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The Losers

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Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year 2017 With over 8000 entries from across the globe, The categories consist of a large range of images depicting food in our society.  The competition has been going since 2011 and I've entered it numerous times over that period. This year I was successful and to my absolute astonishment, first manged to get shortlisted.  I was extatic. 39 Judges went through each and every photograph they included David Loftus Photographer to Jamie Oliver, Nigel Atherton, group editor for time inc etc and Xanthe Clay, Telegraph food columnist. Shortly afterwards, I received an email informing me that my image had made the finals! and I was invited to attend the awards ceremony at the Mall Galleries in London . On 25 April 2017 the award Ceremony took place at the Gallery, with over 400 guests.  Delicious canapes and Taittinger champagne was on offer and was one of the main highlights of the evening for me.  Thirteen Sponsors ranging from St
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The Sport of Kings

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THE SPORT OF KINGS Sunday mornings , the church mass has ended, and men head of to the local Sabong Arena. The first fight is just about to start; Cheers and shouts of betting punters can be heard as you approach the building.  The participants and spectators are excited about the upcoming fight, gambling is prevalent during matches and, sometimes, heavy bets are placed on the favourites. Animal activists beware, this arena still practices Sabong (cock fighting), an organized fight between two roosters  After basketball, THE second most popular sport in the country; it is a favourite hobby for many Filipinos and deeply enjoyed in their culture. Cockfighting has been around for centuries, nowadays it is one of the traditional betting games in the Philippines, and millions of pesos are won and lost every Sunday throughout the nation. Every contest is judged by a referee, the ‘sentensyador’, his ruling is definite so there's no use trying to appeal to his decision.  Ano
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Shooting a Fairytale Princess

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Shooting a Fairytale Princess I saw Ellie in the park, she was dressed as the little mermaid and looked wonderful so I approached her, had a little chat and left her with my calling card. Not Long afterwards, Ellie sent me an email and said she'd be honored to have me take her photograph; so we decided to collaborate and come up with some creative ideas. We met again in a local coffee house to discuss a possible date, went over our ideas so we would all be on the same page on the day of the shoot. I got my friend in to hold the soft box which had a speed light inside.  Everything was done in manual mode, including setting focus and altering the power output of the flash at each location to capture the right mood for each image. I wanted sunny weather, so we put the shoot off until late march when there would be  a better chance of sunshine.  We couldn't have picked a better day, the  sun was glorious, casting the right  amount of light for the duration of the s
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Westminster Bridge through my eyes

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Living in London the last 30 years has taught me many a lesson.  Travelling from Dublin with my friend, we were bored and decided to head to London; since that day in 1987 I haven't looked back. I've always felt safe here, despite any terrorism even back then.  Any terrorist incident is appalling, wherever they are carried out but hearing about it here in the City I live in is indeed frightening but I can't let it rule or change the way I live.  We have no choice but to carry on. I've walked across Westminster Bridge too many times to count and have often stopped to take photos during my recent passion for photograph an it's a great location to capture images' there's often a lot of photographers up there with tripods in the evening attempting to capture that classic shot. Rather than repetitively thinking about the terrorist incident on 22 March 2017 on Westminster Bridge, I wanted to share some of the positive images of the area which I captured of t
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Location: Westminster Bridge, London SE1 7GP, UK
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Creative Composite Photography

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Taking a look around the internet, you are sure to come across many many images that have been put together rather than been taken as a single frame in camera.  Lots of photographers like to extend their editing abilities and create images that seem impossible like the wedding photos where the guests are being chased by a non existent Dinosaur, or the couple standing in the middle of a lava flow.  Impossible images to capture in camera but creatively put together after wards in photoshop. All to make the impossible, possible. Isn't creativity wonderful?   I've been making my mini world images in the same fashion as most of these composite makers and after creating a few, I find it thoroughly enjoyable, especially seeing the vision come together in the final image.  The only limit is your imagination when it comes to creating art and the same can be said for even shooting photos, looking at things from a different perspective, using the things around you to your adva
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Photo 24

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What is Photo 24? Put simply; it's an organised 24 hour Photo event around London.  It is sponsored by Photography News in association with Nikon School and Photo 24 London. On it's fourth year, this was my first time to attend and I was a little bit unsure of what to expect.  So it all kicked off at 12am on Friday 17th of June 2016 and ran until 12am on Saturday 18th June.  Some people went off in pairs or small groups from the start and others went along for some introductory and first time tips with a larger group lead by a couple of team members from Nikon School London. As I have quite a bit of experience with photography anyway, I ended up just heading off with one guy I met and we stayed together for most of the first day into the early hours.  We walked through Covent Garden then on to Leicester Square, and onward towards Westminster and the London eye. The weather was quite different and at various times of the day, we were dealing with sun, rain and heavy cl
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The Curious Squirrel

In my local park there's an abundance of wildlife and plenty of those are squirrels of the grey variety.  They are very tolerant to humans and will quite happily climb on you to investigate whether you have food or not.  It's not the first time this has happened to me and I've even had them climb into my camera bag in search of some peanut treats. Check out the video below to see this curious chap climb up my leg twice and even have a sniff of my camera. Curious Squirrel
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