1/365 was a very successful attempt to produce one photograph every day for a year which I was proud to put my name to.
Starting on the 1st February 2006 this project involved a phenomenol amount of work.
Approximately 20000 miles were driven to find locations and hundreds of hours were spent developing the resultant images. Alongside this was the time spent creating the webpages to display the photographs. This was all completed in a year which saw the birth of my beautiful daughter, a house move from one country to another and starting in a second full time job. In all it was a full and hard year!
The final outcome of this hardwork is a collection of 365 photographs which to me have become a visual diary of the year and also contain some of the best images I have ever shot. As well as these images the project has developed my photographic skills and has given me an eye for detail I could not have reached any other way.
It would also appear to have given inspiration to a number of projects recently started by other photographers! To this end I must say a thank you to Jim Brandenburgh whose "Chasing the Light" provided a spark which eventually developed into this behemoth of a project.
A Bann for Life charts the use and misuse of the Lower Bann river in Northern Ireland, documenting both the wildlife and the pollution which can be seen on our doorsteps.
The project was carried out over a three month period from 2005 into 2006. The majority of the content comes from the stretch of river running through the town of Coleraine in the North West of Northern Ireland. I was fortunate enough to live only a couple of hundred yards from the river so had unimpeded access to it both night and day. While this had its benifits, it also enabled me to see the vast amount of rubbish which flowed with the water and inevitably got tangled up on the river banks.
Watching this day after day was the impetus behind the project. Here was a beautiful stretch of river which was home to herons, cormorants and spotted redshanks among other species of bird as well as being one of the best eel and salmon fishing rivers in Ireland and it was being used as a dumping ground. It appeared that its most important purpose for the majority of the town's residents was to carry their waste out of sight.
To balance this out and to make the message harder hitting it was important that I show the beauty of the river and also the ways in which people used it for both business and leisure. It would have been meaningless to simply create a showreel of degredation and abuse, it had to demonstrate what use was being made of the water in a positive manner and what life it helped support.
Guy Fawkes Night - a photo essay recording the annual festivities which took place at Tynemouth Cricket club to celebrate the foiling of the gun powder plot in 1605.
Guy Fawkes was executed in 1605 for his part in a failed attempt to blow up the houses of Parliament during a session when the King of England was in attendance. The date of Guy Fawkes capture and the foiling of the attempt was the 5th November, a date which spawned the British saying of 'remember, remember the fifth of November'.
In England this date has become one of the biggest, and certainly the loudest celebrations of the year with fireworks being set off relentlessly throughout the day. The culmination of the days events is the burning of a 'guy'. The 'guy' represents Guy Fawkes and a bonfire is built upon which this likeness will be placed to burn for his crimes against the crown and country.
One of the many organised events surrounding the day takes place at Tynemouth cricket club in Newcastle Upon Tyne. In 2006 I was comissioned to capture both the festivities and the fireworks which took place for their Guy Fawkes night celebrations.
