I'm not a photographer by training - Over the years, I've used the internet, the knowledge of patient friends and even more patient professionals to help me develop my skills as a photographer. It's been an enormous learning journey, filled with highs and lows, and countless thousands of photographs, good and bad. All the while, I've never had any involvement in the academic side of photography, and by the later years of university, it had reached the stage where I felt I needed to remedy the situation.

My course, as a student of Glasgow School of Art, was Product Design - a degree focusing on the creation of new objects and services, and teaching the methods and skills required to do so correctly. As part of this - as with virtually any degree - a dissertation is a fundamental requirement, making up a large percentage of my overall degree mark. However, unlike most courses, the topic of your dissertation does not have to tally with your choice of degree. Largely, students choose to focus their written submission on their chosen field, but given my outside interests, I decided to use this as an opportunity to prove to myself that I could create academic work based around photography.

The subject of my dissertation is conflict photography - something I've been fascinated with throughout my career as a photographer, but am unlikely ever to get the chance to be part of. I've posted the synopsis below, so I won't go into too much detail here, but it was a hugely engaging topic to write about. The dissertation received recognition as the best extended essay in the design faculty, and earned me a distinction for my work in Historical & Critical studies - but more than that, it provided me with the chance to read extensively about a subject I love, allowed me to discuss the way the press uses images of this type with the picture editor of The Times, and ultimately gave me enormous pleasure, bringing photography into my degree in a meaningful manner.

You can read my dissertation by downloading it below - I welcome any comments you may have.

A medium at war 
An analysis of photography's relationship with human conflict

Synopsis
This dissertation looks at the way in which conflict is portrayed through photography in its various forms. Specifically, it examines the relationship between the photographer and the images they produce, the ability of art to visually define conflict, the photographic portrayal of terrorism, and the effect of continually modernising warfare on how it is visually communicated. Ultimately, it examines how conflict is currently portrayed by photography, and how the subject will be approached in the future by the medium.

A medium at war - Download (PDF - 1.9Mb)

The affinity with bikes carries across to an event I've talked about before - the Fort William World Cup. I've worked at or for the event for the last ten years, in some capacity or another - a course worker with a barely-healed collar bone in 2002; the event photographer in 2009 and programme writer every year since the Worlds in 2007, including 2011. This year was a bit of an odd one - my other job (I'm a designer with a London-based consultancy) has taken me about as far away from my roots as it could - I'm now living in North London, where hills are pathetic little things with no sense of grandeur or circumstance about them. Photographically, I've still been shooting, but nowhere near the intensity of what I was doing before I moved down here, and certainly not involving any racing. With that in mind, I knew that I had to go to Nevis Range this year, if for no other reason than to remember what a bloody mountain actually looked like.

It was a hugely rewarding trip. I shot for myself, tried out some ideas that I hadn't done in the past, and got some images that made me grin. That's my life measure - the ability of an experience to make someone (me, you, anyone) spontaneously smile. If there's teeth, it's a winner. I spent time with my mates, talking about the years we've all been going to the Fort, and I spent time lying in peat bogs, covered in mud, fiddling with remote flashes and swearing at a lack of memory card space. I was working and I was on holiday, like it always feels like when I'm doing something I love. Without getting overly philosophical on you, it was a trip back to a country that I've been out of for six months, and it was one that's still giving me food for thought right now... I find that this seems to happen each time I head home. But anyway, I talk too much. Here's ten from the Ben, and a bonus - the bottom one's worth a click to see big.

Still, I had time to grab a triple-threat comedy combo before I hopped on my flight out to the land of the free / home of the brave, catching some acts that ranged from bollocks and overpriced (Danny Bhoy, whose humour is about as exciting as a wet day at the zoo), to tiny and brilliant (Abandomen, whose hip-hop improv saw my mate dragged onto the stage, and my good self playing a mean cowbell bassline on the closing track). I've actually got some photos from something related to that, which I'll put in a later blog (chronological order be damned!), but to get back to the point of this one, I'm going to talk to you about music, of which there is a boatload at the Festival.

