It’s a lovely view but, in photographic terms, the mood would have been enhanced considerably by the addition of a few people. However, it could have been a long wait if I’d decided to take the picture only when someone had appeared on the scene. By then it would probably have been too late.

There is a brief period, between dusk and the blackness of night, when features, that are beyond the reach of street lights, are still defined by the decaying light from the sky. You can wait for that magic moment to arrive for what seems like ages – but then it passes all too quickly so you dare not miss it.

Kodak, a 130 year old company, invented the digital camera. I bought their first production model as a first step in a rapidly accelerating move away from film. The camera, costing more than £1,000 offered little more than 1mp resolution, was lightly built out of plastic and fitted with a rather unimpressive lens. However, it did permit me to make a relatively inexpensive foray into digital.

It was obvious that technology was moving at such a pace that it would have been pointless making a large investment in what was soon to become obsolete equipment. Within one year I had replaced the Kodak with an Olympus 4mp DSLR camera. I then switched to Canon and bought a new camera every year or so until I ended up with the 21mp EOS 5D Mark11.

The big question is why didn’t Kodak capitalise on its early success? It had a head start with the technology, the financial clout to research and develop new models and an assured position in the marketplace due to being a trusted name.

One incident was when he was painting outside the Royal Exchange. I have a particular interest in the City, having photographed its landmarks many times for both property advertising and stock, including this photograph of the Royal Exchange that I shot late at night. This is a particularly magical time for me as I love the brilliant highlights and moody areas of darkness which can be such a feature of street lighting, particularly in town centres where it is rarely black enough to obscure shadow detail.

Ken Howard has painted a wonderful picture, from a viewpoint outside the Royal Exchange, looking towards Mansion House. Like all good paintings, Howard’s picture conveys far more than the best photograph. Nevertheless, the principles remain the same – however you choose to create a picture. Light and composition are the essential elements of both. Howard has written a book entitled “Inspired by Light”. I recommend it to anyone who is serious about his art – its message is clear and is equally valid, whether applied to painting or photography.

The Daily Mail used this picture of mine yesterday to illustrate an article, entitled Is this the end for the cinema?, concerning plans by major studios to make films available for download. I rather hope it’s not the end because this particular image has been used in the past by at least one other newspaper – the Daily Telegraph – and I’m hoping it will continue to sell well into the future.

I can remember the exact occasion, several years ago, when I stood at the side of a busy road in North London, waiting for the “right time” to press the shutter. There is a relatively short window of opportunity on a clear evening, after dusk but before it is properly dark, when the sky turns a lovely shade of blue, gradating to mauve. If the picture is taken too early, the light will be too flat. Taken too late and the contrast will be too great causing shadow detail to become lost and highlights to burn out.

It is often said that there is a specific time to capture images at night to achieve the best effect but, as with most things, it’s rarely that simple. There can’t be any hard and fast rules because every situation is different. For example, in scenes where the light source is harsh or uneven, which often creates burnt-out highlights and deep filled-in shadows, it is generally best to shoot early whilst there is still enough natural light to illuminate the whole picture.

Conversely, where there is a good spread of artificial lighting, as with my cinema photograph above, the shot can be left fairly late without risk of shadow and highlight detail getting lost. Often, the later it can be left, the better, because the ensuing increase in contrast creates greater impact.

Nowadays, of course, you can stick your digital camera on a tripod and reel off any number of shots over a long period without thinking too much about what you’re doing or the expense in achieving it. In the days of film – and the above shot was taken on a Hasselblad using Ektachrome transparency film – a certain amount of discipline and judgment were required if you didn’t want to end up with a huge bill for film and processing or shots that were unusable.

I also think that the restrictions of film – not just the cost but also the lack of a monitor on the camera and the lack of “post processing” – made film photographers more acutely aware of what goes into making a shot work and made them look that much harder at the actual scene.

Nowadays we tend to peer myopically at a tiny digital representation of the scene on a digital camera’s built-in display. A quick check of the histogram and we’re away, knowing that any misjudgment will be rectified using a combination of our favoured raw converter and Photoshop.

I have made a point of shooting each of these events to document life in a rural French Village and I will publish some of the pictures on here from time to time. However, there is one event that takes place that is not on any official calendar – the annual May Day shenanigans.

