david purdie photo blog and gallery news — david

  My review of Andreas Gursky at the Hayward Gallery London (till 22 April 2018) In February I went to see the Andreas Gursky show at the newly refurbished Hayward. His work sits between large scale abstract painting and photography. There is a lot to like about the show, the scale and presence of the pictures is arresting. There is an admirable seriousness of intention and ambition in most of them. A recent iphone picture view of the US midwest from a car (below) is terrific. A 4m long print of clubbers, seemingly shot individually, with very carefully controlled colour, is...

I always think that you haven't really seen a place until you go to take pictures, alone and with nothing else to do there. A visit with friends or family has way too many distractions and they aren't going to be amused with waiting hours so I can have a good look at the cliffs!  So yesterday I went down to the beach at Beachy Head for the first time proper, to take pictures, and got very lucky with the light. It takes some planning to get a low tide and decent light, and it's a good idea to leave before it...

Whenever possible am getting out for the last couple of hours of sunlight, today near Woodchurch. I was testing out a really cheap elderly (1980s) 200mm f4 Canon EF lens. Bought for £40 on ebay and used on my Sony A7R2 with an adapter, it looks to perform better than my modern Canon 70-200 zoom. This was inspired after finding a very interesting site about using manual lenses, old and new, on modern Sony bodies....   https://phillipreeve.net/blog/  Although having said that this is a 2 frame stitched picture shot on the Sony using a Canon 85mm f1.8.