Ladies and gentlemen. It has been 7 years of wonderful loveliness with this site, but the time has come to bid you all farewell. This is the last of many blog posts (over 400 I believe) here – srphotos.co.uk has officially been eaten by lightbulbhead.co.uk.

srphotos.co.uk has left the building.

So, it’s been a bit quiet around here lately hasn’t it? What with getting married and setting up home and various other things, I haven’t really had much time to blog about photography, although I have got several draft posts about various things waiting to receive some attention. Is this neglect of srphotos.co.uk through laziness? Well, not really.

You see my new wife has a business – Lightbulb Head, and within the first month of marriage we were commissioned to build a website for a couple of guys who did a grand job with the catering at our wedding. I’ve therefore been spending a lot of my free time on the implementation of pigandporter.co.uk which went live last Friday.

Whilst we’ve been doing this site, Kiri and I have been looking at each other (we’re allowed to…we’re married!) and we’ve realised that what with Kiri’s design and film skills and my photography and geek skills, it would probably make sense to combine our businesses. So…at some point in the new year, srphotos.co.uk will be no more as it merges with Lightbulb Head.

You’re welcome to join us for the ride!

It’s a bit late to be announced, but srphotos.co.uk turned 5 on 1 April this year. I’ll admit that I’ve been a little quiet on the blog in this last year and actually not a massive amount has happened in the business. I’ve taken photos at 4 weddings in various occasions which were all great occasions, and the sun shone for all of them too which was a bonus. My plan to lead more photo walks didn’t really get off the ground, however I got out with my camera more than I have in previous years – mainly with my fiancée. More time with the camera + more time with my fiancée = only 29 blog posts in the last year!

And the next year? Well I have a couple of weddings that I’m taking photos at before my wedding in September, then my own wedding (which I’m not photographing – my good friend and great photographer Tom Dauben is doing the honours), then another booked afterwards. I’ll not speculate what might happen to the business after that; getting married will be a major change and will most definitely take priority. But for now – roll on the 5 year celebrations!

Just over 2 years ago I decided to make a foray into the world of 3d photography…and what a journey it’s been over the last couple of years, including:

• Buying a 3d lens for my film cameras and learning about stereoscopic photography
• Taking 3d photos at 4 weddings and receiving feedback
• Going old school with a digital camera and a lightmeter
• Playing around with creating anaglyph images from the stereoscopic images
• Seeing the return of 3d films at the cinema
• Seeing 3d tv coming to the high street
• Trying to source lenticular prints (3d prints without the glasses)
• Buying a 3d digital camera (Fujifilm W1)
• Writing a script to split a “.mpo” 3d digital file into anaglyph and stereoscopic “.jpeg” images

So it may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you that I’ve decided to take a break from 3d. It’s just not advancing at the speed that I thought it would, and actually I don’t think 3d is appropriate in all situations. Certainly at weddings I’ve just found it to be a bit of a distraction to have my 3d camera with me, and actually, I’m not convinced that 3d photos give much more than standard wedding photos. Couple this with the fact that you have to be close to your subject to get the best 3d effect, it’s all a bit intrusive for not much gain. 3d doesn’t work particularly well for landscape photos, and I don’t really do much in the way of portrait or still life work…so it’s kind of the end of the 3d journey for me.

I definitely think that 3d video is going to be big (well, it’s already getting that way), but I’m going to bow out of the 3d photography world for now. Keep an eye on eBay in the coming weeks for a Fujifilm W1, and do bid for it (if you haven’t been put off by the previous paragraph!)

“Has he finally gone mad?”, I hear you ask? Well, that’s a distinct possibility I have to admit, but actually this blog post is about a website called “moo.com”. Ever since I started up srphotos.co.uk as a business, I’ve been using moo.com in some way or another for my printing.

Those of you who have ever received anything in the post from me will have had a little srphotos.co.uk sticker attached to the envelope – that’s printed by moo. If you’ve got one of my business cards – that’s printed by moo. If you’ve bought anything from the site and had a little note accompanying the purchase – that’s printed by moo. If you’ve had your wedding covered by me, and received cards to share with friends and families containing details of your private gallery on – they’re printed by moo. If you’ve ever received an engagement card from me – that’s printed by moo.

They have been absolutely fantastic as a one-stop shop over the last few years for my printing needs, and the quality has been great. Only once, when they began to offer black backgrounds and white text did I have need for complaint when the black was too grey for my liking, and they resolved that quickly and professionally.

So why am I telling you this? Well, they’ve given me a promotion code to share with people that gives 10% off your first purchase, whilst also giving me discount off my next purchase. If you’re interested in it, then check out my facebook page at facebook.com/srphotos.co.uk to get the promo code.

With 29 weddings under my belt and a few more booked for next year, now is the ideal time for me to announce that I’m taking a short break from wedding photos. Is it because I’m bored of weddings? Is it because I’ve had a bad experience recently at a wedding? Nope and nope. It’s because I’m getting married! I got down on one knee to my girlfriend a couple of weeks ago, and when I got up from my knee, she was my fiancée (and still is!).