In previous years, I've been lucky enough to be covering various acts (Maximo Park, Editors, Muse and Pendulum amongst others) at T on the Fringe, and subsequently The Edge Festival, but this year, I got a fairly special invitation to come and shoot an intimate, acoustic Biffy Clyro gig that few knew about, let alone had tickets for. Having last shot Biffy several years ago at a sweaty Barrowlands in Glasgow, I put on an air of professional nonchalance, and drove through to Edinburgh rocking the **** out to a pile of their best tracks, head banging like a child that's been on a sugar binge.

For this year, the ever-disappointing Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens has actually had a little thought put into its use, and there's a decent little beer garden down at the bottom. Quite nicely, this means that if you fancy sitting out with a pint of your favourite refreshing beverage - say... a Bulmer's Summer Blend - then you don't have to hike all the way over to the Spiegeltent (although they do have cheeseboards available in that part of town). This little pad was the venue for the evening's acoustic showcase, aboard a special bandstand, belonging to the hosts for the evening, Bulmers cider - who were also doing a fine job of making sure that nobody went thirsty.

Biffy sauntered onto stage in the early evening sun and played a mellow acoustic set, comprising pretty much exclusively of recent material, which although not as eclectic as some hardcore fans may have wished, certainly tied into the summery theme of their surroundings. They chuntered away with the 200-ish strong crowd between tracks, supping the sponsor's brew throughout, and just as everyone wondering exactly what flavour of Domestos had been poured on frontman Simon Neil's head, they made their exit, heading backstage to be greeted by their fellow West-Coast export, funnyman Kevin Bridges, and leaving the excellent Sun Lovin' Criminals to play out the evening.

Hell of a strange thing, seeing a band of that level of exposure playing to a crowd that would barely rival that of a school sports day, but it was good to have the freedom to shoot for as long as I wanted, from wherever I wanted, with a backdrop that shames any festival or venue I've been to - even if it did resemble some sort of carnie ride on acid. A unique experience, both as a photographer, and as a fan. 'Mon the Biffy.

Why do I mention this? Well, on the subject of scale and patriotism, it's difficult to consider a better metaphor for them than the US space programme. I recently spent a day at Kennedy Space Center in Florida - the first time I've been there since I was a child. Visiting as an adult, it's an entirely different experience than that of a kid, who despite being impressed by rockets, was a little miffed at being dragged down to the coast at the expense of a day's mouse-bothering at Disney World.

The scale of the Center, like the country itself, is one of the most impressive aspects; towering space craft, the vast amounts of money involved, the number of people involved in the operation. That said, the most impressive thing, by a long way, is the scale of the ambition and achievement that you see. As you walk through the exhibits, wander around the craft involved in the exploration of space, and peer into the history of the subject, you constantly feel dwarfed by everything around you - it's a real shiver-up-the-spine environment, and relentlessly epic. The memorial dedicated to those who have died in US space programmes (a towering, black marble wall with the names of the 24 astronauts who have lost their lives) is a surreal and humbling reminder of those who chose to go into space, and have surrendered their lives as a result, while running your fingers across the atmosphere-scarred heat shield of a Gemini command module, recovered after being dragged by gravity back to Earth, is difficult to put in context.

And that's the thing that really, really gets me - much of space flight has been fuelled by relentless ambition in achieving what is difficult to even imagine. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy stated: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Everywhere at Kennedy Space Center, you see the legacy of a ridiculous suggestion that despite never even having sent a man into orbit, the goal was set to put one on the surface of another planet. And the US did it in less than seven years.

Ultimately, the Center, and everything within, is symbolic of something that we are losing, or in some cases, never had. The ability to think of these outlandish, fantastical ideas, and not to scoff, or deem them impractical or prohibitively complex is vital if we are to progress as a society - playing safe ensures the survival of what is current and existing, but strangles evolution. In an era of austerity, we risk grinding to a halt.

This strange country, with all its flaws and differences, and with a patriotic urge that generally goes over the heads of many in the UK, is something I can entirely comprehend and appreciate, when you consider the $136 billion, 400,000+ employees, and the most complex machine ever assembled that sent 12 men to the moon. It is brilliant, and it is inspiring, and for me, shows the power of an idea, and what can happen when people get behind it and believe in a massive way.

And as a designer, I fucking love that.

