After a Hiatus of over a year (having kids kind of takes your mind off other things in life!), here’s stranger number four or my hundered strangers project on Flickr. Jim is an artist from Newport, and is a regular in the Coffee Shop where I go in Newport. I’d never spoken to him before today. Jim used to be an Anaesthetics technician, but last year he had a triple heart bypass which has given him a new perspective on life. Turns out he’s spent the last nine years writing 15,000 poems, all about different aspects of his life and experiences. Cheers Jim!

This is interesting too as I’d left the ISO at 1600 on the 5D, and ended up using bounce flash. Luckily, the noise on the 5D is low enough as it doesn’t really impinge on the final image at all.

Find out more about this project at www.100Strangers.com/.

I love this shot.  It’s the first in what I hope will become a series of studies of my newborn daughter Amélie.  Baby’s feet are so perfect.  they’re one of those parts of the body that, when they’re new like this, look so different to when they’ve carried the owner around for their whole life.  These feet will carry her throughout her days, through whatever trials and tribulations that the world throws at her.  They are one of the most photogenic parts of a new child, and I loved taking this.  Gave me chance to flex my depth-of-field muscles too…

In between the poo and grizzling of our daughter’s first (short!) photo session, I think I managed to capture something special here.  It gives you a new appreciation about how difficult it is to get babies to relax in a strange environment where things are flashing around them!  She finally settled though, and this is set to become the first of many.

This is a set of shots that I’ve been meaning to take for a while.  My wife is expecting our first child in a few weeks time, and I’ve always said I’d love the challenge of capturing her when she was nearly due.  So last night we had a short but sweet photo session, and I’m pretty pleased with the results.  I’ve varied the lighting slightly,  which I think has resulted in several different moods.  Click below for more…

A self portrait in a different style to my usual way of approaching these things.  A return visit to Talgarth Asylum made me decide to get a little darker for a change…

I love this shot.  It was the result of a lot of patience and lying in the dirt around one of the buildings on the south bank of the Thames in London.  The shot itself is one of many, most of which were too blurry to use.  The art with this is catching the skater when they are at the top of their jump, almost still in the air, and getting ready to drop again.  I wanted a shutter speed that was fast enough to partly freeze the action, but still slow enough to register the movement required to give the shot life.  It ended up being 1/80th sec at f4.5 with a 10mm lens.  These guys love the attention, and as long as you don’t get in their way, you seem to be able to snap away all day without bothering them.

An atmospheric shot taken on a particularly sunny, early April day in a tube station in London. This particular lady was just whiling away the time waiting for the next train, and had decided to shuffle into the one of the few shafts of sunlight, I’m guessing for the for the warmth it brought.