Violin man

I thought summer would be long and fairly relaxing in between leaving college and starting university. That was before university gave me a holiday project to carry out!

I won't bore anyone with the details of the brief here. To cut a long story short, I decided to produce a series of photos of a violin-maker in Sheffield. And yesterday was my first visit to his workshop.

Stefano was wonderfully accommodating and gave me free rein to take whatever shots I wanted. And I came away with more than enough strong ones.

I do have one dilemma - and it is one I have faced before. The university wanted to see a test shoot before a final shoot, but Stefano is a long way from home and although he is happy for me to visit again, the 'test shoot' turned up so many decent shots I am quite happy to use them as final images.

Cadiz

Cadiz at dusk

 I'm back after a long break, which included touring Andalucia in southern Spain by train. One of the highlights was a stop for several days in Cadiz, which I have never visited before.

It's a lovely city with a historic area that is a maze of narrow streets, and these open out onto wonderful squares. Such is the labyrinthine nature of this old town that some of the squares can remain a secret for days, if not weeks. One day, you might miss your normal turn and suddenly find yourself in a plaza you never knew existed.

Here is a photo taken in Cadiz at dusk. It was shot in Plaza de Mina, which we discovered only on our fourth or fifth day. Each square has its own distinctive character - Plaza de Mina is very green, with lots of trees and bushes, although you obviously cannot see that in this image.

If you are looking for somewhere in Spain that is a little less touristy and a little more down-to-earth, with friendly people and good food, Cadiz comes highly recommended.

New project

I have been asked to take photographs of a local venue and today was the first shoot. I think it went pretty well.

I am not under any time pressure to get the pictures done. It is rather like the steam railway museum project, featured elsewhere on this blog, in the sense that I can keep visiting the venue to focus on different aspects, compiling photos as I go.

I took on board some of the advice given out by Mike Browne on his tuition videos, mentioned in the previous post. I used only natural light and a narrow aperture for a deep depth of field, which meant quite slow shutter speeds. This was fine, though, because I want to feature motion blur for pictures that do include people.

I also took advantage of the live view feature of my camera and found this extremely useful - particularly for addressing converging verticals. I could alter the angle of the camera with one of my tripod adjustment handles and see on the screen how it affected the distortion introduced by my wide angle lens.

Recommended tutorials

I am always on the lookout for good quality photography workshops, ranging from paid-for versions that require being taught face-to-face by an expert, to the free YouTube tutorial sort.

It has to be said the quality varies whichever kind you opt for. But if you are looking to spend money on workshops, I wholeheartedly recommend Calumet's courses, which are sensibly priced and well worth the money, while the online videos at Lynda.com are high quality and offer a great range of material for different ability levels.

But I was delighted to find free tutorials on YouTube by the British photographer Mike Browne that were some of the best I had seen in terms of the clarity and breadth of explanation. One thing I liked about Mike's videos was that when he encountered a problem, he didn't shy away from it or even delete it from the video, he found ways to tackle it. I like that honest approach.

Cristina de Middel's best shot

Jambo, from the series The Afronauts by Cristina de Middel (www.lademiddel.com/)

In my last post I mentioned Cristina de Middel's 'fictive' photography. Lo and behold, just a few days later she has featured in the Guardian series asking leading photographers for their best shot. And the picture above, from The Afronauts, is the image she picked.

The interview accompanying the photograph is well worth a read because it explains her thinking behind the series. Here she is, depicting the ill-fated Zambian space programme by shooting images in Spain, using a Brazilian model and sometimes incorporating old photos taken in the US and Italy.

But her motivation was to confront prejudice - Africans couldn't possibly consider going to the moon, could they? Well, yes they could. And she wanted to highlight the 'beautiful' attitude of the space programme's leader, Edward Makuka Nkoloso, who 'tried and believed it was possible'.

Spanish treat

I was delighted to discover in the past couple of days that the PhotoEspana international festival of photography will still be taking place when I am in Madrid later this month.

Described as one of the most important arts events in the world, it features scores of exhibitions, along with talks and workshops.

As ever, when my time is limited, I like to visit something old and something new. So I have earmarked a show called P2P: Contemporary Practice in Spanish Photography for my investigation of new work, while the first-ever retrospective of the late Spanish avant-garde photographer Antoni Arissa will offer me something from the past.

The P2P exhibition, at Teatro Fernan Gomez, Plaza de Colon, 4, includes work by Cristina de Middel, whom I encountered during my studies for a photography HND. She is a leading participant in the field of 'fictive' photography, which is a form of documentary photography that involves re-creating scenes for the camera. She hit the headlines with a photobook called The Afronauts, depicting the ill-fated Zambian space programme, for which she was shortlisted for the 2013 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.

Show success

Well, the end-of-year show is over and despite my misgivings in the previous post, I think ended up a big success.

The work throughout the exhibition (which also included illustration, art, graphic design and interactive media) was of a very high quality and plenty of people came along to view it.

There is a real rollercoaster of emotions as an exhibitor. When someone chooses to look at my work there is almost a feeling of shock, followed by fear that they might loathe the photos. But the longer a person spends viewing the images, the more those feelings turn to pleasure.

And the show finished on a very satisfying high note. I don't like blowing my own trumpet, so please excuse a rare departure from the norm.

First of all, one woman spent a considerable amount of time looking through all 60 pages of a book of photographs I had prepared for the show... then went slowly through the entire book a second time. Which was pretty encouraging.

Then one of my tutors introduced me to a visitor who had sought him out to say how much he had enjoyed the exhibition.

Shaking me firmly by the hand, the visitor said: "I just want to say how wonderful your pictures are. It was worth coming to the exhibition just to see your photos."

It couldn't have ended any better.