The Other Side

One of my portraits has been used as the coverspread of London culture magazine 'The Other Side'. In return they will be doing afeature on me for the next issue. nice.

One of my self-portraits (Sundance) has been included in a photobook designed specifically for the iPad. Mirror Mirror features nearly 30 full screen self-portraits from 28 fantastically talented photographers who have made their work availble via creative commons. Unlike veiwing photosites (which look stunning on the iPad), this photobook can be viewed offline, as the editor states it's "something to view when I’m offline, something that I can keep in my virtual library to whip out whenever I want a high-quality photo fix." It's available to download totally free of charge from theLearningLight.com.

Competition Success

Back in December I blogged that I had been shortlisted in the Galapagos Conservation Trust's International Photographic Competition. I was thrilled to find out that one of my entries won a spot in the 2011 Calender (July). Thanks very much if you voted for me! You can see all the winning pictures on the website.



My winning photo: Sanderling

You can order the calendar online by visiting the GCT's website. All profits from the sale of these items will go towards conservation in Galapagos

KT Lindsay: "Photography Born of Purpose". Oxford Artweeks 8th-15th May.

I have spent a huge amount of time recently preparing a collection for an exhibition I'm putting on for Oxford Artweeks. Artweeks is a brilliant annual visual festival held throughout Oxfordshire where local artists and crafty types open up their homes and studios to share their art. Over 400 exhibitions are made freely accessile to the general public, and this year I am one of them!

It's been an experience drawing together a themed collection and a lot of research was done on where best to get the prints from (Ilford) and how to optimize my prints for the best possible results. Mounts had to be custom measured and made (picturelizard.co.uk) for the frames I ordered (cargo.com), bios written and picture plaques authored and made (using foam board). It's all being hung tomorrow and I can't wait to see it!

The collection I have chosen to display is predominantly a series of black and white landscapes to illustrate the theme of conservation, the need to preserve and protect parts of our planet that have been and will continue to be under threat by our own actions. The collection is thus 'born of purpose', a compulsion to create images that tell the story of people and places in slivers of time that may be lost. Seeing the prints together, physically, for the first time will be incredible, and I hope to inject a bit of femininity into what is largely a male dominated area of photography.

All prints are available for purchase in limited edition of 10 from the exhibition venue or via my website.

My exhibition joins those of a number of my colleagues, other closet photographers, jewellery makers, and painters and will be on display from the 8th-15th May at 13 Banbury Road, Oxford.

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Photograph featured: Pine in Profile. Yosemite National Park, CA. 2009. 10 x 15 inches. £45.

Photoshoot: Hannah

I spent a lovely Tuesday afternoon photographing my friend Hannah, an actress based in Oxford (she was actually in Never Tell Them, a play for which one of my photographs was used for the playbill). Hannah asked me to do some pics for her resume and website and I was happy to oblige, especially considering I'm not getting out much at the moment due to a rather well developed 9 month old bump.

Doing studio-style portraits at home is always a bit of a worry - I don't have much proper equipment beyond my camera, no fancy lights or backdrops, but I'm a creative type and enjoy coming up with Blue Peter versions. This photoshoot involved usage of my white dining room walls, a piece of black material taped with packing tape to said wall to give a black background, and a floor covered with tin foil to act as a reflector bouncing up the flashgun light coming down off the ceiling.



The remit was "headshots", you know the type you see in theatre programmes. But I can't help myself and did a few non-conventional types, artistic license etc. etc.

February Photoshoot: Hotrods and Pin-ups

A commission for a friend for something stylistically likened to David Perry's Hotrod Pin-ups. Vintag-orama!





Styling and Make-up: Gayle
Lighting and Photography: KT Lindsay

Annual Galapagos Photography Competition

I have four photographs shortlisted in the Annual Galapagos Photography Competition. If you like please vote for me! (Numbers 14, 31, 41, and 43) Voting ends on January 4th.

Music Maestro

My self-portrait "The Clown" has been made into a poster advertising a concert for the Swedish band Piroth.



Thanks to _martinik for sending me a high res version of the poster to print out!

The Photographers' Gallery

Saturday morning, Regent Street, I was in the "rabbit in the headlights" zone after emerging from the jam-packed Apple Store after anxiously awaiting the results of the autopsy of my 4-week old iPhone (relief, death occurred in non-suspicious circumstances, replacement procured). I stumbled out onto the buzzing street. Shoppers on a mission crashed into meandering tourists, smart cars jetted in and out of side streets, motorbikes revved, buses rumbled. I stood still, breathing gently, trying prevent my over-sensitized lungs from launching into an asthma attack. London blurred before my eyes, I was not in the mood for busy.

