Last weekend I had a lovely day at Chester Zoo with some friends of mine I was visiting for the weekend. The visit was a pleasure – these were old friends I haven’t seen properly for a long time, who have a young family and lots of love and stability to offer them. I felt privileged to spend time with them. This gave me the chance to take some more photos, the best of which are below. You can view the whole lot by clicking here.
I just came this close to breaking my Facebook fast in order to share this video of my dad dangling from the end of a bungee rope, like some obscure species of bearded, tie-dyed fruit bat. I think if I post it on here, I can just about get away without. Well done, pa!
I’ve stopped using Facebook and Twitter for Lent. I thought this might prove difficult, given how easy it is to log in and spend time on them without really meaning to. But it’s not. Change the passwords to something random you can’t remember, don’t tell your browser, and remove anything from your phone that might push a notification into your pocket and make your ears burn. Social media works by making you think that you need to be connected, need to be fighting off messages with a repost here, a witty comment there, a rebuttal there. But you don’t need this; you didn’t need it before you signed up for Read full post >>
An assignment from my photography course: images of motion. Panning the camera to follow moving things is easy once you get the hang, though getting a well-composed shot outside Holborn station was a question of patience: the vehicles of all kinds were competing with each other for space, in the photo as in life. These are probably the best three, all of cyclists.
I’ve written before about times when life serves up an unexpected treat, something you might be lucky enough to catch if you have your eyes open and are carrying a camera. For me, a lot of those moments seem to happen on bridges in London.
Back in November 2011, I wrote about my grandpa, Geoff Skinner, who had died the previous year. A few days after I did, a short comment appeared on the post, from an IP address in Slovenia. The writer of the comment was called Breda. She said: Ben, your grandfather (or Uncle Geoff, as I call him) was a prisoner of war imprisoned in the Work Camp 10029 GW in Weidmannsdorf (Klagenfurt). Here’s a link to a site about the camp. Love, Breda I was astonished, and immediately recognised the name Klagenfurt – the city in Austria where my grandpa was held captive from 1941 to 1945. This blog post is my attempt, Read full post >>