Fittingly, the whole trip began with me behind the wheel, blasting the six hours down from Scotland to whatever bit of England Silverstone is actually in (roughly Milton Keynes distance for those as useless at English geography as myself). Unfortunately, due to the timing of work, myself and Tim, who nabbed the other ticket, had to leave at about 2am, in order to hit the camp site in time for opening... not a fun drive.

Still, regardless of the hellish hours, we arrived to blinding weather - clear skies, sun, soaring temperatures, and rocked up to the circuit at about 9am, ready for some hard racin'. Of course, with it being Friday, all we got was F1 practice and various other support racing events, but it was still epic. Our general admission tickets meant we could saunter around all the expensive stands for the day, so I managed to grab a few decent shots from the raised seating - the safety clutter of catch fencing and runoff areas means that it's a bugger to get any good photos as a punter, which is a shame really. Saturday was more of the same, although not being allowed in the stands, we explored where we could sit for the race on the Sunday.

The night brought a lot more fun - live music at the campsite, with Eddie Jordan turning up on stage to swear a lot and play the drums, and a hearty selection of scrumpy from the on-site bar. The campsite itself was fantastic, and compared to the crap that people at festivals get shafted with, the difference is staggering - parking your car next to your tent is a much more adult way of organising things, although it's obviously not going to work with the T in the Park chavs...

The race itself was epic - the atmosphere amongst the fans was brilliant, and being so close to the blasting noise of the F1 cars as they battle on the circuit is incredible... you have no idea how loud these cars really are until you hear them flying down a straight, jumping onto the brakes, and listen to the engine blast and rumble as it gets cycled down through the gears. It is a sound that is totally sterilised by television, and one that any F1 fan would love.

Getting any shots on race day was an exercise in futility, due to the number of fans crammed in at the fences and the sight lines being full of chain link fencing, but I didn't really care by that point; watching Webber win was brilliant, seeing Hamilton keep right on him, despite having an inferior car, was great, and watching Vettel and Button haul themselves up the field was inspiring.

So why have I written a photo blog about this? Well, there's a few reasons. Firstly, it's a great sport to photograph, and as a punter, you can certainly get some good photographs of the F1 cars, if you have patience, a vaguely long telephoto lens, and know how to pan. Unfortunately, it is a sport that has a vast, yawing chasm between what the pros can shoot, and what the public can - and that's not going to change, given that the best spots are in front of the catch netting, where only marshals and press photogs are even allowed.

Secondly, it gave me a sharp poke with a stick. Motorsport photography is something I've always had an interest in, ever since I got a run round Knockhill in a Ferrari 360, and took loads of pictures with my wee digicam, but this weekend made me realise something that I feel about a lot of the things I photograph, but couldn't quite put my finger on - I like to be involved in what I photograph. Don't get me wrong, I loved watching the GP, but I know that I would love it even more if I was there working, doing something creative and productive - it's the same way I feel about music photography, and also shooting mountain biking. I think it's to do with knowing my subject, and the confidence it gives me to shoot it, but also that I don't like sitting back and letting things just wash over me... I need purpose!

So next year, I want to be at Silverstone again, but wearing a vest, and shooting from inside the track. It's a big ambition, but now that I'm shot of uni, I can really apply myself and see what I'm capable of achieving, without worrying about how photography's going to ruin my grades... Just have to figure out who to badger to sort out a pass now. Oh, and if you're an F1 fan, and haven't been to a GP, then in 2011, go to Silverstone. And take your camera, because even if you can't shoot the F1 race, there's a hell of a lot of other good stuff to shoot, even if it is just an Irish former team boss playing the drums to Cocaine, for a crowd in a field. It is festival season, after all.

A fairly odd statement you might say, but I can pretty much pin it down to that time because of one event - the 2000 British National Mountain Bike Championships, held at Innerleithen in the Scottish Borders. Me and my mate Iain pitched up there for two days, collecting the currency of every adolescent biker-nut the world over - stickers, autographs and photos with the riders straight out of the pages of MBUK (and randomly, chatting to Fionn Griffiths' mum whilst the dual was on). For a 14 year old kid, it was unquestionably the best thing in the world.