In my dazed state I was led by the hand to a non-descript building tucked away on a narrow through-road between Regent Street and Oxford Circus, The Photographers' Gallery. Peace. White walls, white frames, wide mounts displaying black and whites prints. Airy, light, peaceful. Delight. A whole building dedicated to photography. The cafe served just the type of food that I liked, every single item in the bookstore I wanted, no, I needed, to own. Future talks and events were advertised which in my mind I have committed to attend. At present they are showing Andre Kertesz On Reading. An important photographer, 'the godfather of photojournalism', the collection is well worth seeing. As the title suggests these pictures must be read, sometimes between the lines. When done effectively you can trace the transgression from text-based culture to one that is primarily image-based, and one that has come to dominate the conveyance of happenings and movements in contemporary society, both welcome and unwelcome.

In the gallery as a whole I saw few pieces that made me go 'wow', however the price tags of some of the prints for sale certainly did....can I ever hope to sell a photograph fro £2000? But the venue itself is noteworthy, its commitment to independent photographers and emerging talent is welcome, as is its commitment to education and providing a place focused on visual interpretation. It's all free too. A rarity in the capital. An hour to spare? Seeking an oasis of tranquility, and tea and cake? Let your eyes lead you to the Photographers' Gallery.

It was meant to be all about light

Shame on me, I am 8 months late. Back in December I posted that I wanted to play more with light this year, specifically flashes and studio lighting. It's only now in August that I've purchased my first external flash unit. The Speedlight 430 EXII already looks promising. Just sticking it on auto on my camera has produces some very nice portrait shots, I have to say it does make a lot of difference. As far as the settings on the back go though, am flumoxed, so I bought a book with pictures in it. Eventually I'd like to get a transmitter so I can fire the flash off the camera, and the Blue Peter girl inside me likes the look of these DIY light modifier kits.

First though I'll inspect my picture book! Look out for better lit shots!

This is not a phone: Photography Applications for the iPhone

The other day I received my shiny new iPhone. The underlying reason for me getting Apple's finest was primarily because my two-year old Nokia N95 had been held together by sellotape for the past six months as the back and battery kept falling out at inappropriate moments and also because I was spending a fortune by being on the internet too much reading emails etc. The iPhone's high contract price was counterbalanced by free web access and there was no clip-on back to fall off! Plus it looked snazzy. I was happy.

But then I came to download a selection of Apps and I discovered that this wasn't really a phone. What it was was another tool I could use to better my photography. The Apple App Store is bulging with photography widgets from filters to create fun photo effects to more serious tools to get your shutter speed spot on. Here's a few I like so far:


Pre-Photoshoot Research
Not a photography app as such but GoogleEarth will easily help you scout locations before a shoot. More specific is FocalWare which promises to be a God-send. It calculates the Sun & Moon location, in relation to due North. This provides an exact means of researching and preparing to photograph a subject with specific lighting or placement of the sun/moon in the scene.

The Photographer's Notebook
Photographers tend to take notes. Often in a small leather bound or occasionally hard backed notebooks recording location data, camera settings used, and other bits and pieces to recreate good shoots or remind of the mistakes made in previous ones. Everytrail (free)is a geotracking application records your movements, takes geotagged photos, to which you can make notes and immediately upload it all to everytrail.com. Originally used as an online tool for travel storytelling, it also offers photographers the chance to take reference photographs, tagged with location data, and record and share the settings that they were taken in. These can all then be plotted on a google map.

Alternatively Photojot is similar to the above but with a nifty sunrise / sunset calculator. It has specific fields to fill in camera settings but doesn't have the sharing facilities as EveryTrail.


Calculators for those complicated things
Can't get your head around manual exposure settings? Use a calculator! ExposureCalc will let you select from a range of different light settings and will give you the different values you need to create a good quality photograph. Photocalc on the other hand is a bit more detailed, providing depth of field (DoF) and hyper-focal distance calculations, exposure reciprocation, and flash exposure calculations. If you want a good all round tool which also tells you when the sun will rise and set then PhotoBuddy is your, er, buddy.

Getting it straight
As in your camera on your tripod (if you are one of those people who don't like to straighten things digitally afterward). Use the iHandy Level Free. It's free, funnily enough.

Photo Editing
If you want to actually use your iPhone as a camera (and it's not a great camera but sometimes it's just easy) you can edit your takes directly on your iphone. There are tonnes of apps for this, but my favorites so far are Tiffen Cool fx, offering nearly 100 different filters which can be applied and saved as “virtual” layers and images are saved out as new files; Lomo and ToyCamera (don't think just shoot); MagicTouch - what it says on the tin, basic retouches such as blemish removal, change eye colour, clone stamp, lighten selective areas etc.

Don't believe you can do much with phone cameras and software. Believe. Check out Tony CeCe's and Greg Schmigel's work, as well as the iPhone Photography Awards.

Fisheye - First Attempts

Plastic Fantastic!