Shortly after midnight, giggling mischievous youths, under cover of darkness, seek out and carry off anything that isn’t bolted down. These items, which may be  shutters, garden swings, gates, flower pots, traffic signs or even cars, usually get deposited in the village square.

I think it was the late Auberon Waugh who said that the French have a wonderful line in civil disobedience that the British would do well to import. Officialdom also knows when to turn a blind eye since no action is taken to stop this practice – and long may it be so.

Letting youth vent steam in this relatively harmless way is probably a safety valve. Most villagers are aware of the practice and tend to remove any loose items from around their houses. The picture above was taken shortly after dawn. Unfortunately the owner of the car in my picture hasn’t learned his lesson yet as this is the third time I have seen it end up in the square. This time it is adorned with a garden bench on the roof and flower pot on the bonnet.

Like many stock photographers, I have a local patch that I turn to first. My house in Burgundy is a short drive from the wonderful, medieval town of Auxerre with it’s brightly painted half-timbered buildings. I shot the above picture because it’s a perfect example of the seemingly haphazard and yet perfectly harmonious medieval style of building that is typical of this town in the Yonne.

As I walked by the Canal du Nivernais yesterday I was interested to see a fellow photographer – tripod in one hand, camera with a long lens in the other and a large camera bag slung over his shoulder. It occurred to me that he too was probably taking photographs destined for a picture library. As we passed each other, I noticed that he had a vestigial pony tail – confirming that he was indeed a serious photographer.

When John Maloof bought a collection of around 30,000 negatives for $400 at auction in Chicago he had no idea of their provenance and little idea of their content. In fact, he was initially rather disappointed with his purchase, having expected the collection to yield architectural pictures for use in a book about Chicago.

When he took another look a few months later he started to be a little more interested. He liked what he saw but street photography was something of which he knew little so he posted some pictures on Flickr to gauge reaction from photographers. The overwhelming response was that the pictures were outstanding so he delved a little more and discovered that the pictures were shot by Vivian Maier.

John Maloof created a website to show the works of Maier and has been steadily adding pictures since the site’s inception. There is no point in trying to describe the photographs – click the link to the website and let the pictures speak for themselves. Maloof now has around 100,000 negatives, including around 1,000 rolls of undeveloped film which he has been processing steadily.

Maloof’s website shows not only her pictures but also tells the story of her life, as far as it’s known. There is also much to read in the press for another perspective – like this recent article in the Telegraph.

It seems that Maier worked mainly over a twenty year period and, if the bulk of pictures were shot over two decades, it is the equivalent of taking around one hundred pictures a week, every week. That would be quite an undertaking for a professional photographer but for an amateur, who worked as a nanny and only shot during days off, it’s an astonishing achievement and shows a remarkable commitment.

This unpredictability shouldn’t really surprise us. The same can be said of his pictures – and one automatically thinks of his early pictures – which were different to anything that anyone else was doing at the time and still stand up well today. Innovation is the product of a creative mind.

Bailey was recently in conversation with Andrew Graham-Dixon of
the Daily Telegraph and added a few more quotes to the already considerable list. Just one example being that he’d never thought of photography as art. Of course, this has been said many times by many people but it’s rather novel to hear someone of Bailey’s stature being so frank and self-deprecating about the value of his own work – even if the comment related to his early perceptions of photography as art.

He also suggested that he’d never understood “all that nonsense about composition and framing”. It’s a provocative statement but is worth examination. In art, rules aren’t there to be broken – rather they are there to be ignored. In order to “break” them, one would have to acknowledge that they have some sort of importance or relevance that must be confronted. They haven’t. That’s why they must be ignored.

Bailey and I were sent to the same private school – Clark’s College in East London – and he has said that he learned little there. He was at Clark’s some years before me but we both had the same headmaster so I don’t suppose our experiences were that different. Clark’s had plenty of rules, many of which were quite stupid.

I didn’t learn much at Clark’s either. It was an authoritative regime, run on military lines. Every break ended with parade, where prefects would have you line up in your houses. They would strut around, ordering you to stand to “attention” or stand “at ease”.

Of course, rules are necessary in schools but their rigid enforcement – the aim being to impose conformity – does tend to stifle individuality. The same is true of rules that apply to the creative arts.