I took lots of photos. Panning shots of riders, podium shots - you name it, I took a badly out-of focus photograph of it. But still, the best went in a big clip frame, along with a big bit of the RAV4 branded course tape for added authenticity. Not one of those photographs was passable in any technical sense, but I still felt immeasurable pride in the fact that I had taken them. I still have that clip frame - it reminds me of why I decided that photography was something I wanted to be good at. Of course, the trump card in that frame was undoubtedly the photo of myself and Steve Peat - the downhill equivalent of one of the shiny football stickers that you could trade for major components of other kids' packed lunches.

Why do I mention this (somewhat rubbish) photo? Well, ten years down the line, I've taken a lot of photos of Peaty, and even managed to get the odd one in focus now and again. From SDAs to NPSs, from World Cups to World Champs, he's ridden in front of my lens a boatload of times throughout the ten years since the photo above (check out the images at the bottom of the post), and images of him racing are scattered throughout my photographic development. Ultimately, at one key moment in Austria last September, I shot him whilst competing in the World Cup Finals - the first foreign race I'd ever covered.

In the last few weeks, this image has become an incredibly important photograph for me, as a result of its association with an upcoming event - the event in question being the Fort William round of the 2010 UCI MTB World Cup. With the management company behind the event basing the branding around Steve (what with him being the reigning World Champion and all), my photo is being used as the main brand image; I've been involved in this event every year since 2002 when I volunteered as a course-worker / marshal, so this means an unfathomable amount to me. It'll hopefully be plastered all over the place in marketing material for the race, so keep your eyes open, or take a look on FortWilliamWorldCup.co.uk - the main image in the downhill section on the site is also one of mine. Bit bigger than the clip-frame, but the pride's still there...

Cheers all...

As some of you may be aware, I'm studying the the development of photographic conflict coverage for my dissertation. After being recommended a review to read by my tutor, I subsequently didn't bother reading all of it, and went out to buy the book it discussed - The Photographer - from Borders. If I'm going to use a source in the most important academic piece of writing I'm going to do, then I want my own opinion of it!

The graphic novel tells the story of a French photographer (Didier Lefevre) embedded with Medicins Sans Frontiers in Afghanistan, during the Soviet conflict of the 1980s, who spent several months documenting the mission for MSF. Lefevre's photography is built into a rich tapestry of a story, through the use of illustrated insertions between images that add his own comments, memories and opinions to the material, in a manner not so blunt as a caption or accompanying written copy in a newspaper. The depth in which the method of storytelling immerses you is really something - certainly beyond traditional photojournalism that I've seen, with Frederic Lemercier's artwork fitting like a jigsaw between the images from Lefevre's contact sheets. Until this book was published in 2003, only a tiny number of the images had ever been used in print, never mind knitted together into a tale of this type.

Put simply, this book is outstanding. I bought it tonight, read it in one go over a couple of hours, and finished it feeling like I'd read something really special - and I'm certainly not normally a fan of graphic novels. If you have any interest in photojournalism (I'm talking about the tiniest glimmer of enthusiasm), then you have to read it; if you don't, then you should pick up a copy anyway. It is one of the most fascinating, enjoyable things I have ever seen done with photography, and I'm completely blown away by how a dull trip to a bookshop for a dissertation source has turned into something so rewarding.

"The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Medicins Sans Frontiers" is out now, costs about £10 from Borders (click here), and should be in your basket within 10 minutes of reading this. You can also see some samples of the work, by looking on this site - Click.

(Thanks to Richard Brunton on the Forbidden Planet blog for the link to the sample)

Anyway, look around - I hope you enjoy what you see.

After a summer of mixed photographic fortunes, the previous few days have seen the swansong of the sunnier months as I headed out to my first World Cup race on foreign soil. I've shot the British round at Fort William for years (working for the event organisers this year), but have never had the opportunity to shoot the races abroad. To say I was happy to be doing it is a screaming understatement.

The finals this year were in the Austrian ski resort of Schladming, better known for the amazing Schladming Night Slalom race (50,000 people watching the top guns of slalom skiing competing under floodlights), and it's a cracking place to have a bike race. As it turned out, the weather forecast of rain, thunder, and low temperatures was a load of bull, and the whole weekend was bathed in blazing Alpine sunshine - exactly what you want for a weekend's shooting, especially when the last race I shot was the Fort William endurance downhill, which was essentially six hours in the pissing rain and cold.