This year was meant to be all about light but I've been distracted by something a little more...er...retro. I'd heard of lomo and seen the photographs that it produces, but little did I realise how kitsch, sexy, and remarkably plastic fantastic the cameras actually were. I wish I could say it was the creative challenge of film that led me and my credit card to ebay today, but no, I am shallow - it was the great big retro flash on the Diana F+ model that made me cross that fine line between desire and require.


So meandering its way down the M5 to me this week is Lomography's faithful reproduction of their early ‘60s cult legend camera 'Diana' famous for its dreamy, radiant, lo-fi images. The remake has lots of cool new features including ability to take pinhole photos, a plug-it-in-and-fire-away immensely retro flash with colour gel filters (with horse shoe attachment so it can fit to my canon), multiple exposures, half-exposed frames, and a bulb setting. It can even be converted to take 35mm filmvia the use of lollipop sticks, a razor blade, and you you guessed it sticky tape.

But I couldn't stop there....not when I saw the Lomo Fisheye Camera. Fisheye. What more can I say...fishyeye rocks and this gorgeous piece of plastic is a hell of a lot cheaper than a £500 lens for my Canon EOS.


This is going to be a very interesting experiment for me. I am very impatient perfectionist. I will spend a good while thinking up an idea for a photograph, put aside a decent few hours to shoot it and be arty in photoshop. That is one of the reasons I use a digital camera. Composed, shot, in photoshop, and up on the web in the bat of an eyelid. I have complete control and can happily afford to make mistakes because I can see what I'm doing, if it's not right, delete and start again, it doesn't matter if it takes 100 shots to get the perfect photo - it is just adjustable storage space. With these guys I will have no idea if a photograph has worked until I get them back from the printers. Film is going to take some getting used to. Especially the 120 film for Diana....that has to be sent away somewhere special to be developed (Mr Fisheye takes standard 35mm requiring a much more acceptable potter down to Snappy Snaps 1hr service). Also, difficult to accept will be that the camera will have more of a creative input than me, with these guys I will not be spending many happy hours creating the lomo effect in photoshop, the camera will do it for me, it is lomography. But I am excited by this challenge. A new style of artistic experimental photography to play with. The approach: to take as many Lomographs as possible in the most impossible of situations possible and from the most unusual positions possible, and then have them developed as cheaply as possible. Colourful, crazy, off-the-wall, unfamiliar and hopefully brilliant snapshots.

----Picture Credits----

Diana F+ by Lomography

Lomo Fisheye No.2 by Bàrbara Ferrà on Flickr

Home sweet home: Photographing Sheffield

Last weekend I went home to Sheffield. I am bias, I think it's the best city in the world. Not only did I grow up there but I also returned there as a student. Yup, I liked it enough to move back in with my folks for a year (no offense M&D)! Sheffield is a city of many sides. It has the somberness left by deindustrialisation of the steelworks but also the beauty of the Peak District on its doorstep. A lot of effort has gone into its regeneration and restoration, but a lot has also been left to crumble away. Touted as the 'greenest city in the UK' it has also been known as simultaneously the most educated and least educated city. Personally, I love the long rows terraces made from peak district stone, the fact that no matter where you go you always have to walk up a steep hill, that there are loads of trees, its sense of community, and that the water tastes reeet nice.

So, the purpose of this post. I've been asked for good places to photograph in Sheffield by the Oxford Photographic Society. I would say that because Sheffield is many-faceted it's great to photograph. Working on the theme of 'steel' could take you in so many different directions, from the existing and dilapidated steelworks to steel architectures and art in the city centre to the old millstones returned to their rightful place in the Peak District. Only a handful of photographs done by myself so far, but these are my recommendations for photographing Sheffield:

1. A walk along the Five Weirs to see the steelworks and the industrial/commercial landscape of the Lower Don Valley
2. A trip to Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet / Kelham Island / Shepherds Wheel, all Sheffield industrial museums and preserved sites that can show you steelwork practices of the past.
3. A meander around the city centre to see the sculptures that are starting to appear as part of Sheffield's regeneration (esp. the city train station, Millennium Galleries, and the Peace Gardens)
4. A trip out to the Peak District, specifically Stanedge Edge, Burbage Crags and the The Derwent Valley (HEADS UP: I have just discovered the fantastic photography of local photographer Stephen Elliot. To see how beautiful the countryside is I urge you to pay a visit to his web site at http://www.stephenelliottphotography.co.uk).

Picture Credits
1. Salt Cellar (Derwent Edge Derbyshire) by Stephen Elliot
2. 'And Quiet Flows the Don' by me
3. Balls of Steel by Zekizeki

Istanbul Dreams

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul. ~ Alphonse de Lamartine


I've just uploaded a new set from a recent trip to Istanbul to kT LindSAy pHotoGrapHY. Enjoy!

