The Decisive Moment

Matt Stuart describes himself as a “street photographer”. He has a wonderful talent for spotting and capturing people inadvertently interacting with their surroundings. Some of his images are quite surreal, many are amusing and most are thought-provoking.

I personally like his black & white work the best. I don’t know if he works with film or digital, but his black & white images have that fabulous look of perfectly exposed film, expertly printed onto Ilford paper.

I’m going to have to find out more about this photographer. I thoroughly recommend a visit to Matt’s website, although you will need to have Flash installed first.

I’ve spent nearly an hour sat here, writing, deleting, writing again in an effort to come up with an interesting introduction to Lara Jade. The harder I try to write something complimentary about her work the harder it seems to get. You see it’s not that it’s bad, quite the contrary. It’s because her photography is so good that I simply can’t find words to do it justice.

As the old saying goes, a picture speaks a thousand words so I think I’ll just shut up and let her pictures do the talking.

www.larajade.com

Lara’s work is a testament to the fact that you don’t need top notch kit to create top notch photography. Check out her “About Me” page for details.

UPDATE: You can see more of Lara’s work on flickr

During a little surfing trip (I mean the Internet - I don’t do sea!) I tripped over this site and found it truly inspirational, so I thought I should share it. I confess I have never heard of Yann Arthus-Bertrand but I really feel I should have.

The shots from the air are stunning and I also love the study of French people. However, I really can’t do the photos justice with words - you need to go take a look. You will need Flash installed to view the site.

Update: Thank’s to Charlie’s comment I went searching and it turns out Yann has a series of books - Earth from Above, The New Earth from Above: 365 Days and Earth from the Air: 365 Days to name just three.

An old friend of mine visited TDM yesterday and imparted some of his experience regarding my wedding photography fears. I gave him a call to find out what he had been up to lately and he told me a little bit about the safaris he has been organizing. As you can see from the picture of the leopard cub inside a carcass, it has been a fruitful exercise!

In spite of being incredibly busy at the moment, Tony has agreed to set aside a little time to write a couple of articles for us, including his experiences as a wedding photographer, his journey from amateur to professional photographer and his trips to exotic locations to photograph the wildlife.

For those of us who like to know such things, the technical info of the leopard shot looks like this:

• Location: Samburu, Kenya
• Camera: Canon 20D
• Lens: 70-200 F2.8 with a Canon 1.4x converter
• Exposure: 1/125s @ f6.3
• Raw file processed with CS2