Inside and Out

Stills photography is essentially the capture of light using some piece of equipment and a type of recording medium - film, or a digital sensor. The trick is using the light to your advantage in whatever genre of the art you're working in. The greatest images ever captured all use natural or artificial light to create mood, contrast, ambience, and drama to subconsciously invoke some sort of emotional response in the viewer - whether it's street photography, nature, landscape, sports, or architecture and interiors. Much of the work I do is pretty uniform in nature - shooting high end residential properties which need to be documented in an accurate fashion, with a balanced, & fairly neutral lighting style to show the features and flow of a house in a certain format used in brochures and MLS (Multi-listing sites such as Zoopla, Rightmove, etc.). This generally involves three distinct elements, which are combined in the post production process to give a balanced, final output

The effect of the boost given to the property market from May 2020 onwards has well and truly halted. The start to 2021 has been the quietest period since I started doing this job, and along with the upcoming end to the stamp duty land tax holiday, it signals a worrying few months ahead in terms of keeping my head above water. I've not seen anything paid since October from my main client, and my reserve of cash put aside for tax is dwindling due to being forced to dip into it for monthly living costs. It seems that everyone else is raking in the money by being in white-collar, administrative jobs, working from home, and saving thousands in transport costs etc, while I continue to drag myself out to small jobs, spending a fortune on diesel, supporting millionaire estate agents & homeowners, while I live in poverty like a mug. Britain in the 2020's - a nation of tory-voting middle classes sitting safely in warm homes which seem to magically increase in value month on month, b

Having fully recovered from my mild cold in late November, I can now finally reveal that there is no actual pandemic - it's all a fake thing - designed to force you to bow down to libertarians who plan to take over the economy and use you as disposable labour. The injection of mind-controlling nano-chips, manufactured by Bill Gates, and disguised as a vaccine, will accelerate the process. Alongside this there's a conspiracy involving a massive group of high profile paedo's who have a network of underground bunkers housing the bodies of millions of sacrificed children - whose blood is piped worldwide to Joe Biden's followers in order that they may drink their life-essence to maintain their own youth. The communists have just ousted the only hero who could have stopped them by rigging an election. Has it really come to this? Anyway, the latest "lockdown", and the tangential restrictions flying in all directions have now made things almost impossible to manage,

Fifty six short years ago, on this very date, I was dragged into the world as the offspring of a Jewish-American wife of a US serviceman, and some anonymous Scottish dude who had it off with her on at least one occasion while her husband did his duty on the USAF base near Prestwick airport. Being the mid sixties, the relaxed attitude towards the children of unmarried mothers wasn't as prevalent as it is now, so yours truly was sent packing to an orphanage of sorts before having ownership transferred to my lovely adoptive parents who did their job superbly. I only have one photo of my birth mother - taken in the back yard of the address she was packed off to in Aurora, Colorado shortly after my disgraceful appearance presumably. None of my birth records or subsequent historical details exist from the time, so I can never be sure about the exact details of my ancestral lineage, or birth family details. It's a shame, and instils an insecurity that children with certainty about the

Well......that was interesting eh?  To be honest, the year of 2020 Anus Dominoes wasn't that bad in overall terms in this particular household. Thankfully, and gratefully, there were no deaths of loved ones, serious illness or injury, unemployment or massive financial hardship to endure, unlike millions of others who have suffered loss in all its forms throughout the year. Countless families and households are in dire straits, and under massive pressure because of the effects of some bumpy particle things measuring a mere 60 nanometres across. As I write this, the next "lockdown" has just started, and I'm looking at another blank order book, with only one job in the diary. As this is strictly a review of last year, that'll have to wait until another time however. So without further ado, let's get to it: My favourite property of the year: One of the things I have to swallow without complaint in this job, is spending time in houses that I couldn't afford to