I hate being ill. There's so much to do, and with flu (apparently) I've no energy to do any of it. It's also such a lovely day as I write this, there's all those phone boxes out there waiting to be photographed, and they'll just have to wait. Perhaps I'll upload some of the images I took over Christmas and New Year later today - I haven't looked at them yet. What I have decided to do is take out a subscription to the British Journal of Photography (see http://www.bjp-online.com/). It beats all the other so-called photography magazines (except Amateur Photographer) in my view. Their raison d'être seems to be to convince you that you can be a better photographer by buying all the expensive and unnecessary kit advertised in their magazines. No. You get to be a better photographer by taking more photographs. BJP is also the best window into what's going on in the world of contemporary photography at the moment.

Finally, I'm now in contact with a real red phone box nerd, thanks to Flickr. Have a look at http://www.flickr.com/people/robert_punk/ - he's Robert Ore, lives in Edenbridge in Kent, and has at least  four phone boxes in his garden including a Doctor Who Tardis and two K6s. What a guy.

Back from the hols yesterday. I took "A Beginning Light" by Katherine Hoffman with me. It's a biography of Alfred Stieglitz, American photographer, dealing with his early years 1890 - 1917. He was instrumental in making photography the modern art form that we know it today. His work is beautifully lyrical, and is teaching me a lot about interpretation and composition, not least to really look at how the image is put together before the shutter is pressed. One of my favourite quotes of his is "Nearly right is child's play". Probably his best known image is "The Steerage" (1907). His early work comprised a lot of what we would call today street photography, notably "Winter - Fifth Avenue" (1893) - left. Interestingly, the version of the image in the book has a pile of railway sleepers in the extreme bottom left corner, which Stieglitz brushed out in the print shown here. Nothing new there, then.


Oh, and I did take loads of holiday snaps, all with the GF1, for which I now have a viewfinder. But that's for a future post.