On Saturday night I photographed the very glamorous 007 Charity Ball in aid of Shine Charity UK, organised by a pal of mine, Daisy Dowler and held at The Nucleus in Great Chesterford, Essex.

Daisy had visited Zambia years ago and had subsequently, through a friend, become reconnected to the country via the charity Shine.

Shine’s main objective is to alleviate poverty using education to tackle illiteracy. Already, this has been very successful, having already built a school in 2009. But the hard work needs to be continued and more importantly, funded!

£20,150 was raised on the night through ticket sales and and an auction, which included a match day corporate box at Tottenham Hotspur. I think you will all agree that is an EXCELLENT prize.

An edited selection of images can be viewed on the richfoto facebook page, so please go there and tag yourselves, so that you can spread the word about the event to your friends.

A full selection of images can be viewed on the richfoto events page where you can purchase prints in order to raise some more money for Shine.

Got some great news this week, I received an email on Wednesday from Foto8, it read as follows…….

“Dear Photographer, Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that one of more of your images has been selected for inclusion in the Foto8 Summershow 2011. This year the Summershow opens on July 8th and will run until the 12th August at HOST Gallery in Honduras Street, London, EC1 0TH.”

I’d entered some images for selection for the Summershow 2011 from a set I’d shot about the recession in the Downtown area of Las Vegas, Nevada and how businesses were struggling there. Even The Strip down the road, with all it’s glamour, had been having a hard time financially. So to see this area as a bit of a ghost town, which was the place to be seen in it’s heyday, was slightly sad.

I was photographing an empty car park, when over the road on the wall of a casino, a large tiled mural had caught my attention. I walked over toward it & then noticed that there was an old man on his mobility scooter taking some rays in the midday sun. I tiptoed closer, quickly taking a meter reading and proceeded to nearly drop my RZ67, which I was handholding. I was literally beside myself to get the image shot before he woke up or heard the shutter open and shut on the camera. I had time to shoot a few frames as he was clearly ‘having a kip’ and walked back toward my car.

I noticed he’d woken up and was driving his mobility scooter along the pavement, so I quickly ran over to say I’d photographed him and to find out a bit more about him. His name was Bob Whiterock. It turned out he and his family were Japanese, he’d been in the US military during WWII and was down from Long Beach, California for a break. He was excellent, chatty and very interested in my Mamiya RZ67. I told him I’d bought a Mamiya C33 a while ago, so he was filling me in on why the Japanese actually had it made in the first place….they basically wanted to mass market the German Rolleiflex.

So, I took his email and promised to post him some prints when I got back to the UK which I did with a greetings card with one of my images on it. Soon, I got this subsequent email reply……

Now, WHERE did I put her email address……..!? *Cupid*

On the day of the Royal Wedding, I decided to photograph a project on spectators who were in Trafalgar Square attempting to view the large screen that had been set up between the lions at the foot of Nelson’s Column. A very patriotic venue to watch totally live, a part of history that will be spoken about for decades.

On the day of Diana & Charles wedding on 29/07/1981, I can remember vividly a long drive to to the Essex Riviera, Clacton-On-Sea, where my Grandma & Grandad had retired to. It was a hot, sweaty day which was made worse by no air-con in my Dad’s classy brown Ford Granada & single lane traffic ALL OF THE WAY. Painful.

Literally everywhere & everything had a Union Jack on it, but this time in 2011, I did notice there was less intensity of Union Jack’s & Street Parties, but once I got into Central London, you could really feel the atmosphere & this made things incredibly easy to approach the general public to photograph them.

I photographed this set of portraits with a Mamiya RZ67, which for those who are unfamiliar is a medium format film camera. It is a bit cumbersome, so I eventually chose a spot, where I didn’t have to move too often & had a fairly decent background. At one point I was being photographed by some students, armed with Lomo & Diana cameras who were amazed by this bonkers looking camera, so I got a taste of my own medicine!

Do you know any of the spectators? Please tag them on the Richfoto Facebook page!

Monday night was the annual Hockerill Anglo-European College Leavers’ Ball, which this year my daughter attended. I was lucky enough to photograph the event & set up, with alot of help from the Great Hallingbury Manor Hotel staff to work with very limited space, a small studio area to photograph the students either side of their dinner & speeches. A taste of the student images are below, you can tag & like images on Facebook & a full set can be viewed & prints purchased on the Richfoto website.

Here are some iPhone images I’ve been photographing on my travels, using the instagr.am & The Best Camera apps. I then publish them through Foursquare for geotagging, flickr for networking & tumblr for blogging, mainly using the instagr.am app, which is also has a social network. Why not start taking pictures yourself, it’s easy & even better….FREE?

