was in 2020. The year of the pandemic, and an interesting time for me - at the beginning of March that year I'd travelled back to India for a mixture of a months worth of work and pleasure and two weeks in, lockdown and the international travel ban came into effect. I ended up being stranded there for six months, though in fairly comfortable circumstances as I was staying in my chum Simon's house, whilst he in turn was stranded in Sandwich in Sussex having travelled back to visit his mother. When lockdown eased and we could venture out without fear of having the shit beaten out of us by police with lahtes I started walking on the beach with Charlotte - Simon's sister, co owner of Vivenda dos Palhacos and my next door neighbour.  Naturally I took a camera as often as possible.

This is what I wrote when I eventually got back to the UK that September and the accompanying photos:

The international travel ban and swift nationwide lockdown left me stranded in India from March to mid August. Heavy policing - beatings and fines, made the streets unsafe except for in an emergency, so for exercise I started walking on the beach either at first light or just before dusk. The first thing I noticed was how much the beach dogs had suffered - they rely on tourists, beach shacks and fishermen for food and affection, and all had disappeared overnight. I started taking a box of biscuits everyday for the dogs. Initially suspicious of something that wasn't either rice or fish, they soon came to understand biscuits were also food. This made me quite a lot of new friends who would accompany me on my walks, usually in the hope that there was a forgotten biscuit in my camera bag. These images are a small part of a photographic journal I kept during the six months I was marooned.

Miss India Bikini

Strangely enough I wrote the below just before going to India in early March 2020. I was in two minds about publish it because I didn't think the snaps were good enough. Now the whole paradigm has shifted so what the hell.

I first met Nik in 2014 when we shot in a hotel in Colaba, Mumbai. I mentioned I was on my way to Goa and she said 'I come visit you, I need photo'.  She'd not long previously given up working full time to pursue a dream of becoming a model in spite of only being 4'10". To counter balance the height disadvantage however, she had one of the most superb racks I've ever seen. This and her willingness to shed her clothes and test for Playboy had got her a following of about 400,000 on FaceBook at that time. It's now 2.5 million.

Anyway, Nikki turned up in Goa and stayed a week. We shot pretty much every day in-between her eating more than someone that size should be able to. We produced images for her social media accounts, images for various websites, images for her sponsors, portraits, fashion, swimwear, lingerie and nudes.

After that I found myself shooting with her every few months. She saw a waterfall I'd shot for a homestay 'where's that?' she asked. 'In the middle of a tiger reserve, two miles from the nearest road and only accessible by paddling the last two hundred meters upstream' I replied. 'Ok, we shoot there'.

I haven't had a proper shoot with Nikki for about three years, but she and her husband come and stay when they're in the UK. Here are a few of the more modest snaps I've taken of her over the years with a D700 or D800e and various lenses.

Entering Awards.....

This year I didn't enter the World Photography Awards, purely because of incompetence and dithering. I've never won anything (though they used one of my images to promote the inaugural contest) but it's free to enter and to someone with a limited to non existent awards budget it's a bit of a choker to not take advantage of something free. So I'm stuck with paying contests which this year will be IPA (expensive) Communication Arts (more expensive) and LensCulture (less expensive and less prestigious).

Most of the competitions these days are looking for 'a body of work', or a series of related or thematically similar images. A decade ago this generally meant three images, but these days can be anything up to 50 (Magnum portfolio prize) but is generally 5-10 images. This puts me in a dilemma. I usually have around three or four photos that I'm ok with across everything I shoot in a year, so my chances of pulling 5-10 images out of my butt in time for awards deadlines is pretty minimal. Hence no entry to Sony World.

Anyway, here's some of what I might have entered and a couple that I might still enter in the remaining contests. I'm stylistically so far away from the current concept of cool, it might just be a huge waste of drinking vouchers.

Watery portraits with Harleigh - nudity involved.

Some more of Harleigh. This shoot took about 40 minutes and most of the time Harleigh was underwater, holding her breath and looking in the general direction of where she thought the camera might be. She was also in a consistently good mood which was quite a feat. I'd like to shoot more of these, but asking people 'how long can you hold your breath' can get a person into a lot of trouble.
This lot were all shot on a D800e with a Nikon 24-120.

Bottle Alley, Hastings.

I'm rather fond of Hastings - it's like Brighton's scruffier, less refined younger brother. It's also home to some of the creations of Sidney Little, the engineer also known as The Concrete King and arguably the grandfather of the Brutalist architectural movement - one of my least favourite offshoots of modernism. Little built a lot of stuff using reinforced concrete, and the promenade that runs from St Leonards to Hastings was one of them. It's far from elegant, but after 90 years exposed to the elements it has a functional if shabby simplicity.

Because of the shape of the alley I decided to use a panoramic format, although I shot in a 2/3 format, I knew that the images would be cropped 2/1 and shot accordingly.