Review: Annie Leibovitz at Work

Annie Leibovitz has become one of the most iconic photographers of the century, her body of work recognisable and individual photographs iconic. This book takes you behind the scenes to hear Leibovitch talk about how she got there, her inspirations, the discourse behind each photograph and how it was actually done. Her words in many cases are quite comforting to the aspiring photographer, advising acceptance that a photograph can only be a moment in a life of a person and not capable of 'capturing' that person, that cameras are just tools of the trade and not to get hung up on brands and equipment. Some of my highlights from the book include:

* Taking the famous last photo of a naked John Lennon and clothed Yoko Ono before he was shot
* Photographing the Rolling Stones on tour
* Capturing the war in Sarajevo
* Photographing the Queen
* The last supper photograph of the cast from the Sopranos

My only criticism of this book is that it is not big enough to give justice to the photographs. It is nightstand rather than coffee table sized. Looking at the small reproductions is not quite the same as gazing at the glossy center spreads in Vanity Fair. Still though, what has impressed me most about this book has been the words behind the pictures. I have accumulated quite a few photography books over the past couple of years but this has definitely become one of my most treasured.

Self Portrait: Being and Nothingness

So this is my first (and may be my only) attempt at a self portrait for this week's DPO Weekly Assignment. Surprisingly I got stuck on what to do for a self portrait. I've done lots of self portraits before but I couldn't say that any one of them perfectly represented me, or were even close....so, just to give myself a headache, I decided to go existentialist.

Because I was contemplating what parts of me were not in my previous photographs, what sprang to mind was Satre's work "Being and Nothingness". Rather than being as the opposite of nothing, Satre considers them as contradictions. Nothingness is a state of non-being, logically subsequent to being. In my self portraits whilst a part of me is there, the portrait is also defined by what of me is not there. That's something that is very clear to me. In saying that “This is a photograph of part of me” means that I should also be able to say “This is not a photograph of part of me”.

Anyway....it's difficult to take a photograph to represent a phenomenological ontological discussion, I tried to make it as monochrome as possible but not as opposites but as part of the same condition. The white background fading into the self, a blur to blur the boundaries between being and nothing. It's an attempt!

How do I take a self portrait?

Ok so I have taken lots of self portraits in the past....but now I am given the challenge of being asked to take a self portrait for a competition and I'm stuck! I think perhaps before I have used self portraiture to tell a story or to try out particular techniques but now that I am asked to take a photograph of mySELF rather than a character I feel a bit nervous....how do I photograph me?

Creating Clone Images

Some people have asked me how I put together "Breathe" - good news, the photo editing work is dead easy (climbing the tree itself...well that's another story)!

Clone pictures are pretty commonplace now on Flickr, there are groups dedicated to them or look at the excellent work of Miss Anelia. I guess you could say they are symbolic of the multiplicity of the self....I just happen to think they are quite fun! This isn't the first one I've made, but I prefer this one.

There are many ways I imagine that you could create one (more tutorials at the bottom) but here's how I did it:

1. Find a tree (preferably one you can get up and that isn't blowing in the wind too much).
2. Set the camera up on a tripod - I had mine on programme setting stopped down a notch, nothing too difficult here.
3. Climb tree
4. Either with the aid of a trusty other or a handheld remote take loads of pictures (I mean loads - I took about 150) of you in different positions (being careful not to fall out of said tree). The trick is not to move the camera a mm! Keep it set on the tripod. Be careful though, if someone comes up and nicks your equiptment you are not in a very good position to go after them in hot pursuit!
5. In photoshop choose one picture to use as a base image, then using the lasso tool select yourselves on the other images and paste them into position, each on a new layer on the base image. Works better if you feather the selection for each.
6. Use the eraser and blur tools to go around the edges and neaten up.
7. Flatten layers
8. I then used the Orton method on this image and played with the tone mapping and curves to create the 'look'.

...In total about 2.5 hours work, voila! Piece of Pie!

[The reflection in the pond was created by copying part of the image, flipping it round, distorting it horizontally using the lens distort filter, pasting into position and decreasing the opacity]

Oh did I mention I have a new website...http://www.ktlindsayphotography.smugmug.com

Other Tutorials
How to make clone pictures using Gimp

Galapagos: 'Imps of Darkness'

The Marine Iguana is only found on the Galapagos Islands so I felt very privileged to meet them! They look so prehistoric and are a pretty scary sight, Charles Darwin himself on first encountering them wrote:

The black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2-3 ft), disgusting clumsy Lizards. They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl & seek their prey from the Sea. I call them 'imps of darkness'. They assuredly well become the land they inhabit.

These 'imps of darkness' warm up on the lava rocks all day to create enough heat to plunge themselves into the sea to swim to their daily supply of marine algae. I was so shocked to encounter one whilst actually in the sea that I didn't get a photogarph...it was like having a dinosaur swimming towards you!