With all of the preparation that will take, and the honeymoon afterwards, I’ve decided that I’m going to take a break from the wedding photography. Taking photos at a wedding doesn’t just involve turning up on the day and taking a few photos then going home; there’s quite a bit of work either side of the day, even without me doing digital post-processing. It’s quite a time commitment considering I have a full-time job during the week.

I’d like to thank all the couples that I’ve had the pleasure to photograph over the last few years (and those I’m going to shoot next year too) – it’s been great to share your special day with you. And don’t you worry – I’ll still be putting photos on this site; it’s only the weddings I’m taking a break from, not the photography!

I can’t believe that today marks the 4th anniversary of me declaring my photography work as a business and becoming a sole trader – it seems like no time since I started up. This year I took a bit of time out to think properly about where I want to go with the business. The main change that a lot of people will have noticed is that I’ve re-written the website – this was done to both improve the experience for you guys, but also to make it easier for me to manage. Another big change was my move to London.

So, what did I decide from my thinking? Although it’s not a very business-like thing to say, I don’t have aspirations at the moment to expand the business too much. Last year I only shot 1 wedding…which I think is too few, but I’m not going to suddenly start a massive marketing campaign to get me booked up for every weekend of the year. This next year currently holds 4 weddings for me; still fewer than I’ve had in previous years, but I don’t really mind. I think I will explore leading photo walks a bit more though – I love shooting weddings, but I also really like the slightly more personal and informal setting of a photo walk.

I’m not going to predict what the next year holds – my predictions in previous years on my “birthday” have been pretty far off, so I’ll go with the flow a bit. The guiding philosophy behind my business remains unchanged; I will continue with it as long as photography is a passion.

A couple of years ago (although it doesn’t feel that long ago!) I wrote about registering the domain srphotos.tel. Well, I still own it, and it’s up for renewal, so I have a decision to make – do I keep it, or let it go back into the pool to let someone else snaffle?

This is what srphotos.tel looks like at the time of writing – you can tell that I’d forgotten I even owned it by the fact that it hasn’t been updated to say that I’m now living and working in London.

To be honest, it’s an easy decision to make. I haven’t used it at all in the last two years, and it hasn’t sent any traffic to my site. It’s just been a bit of a white elephant, which I haven’t had any value from. On the telnic site, there’s a whole section about benefits of owning a .tel domain…but I can’t find anything there that’s convincing enough for me to keep the domain, so I’m letting it lapse. It’s not worth spending money on.

I finally got round to watching the Banksy film, “Exit through the gift shop” a few days ago and despite its quirky nature, I loved it. I’ve been a fan of street art since I saw my first Banksy in Bristol about 7 or 8 years ago and it was great to have a bit of an insight into some of the creative processes behind it. If/when I ever own my own property, I’d love to set aside a wall somewhere (probably inside) to experiment with spray cans, stencils and the like. Let me be clear though, I don’t like tagging – where people just graffiti their name (or tag) on a wall; I see very little creativity in that and hence just see it as the equivalent of a cat marking its territory.

So, aside from me waxing lyrical about the film, what is the purpose of this post? Well there’s part of the film where several people are talking about the ridiculous sums of money that people have recently been paying for street art. One of the quotes (not word for word, as I can’t remember it fully) was something like:

Who is the joke on? Actually, is there even a joke?

The first question alludes to the fact that the buyers of this art are essentially being robbed when they pay huge sums of money for art. But then the second question implies that this is just the natural order of a money-centric society; if a buyer is willing to pay that much, then that is the value of the piece. Is it about the status of owning a piece by a particular artist? Is it an investment; taking a risk that the perceived value may increase over time?

One of the hardest decisions that I have as a photographer is to work out what I charge for things. My current prices for weddings, prints and 3d glasses are based on covering costs, then paying myself a basic hourly wage (in the case of weddings). What you’re paying for when you buy art though is not the cost of materials; the oil and canvas, or in the street art case the spray can, the stencils and the surface on which the art is captured. You’re not even paying for time an artist has spent creating it. Instead you’re putting a value on an aesthetic piece of work that’s been created using the skill of a certain person.

After this revelation am I suddenly going to re-think my pricing strategy for my photography? Probably not, as I’m not in it for the money. However I am tempted to sell the rights, ownership and copyright of all photographic works that I will ever produce in the rest of my life (restricted to those suitable for commercial use, therefore excluding wedding photos, family and personal photos and those taken for charitable causes). Let me open the bidding at £500,000…

The second upgrade to this website in 2011 is the addition of shopping basket functionality. You can now order 3d glasses from me, and order lenticular prints of some of my 3d images (which don’t require glasses in order to see the 3d effect). Unfortunately I can only offer prints of the later 3d images that I’ve taken, as this is when I started taking a new type of 3d images. However, this is the type of 3d that I’ll now be predominantly shooting in, so the number of images to choose from will start to increase.

Is there anything else that you might be interested in buying from the site? If people are interested, I’ll start selling prints of some of my other photos, and I have plans for a 2012 calendar.