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Then along came digital and the world was turned upside down but fortunately it didn’t happen overnight. For a start, unless you bought a scanning back for your large format camera, which would have meant a considerable investment, the resolution of early one-shot digital cameras was far too low for most commercial work. Most of us kept an eye on developments before taking a few tentative steps towards the new technology.

Clients were aware of digital photography and in particular the cost benefits with film and scanning completely eliminated from the process. 15 years ago I was spending around £1,500 a month on film and processing. A typical cost to provide one 5″x4″ transparency would have been around £10, it being normal to shoot three exposures, processing one, holding the other two back in case a lighter or darker exposure was considered desirable (known as bracketing). In addition, there would have been the cost of at least one Polaroid at around £1.20.

Obviously, photographers felt under enormous pressure to use digital cameras. “It’s not as good as film” was our mantra, a statement that remained true for a number of years. However, the technology improved, pixel count increased and digital cameras became more viable. More than that, we soon learned the advantages of image manipulation in Photoshop.

Disregarding scanning backs because they were costly and exposure times restricted their use, photographers were faced with a choice between two systems – medium format or DSLR. Medium format was very very expensive early on but the price has come down over time. Even so, a medium format digital camera and lens will still cost upwards of £10,000 – more than twice as much as a decent DSLR.

The DSLR has come a long way in five years. Sensor pixel count rivals that of medium format systems of just a few years ago at a fraction of the price. However, more pixels come at price – lenses need to resolve more detail and sensors, along with their processors, need to keep images clear of noise.

In the days of film, I never used 35mm in the studio because considerable enlargement of the image would have been needed to fill, say, an A4 page. It’s a sign of how technology has moved on that we are now routinely shooting pictures on DSLRs that are being used not just on A4 sized pages but on double page spreads and posters.

The ability to examine images at enormous magnification on monitors has made us very critical of our cameras and lenses. Features such as sharpness, noise and chromatic aberration are evident on a scale previously unseen.

There has been a marked improvement in lens quality. This has been necessary to keep pace with improved sensor resolution. It was with this in mind that I carried out some tests, comparing a standard DSLR lens with one of my best Hasselblad medium format lenses – the 40mm f4 Carl Zeiss Distagon.

I bought an adaptor from China that enabled me to mount the Distagon on a Canon DSLR and took a series of pictures in a controlled studio environment comparing the Zeiss Distagon with the Canon 50mm f1.4. The Canon 50mm lens is pretty good, so I wasn’t expecting the Zeiss to be that much better, However, nor was I expecting it to be worse – which in some respects it was. Centre sharpness was excellent from both lenses but, surprisingly for a medium format lens with a wider image circle, the edge performance of the Distagon was disappointing. The Zeiss lens also showed a little more fringing or aberration.

I suspect that many photographers have hung on to their medium format gear in the hope that they will be able to use their lenses on a medium format digital camera at some point. This was certainly my thinking when I decided to keep my Hasselblad outfit. I had also expected that the lenses, when used with a suitable adaptor, would give excellent image quality on a DSLR. However, in the light of my tests, I realise that medium format lenses are best left on medium format cameras. Really, the best DSLR lenses today are very sharp indeed.

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Ken Howard was told that his tripod constituted a ‘Health and Safety’ risk. When he pointed out that nobody had come close to tripping over his tripod he was advised that “There is always a first time sir”. I particularly dislike such false politeness – it is both patronising and officious.

Artists – whether painters, photographers or musicians – enrich our lives. Their presence on the streets enlivens a dull day for swathes of office workers, tourists and others. And their works are valued for decades, perhaps centuries to come.

Howard said “If these people had been around in previous generations, we wouldn’t have paintings by Monet, Whistler, Sisley or Boudain”.

But it’s not just Ken Howard who has been told to move on – it happens frequently to photographers, myself included. Sometimes the reason given is suspicion of terrorism and, at others, it’s ‘Health and Safety’. Tripods, apparently, are a huge menace. They block pavements and cause a tripping hazard.

However, I suggest a tripod is rather less of a hazard than a pram, shopping trolley or bicycle, all of which can be encountered daily on our ‘dangerous’ streets. When a photographer sets up a tripod, on which he has mounted a camera and lens that may have cost several thousand pounds, he is going to make absolutely sure that he protects his investment from errant pedestrians who aren’t looking where they are going.

You can read one of the newspaper articles on the Ken Howard incident on the Telegraph website. It’s rather old news now but it is still very pertinent.

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