I have no real interest in the Royal Wedding but I felt it was important to document the local community spirit in New Brighton. I was interested in how a community would come together on this day. Most people I spoke to weren’t huge fans of the Royals. They watched the wedding and some women did get a bit teary eyed, but they did agree that it was a great day for a street party.  Normally their road is full of cars meaning the kids can’t play in the road like this, so its a great opportunity for them to make the most of their street.

I didn’t really know my neighbours as a kid. The road was too wide so you only really got to know the person next door. In a street this size I can imagine its easy to get to know people. You can probably have a chat from your front door to the guy across the road, and because of that they probably have a great sense of community. Well, I know they do because they felt able to put on a street party.

This is Jo. She and her friend Vicky set the street party up.

This is Garry wearing his grandfathers bowler hat.

Garry’s son wearing ‘The Who’ tshirt. He’s too young to know who The Who are but does love Doctor Who.

The Royal family. Will isn’t in this photo. He was too busy skateboarding.

A darts player and his son enjoying the day.

Kids race up and down the street to see who’s the fastest.

The last time I saw a street like this was the World Cup in 2010, but as far as I know there were no street parties. It was fantastic to see a community out like this.

Traditional party food. Fun size chocolate, dolly mixtures and sarnies.

This is Vicky. She and Jo, pictured earlier, set up the street party. She even created her own bunting just for the occasion and spent 16hrs making it.

Traditional wedding day tug-of-war. Girls vs boys. The boys didn’t play fair.

It was really great to photograph this event. As I said at the start, I didn’t go to photograph a Royal wedding event. I went to photograph a community coming together in celebration. Why? Simply because its not often you see this and to me thats a damn shame. Surely there should be an event every year that brings communities together like this. Bizarrely Canadians take a day off, set off fireworks and celebrate our old Queen Victoria. We don’t. I’m not saying we should but surely we should have some day to celebrate something that brings us together like this. A royal wedding every 25 years doesn’t seem enough.

I’ve got to say a massive thanks to the people in this street for allowing me to document their afternoon. In the paranoid age we live where every photographer is treated with suspicion it was a breath of fresh air to be able to enter a community and take photos.

So instead I shot the entire lot on my iPhone with Hipstamatic.

There’s nothing new about mobile phone photography and I never intended to be unique or groundbreaking. It is after all photographs of people on public transport, nothing new there. When I was last in London I photographed a girl on the tube, and when I was in France I photographed a guy on the train there. I simply wanted to produce a simple series of photos using a stress free camera. By that I mean without the issues normally associated with pointing a camera at a stranger.

Its an interesting time with iPhone based photography. A series of war photos shot in Afganistan by Damon Winter recently came third in the POYI competition. He also used Hipstamatic. He said he thought it was no different to selecting film and a camera to shoot with. Hipstmatic allows you to chose the film and lens to produce the final image. You take the shot and its processed accordingly. This differs to apps like Instagram where you chose the processing style after taking the photo. It does make you wonder about the validity of an iPhone photograph. Is it really any different to choosing film and a camera just because its an app? It’s an interesting debate and you can read more on the NYT site
and also on the excellent Duckrabbitblog.

Anyway, to my photos from the tube.

Personally I’m waiting for the time when the cuts to the police force are so bad that there isn’t enough police to properly control these protests. I wonder what will happen then, when people are pushed just that bit too far and there’s no-one to stand against them.

As well as the photos below I recorded an Audioboo of the event.

I can’t say I’ve ever been to a real red carpet event. That was a nice thing to see.

A great turnout too.

The first thing we found was that my girlfriend Sam was a runner up in the ‘People’ category. That was really great to see. Seriously proud of her for that. The winner was fellow Fab Collective member Jane MacNeil with a photo from the Liverpool Santa Dash. Both great shots.

After looking around it turned out that I won the ‘Nature’ category with the following photo. I was pretty chuffed with that.

After riding the high of winning ‘Nature’ it turns out that I’d also won a 2nd category, ‘Maritime’.

This was turning out to be a fantastic night. 2 winning photos and a runner up for us. Great stuff.

The winning prints in each category were to be auctioned off during the night with the running totals being updated as the night went on. They put the current bids on the screen and I thought “Wow! £200 for my maritime photo.” But you see I got that wrong. It was £2,000! I couldn’t believe it. I sell similar sized prints for a lot less than that and there was someone here bidding £2,000 for one. Amazing! The nature photo was also doing well at £250.

I was really really happy with that but most importantly I was incredibly proud to have helped the Fairbridge out in this way. I just don’t have the money to donate £2,500 to a charity so its great that I could with my photography. In total they’ve so far raised £9,500 and hope to break £10,000 with more print sales. Fantastic news.

Lastly I just want to congratulate Matt Thomas for winning in the music category, and to Mark McNulty for judging and the work he put into making it a success.

I feel like I’ve changed considerably since the first edition came out. I’m not really a fan of the current trend in HDR photography. That is the overly processed style, or throwing a single RAW at Photomatix in the hope it makes the world a better place. Personally I very rarely HDR from a single RAW.

I prefer to use the technology to help with situations where the light is out of my control. My Nikon 24-70 happily accepts an ND filter to help with darkening the sky, but my Nikon 14-24 doesn’t. I think there might be a filter holder for it at around £250 or so. Its easier to simply shoot a few bracketed photos and merge to HDR later.

For this book I’ll be showing people how to get HDR shots like the following;

I’m sure theres a marketplace out there for non-OTT, normally saturated photos without crazy random burnt spots or blown areas. I hope anyway

By that I mean I won’t be showing you how to sacrifice a kitten in order to HDR from a single bitmap … or take photos like these (even though I used to)

If you’re a fan of my older style of HDR photography then by all means buy the current edition of the book and enjoy it. If not, wait for the 2nd edition. Also don’t forget to have a read of my HDR tutorial.

If you have any suggestions for content then please leave a comment below and I’ll think it over.