I’ve just returned from the North West where I visited two events that could not be more of a contrast. On Saturday, with The Smiths playing loudly from the stereo as I drove through Salford, I arrived in Manchester where I photographed the British Soap Awards 2011. Here, I overdosed on a large injection of fake tan, bling, jazz hands & extensive picture editing. In future, obviously, I will lay off the jazz hands.

The following morning I got trapped in the city for a couple of hours due to the BUPA Great Manchester Run blocking Portland Street. Definitely a sight for sore eyes, having been up to the early hours staring at a laptop screen whilst the rest of Manchester got absolutely wasted having United winning the Premier League & City winning the FA Cup on the same day. Messy. Eventually, I travelled out of Manchester to get to Look 2011 : Liverpool International Photography Festival, which I had been following from their excellent website Look11. I can confirm there was some Beatles, Cast & Gomez on in the car for the journey, but no Cilla.

I visited the Walker Art Gallery, for one of the most inspiring & unexpectedly emotional project exhibitions “Like you’ve never been away…” Photographs by Paul Trevor. In 1975 he spent six months living & documenting the lives with the residents of two deprived areas of Liverpool, Everton & Toxteth. Having spent this time, photographing the children of the estates, he is now trying to trace them 35 years on for a project to bring their stories full circle. What struck me immediately was how brilliant the images were & how clearly the children all loved being photographed. It turns out that in many cases, this was also the first time many of them had even seen a camera. The children had nothing. There were no adventure playgrounds surrounded by fields, only discarded shopping trolleys & derelict houses to play in. But from the images you would never have realised this poverty, due to world of games & dens that the children had created for themselves using their imaginations. They had nothing, but they had everything. The streets were their playground & Paul Trevor captured moments from their childhood, that the children didn’t even realise were being captured. Tragedy is attached to poverty & their subsequent life stories are quite diverse, some uplifting & some unexpected.

Times have changed so much, you never really see the kids all out on mass playing in the street. Cars are larger, roads busier & what would happen if you or I turned up randomly on an estate now, befriending the kids & started to photograph them playing!? I can actually hear the police sirens now….. If you are thinking of visiting the vibrant, regenerated city of Liverpool, like, I urge you to visit the exhibition, which will run until 25/09/2011. LIKE.

This Royal Wedding graffiti on the Liverpool Road, N1 in London says it all.

The Queen was spotted taking the corgi’s for a stroll outside Buckingham Palace yesterday lunchtime….well, the good folks from Turner Broadcasting and adultswim.co.uk had me fooled anyway…..

Urban Fox

Urban foxes are an increasingly familiar sight in the capital, but this particular fox sighting is far from common. Pop along to the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre, a giant urban fox sculpture made from straw bales looms large.

Facing Waterloo Bridge, and featuring as part of the Southbank Centre’s 60th anniversary celebration of the 1951 Festival of Britain, this urban fox needs to be seen to be believed.

The celebration runs from April 22 until September 4, 2011 at London’s Southbank Centre. For more information, visit Southbank Centre – Festival of Britain

With less than two weeks to go, the Royal Wedding is almost upon us.

Feels like a lifetime already since the engagement was announced last November, yet as April 29th draws ever closer, each day brings another fine example of the inspiration Prince William and Kate Middleton’s forthcoming nuptials have had for small businesses across the land.

As production manager for Richfoto, one of my tasks over the past few months has been to source some of the, shall we say, less traditional souvenirs and memorabilia produced to mark this historic occasion.

Here are a few examples of the imagination and creativity that the Royal Wedding has brought us so far.

A very modern range of Royal Wedding memorabilia for a Facebook generation

Legoland Royal Wedding

Lego Kate and William, Sir Paul McCartney, David and Victoria Beckham and Family

Lego Sir Elton John, David Furnish, Kate Middleton and Prince William

The Royal Breakfast

Wine and Dine: Kiss Me Kate beer, Royal Wedding Carvery Portrait and Prince William Champagne

Royal Virility Beer

Papa Johns Pizza UK, Royal Wedding Pizza Portrait

Love Hearts

Gnomes and Phones

iPhone cases

William and Kate Pez Dispensers

Royal Wedding Party Goody Bag

Kate Middleton Dolls

Top Trumps

In the Bedroom: Get in the mood with Wills and Kate Sliding Doors...don't forget your Condoms

Oystercard

Wooly Windsors - Knit your own Royal Couple