Photo-Series on Sam Smith

Photo Series: Standout

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Standout is a short series of shots taken in Switzerland between March 2021 and May 2024. They are photos showing telephone poles, electricity pylons, signposts, and fence posts standing out.

Every photo in the series was shot on my Hasselblad 501c with either a 60mm f/3.5 CF or 80mm f/2.8 CB lens using Ilford HP5+ shot at ISO 800 and developed in Ilfotec HC 1:49 for 11 minutes. I scanned them with an Epson V800 and edited them in darktable.

August 01

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

August 01 is Swiss national day, and one of the few days of the year that it’s legal to set off fireworks here in Zurich. I decided to head out in the evening with my digital camera to see the fireworks and take a few photos, primarily just for myself and maybe to put a few on my Instagram story (hence the vertial compositions). In the end I thought I had a nice little atmospheric photo series which would fit nicely here.

Edgeland Nottingham

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently looking through all the photos I took during my 4 years living in Nottingham to see if I could come up with some kind of series out of them. After cutting it down to all the black & white images that turned out reasonably I had just over 200 photos so I needed to come up with some more specific ideas. One theme I tend to shoot a lot is where nature meets the built environment, which lead me to put together this series. I got the title, and some inspiration, from Robin Friend’s Bastard Countryside (watch this video for a good introduction).

This series was shot with my Hasselblad 500C/M, CF 60mm and 150mm lenses, and Ilford HP5+ at EI 800 and developed in HC-110 1+49 for 11 minutes, except for image 13, which was shot on Ilford FP4+ at EI 400 and developed in HC-110 1+49 for 16 minutes.

In Feburary 2019 I started shooting a series with a similar theme in a small nature reserve in Nottingham on Fuji Pro 400H, but I’ve never been able to get acceptable scans from the 2 rolls I shot. If I do manage to get something useful from them I might put together a part 2 to this project.

Photo Series: New York Architecture

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Just 15 months after I posted my Singapore Architecture photo series, I have decided to revisit this theme with some photos I took in New York last September. Despite what this series might suggest, I did explore beyond Manhattan but not as much because I found Manhattan to be the most interesting photographically.

This series was shot with my Hasselblad 500C/M and CF 150mm lens, on Ilford HP5+ shot at EI 800 and developed in HC-110 1+49 for 11 minutes.

Campus Lights

Sat, 16 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As an astronomy student and hobbyist, light pollution has sort of become my environmental issue of choice. Not only is it an annoyance to astronomers, but also damaging to wildlife as well as our health and is a large energy sink. I have taken particular notice of the amount of light pollution on my university’s campus lately as I am back living on campus after 2 years of living elsewhere, and my dissertation involves using the telescope on the roof of the physics building. This is a university that seems to boast about being green but seems to ignore this aspect of the environment.

All of the photos in this series were taken between 11pm and 2am, outside of those times of the year when things stay open through the night (around exams and big deadlines) and mostly away from the residential areas, so this should show the darkest the university gets within term time.

I have been in contact with a relevant member of staff about the situation and they seemed to be very receptive to this and I am awaiting an update. My main goal with this project is to raise some awareness for this issue while also documenting what the campus looks like before it hopefully gets darker.

This series was shot on my Hasselblad 500C/M with 150mm CF lens and Rollei CR200 film, developed by Palm Labs in Birmingham and scanned with my Epson 4180.

References

Burmese Dogs

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

"The pariah curs were baying the moon - it was only a quarter full and nearly down by midnight, but the dogs slept all day in the heat, and they had begun their moon-choruses already"
- George Orwell

It was on the first night of the 3 day trek from Kalaw to Inle Lake, in a small hilltop village, at about 4 a.m when, as we discovered later in the morning, we had all been awoken by the moon-choruses of a group of dogs that must have been larger than the human population of the town.

This is a series of photos I took with my phone while travelling around Burma during July 2018. I found the similarities between Burma as I visited it and how George Orwell wrote about it to be quite interesting, especially with regards to the dogs.

Photo Series: Singaporean Architecture

Sun, 02 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In another attempt at post-shooting photo series creation, I have put together a collection of architecture shots I took during my brief stay in Singapore in June of 2018.

Subways

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the remnants of a failed attempt at a photo project looking at Birmingham’s pedestrian subways. I never really thought it was a very good idea for a project but I decided to give it a go anyway because I wanted to try shooting a project and it was the best idea that I had, also the subways are the sort of thing that I usually like to shoot anyway.

Everything in this series was shot with my Hasselblad 500C/M and Zeiss 60mm Distagon CF with Ilford HP5+ rated at 800 and developed with Kodak HC-110 at a dilution of 1+49 for 11 minutes. This is what I shoot most of the time anyway but I thought that the pushed HP5+ would work well for the sort of gritty feel of the subways. I shot 3 separate rolls of film on 3 different days in May of 2018. I have chosen 12 of the 23 pictures that I took that I feel fit the scope of the project.

The intention behind the project was to capture the feeling of the subways, which I think I was at least partially successful in doing. I think photos 2, 8 and 9 capture some of the dread and uncertainty I, at least used to, feel when entering one of these. At some point when hunting these things down I began to realise how quickly they were disappearing, a couple that I photographed were fenced off and one that I visited had been totally filled in. I was then also trying to document some of these before they were also demolished. The main thing that I failed to capture was a human aspect of the subways, although I’m not sure that photographing people walking through these areas or homeless people sleeping in them would be more compelling than what I have.

I gave up on the project mostly just because I’d lost interest in it. I visited almost all of the subways that I managed to find, some a few times, and despite only shooting 23 images I was starting to feel like there wasn’t really any new compositions left since they’re all quite visually similar.