In terms of the racing itself, there were six individual events - men's and women's races in downhill, four-cross, and cross country. Personally, cross country doesn't really tickle me, so I was following the DH and 4X action over the weekend, which provided more than enough to keep me occupied and entertained, especially as the four cross - in the same vein as the aforementioned ski race that takes place on the Planai piste - kicked off when the sun went down on the Saturday night.

As I've often said on here, I'm always keen to learn more, and most of that comes down to trying new things and practicing them when I can. With mountain biking, my recent aim has been to try and make the most of natural light. The reason I'm keen to do this comes down to variety, especially during 4X races - due to the nature of off-camera flash, you spend time setting up, time adjusting, and time getting some good shots. Given the small amount of time available during the race to re-locate and fanny around with radio kit, I decided to shoot the whole of the 4X at high-ISO, and rely on the floodlights. I'm pretty pleased with the results, but then again, Nikon really have made one hell of a camera in the D3.

After the 4X, Sunday was the main deal - downhill. I shot practice up the hill, and then moved down to the last straight before the finish for the race runs. Again, most of what I was shooting was natural light, although I did play around with flash a bit now and again (as was the case all weekend), just to keep my hand in! The finals were great, and I got what I needed from where I parked myself, although a 300mm lens would have been a real bonus.

So all in, a pretty good weekend. I could quite happily shoot all the races next year if anyone wanted to take care of the financial side of things (I was shooting for Descent-World this weekend, who put up for my flights and accommodation), but realistically, I'm now a fourth year product design student, so I doubt I'll have much of a life until next June. Guess we'll play it by ear, but I don't want to be a stranger to the World Cup for much longer.

Oh, and as a nice little closer, I have a tale to tell. Today, I left Schladming at 6.30am, with Doug driving the trusty Ford Maverick that Hertz had cursed us with when we arrived in Zurich (cheap flights being the reason for the epic roadtrip required to get to Schlad). Plenty of time to make our flight at 2.50pm. Unless you drive for over an hour in TOTALLY the wrong direction, end up near the Slovenian border, before realising the error. Cue 640km of trans-European driving, averaging a respectable 120kph throughout (and a max of about 175kph on the German Autobahn!), and a sprint through the airport terminal to get to the plane before it left. Whether you believe it or not, the difference between us making the flight and being stuck in Zurich came down to a matter of seconds.

Speed, tension, and exhilaration - that's how every World Cup should be... although perhaps not the drive home.

Occasionally, a job rears its head, and I have to say, no matter what it is - it's a phenomenal feeling to have someone say that they want to pay you to take photographs. I'd say it's like being paid to have fun - but that's not true. It IS being paid to have fun. Maybe that's just a sign that I'm immature, naive, and have a lot to learn, but I'd rather think that I'm right, and that I've found what I want to do with my life. That's much more appealing.

Anyway. At some point in July, I ended up going down to the Scottish Borders to cover the biggest mountain bike race of the season in the country, the British National Championships. Now, this was a good four weeks ago - unfortunately, I need to sit on images until I know one way or the other whether they'll get used by magazines. Even more unfortunately, considering I spent two days in the undergrowth snapping away, they weren't used by anyone. Ho hum. The race itself was a cracker - World Champion Gee Atherton took the win in the Senior category, with favourite Steve Peat stuffing it in the last corner whilst looking very safe for the win - and a welcome reminder that downhill racing in the UK can be a spectator sport outside of the World Cup round at Fort William.

I've been a lot more aware of exposing my images differently of late. It's very easy to take a brightly lit photograph in a forest when you've got remote flash, but it's also very easy to make it look like the race took place at night if you don't balance the ambient and flash light. It can actually make quite a cool photo, as it gives you clean backgrounds and lots of contrast, but I was keen to try and make the most of the lovely light that was floating around through the trees - most of the day it worked well, but right at the end, the clouds came in, and it got dark as the fastest guys did their runs... also when my second remote flash decided to die on its ass. No time to change settings, so it was a case of throwing my primary flash into a new position, and hoping for the best (check the last shot to see what I mean!).

So, I've got two days worth of images and nowhere to put them, other than archive storage, so here's a few for you to take a look at. I've just found out I'm off to Hong Kong later in the year, which I'm hugely looking forward to - definitely taking the camera with me, having seen the potential for great photos on-line.