Helvetica is a great font – one of the best, it does exactly what is asked of it, and it does it damn well…. but… well it is everywhere, its default, it inspires rage in people who have too many things to worry about… only comic sans should inspire rage – anyway no matter how much you hate Helvetica, it’ll always be trumped by Arial… anyway – - business cards and site design – to use Helvetica or not?

but there are better fonts out there

For more on Helvetica, this is the best film about a font you will see:

I know George from the allotment, known him for a while now. George is originally from Limerick but lived here in Manchester since he was 18. For the past 39 years George has had a smallholding somewhere between the river Mersey and the M60 motorway, on wednesday I went down to see him….

i’m not sure George ever really did leave Limerick, or whether he brought Limerick over with him but its a great site, in the middle of this industrial city as the electrical substation pulses on one side and the roar of the motorway is on the other there is a man pottering about his business, lost in a world of pigs, goats, cattle, chickens and a polecat… its great.

Thank you very much to George and his wife Kay for allowing me to sit and talk rubbish and take photos with them

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a distinct lack of updates is hardly new on this blog but there have been a few life changing events in the way that needed taking care off.

Yesterady I took a day out to work on a new series, a sneak preview of which can be seen on my flickr stream, but I am mostly experimenting with b&w – i find it works best under harsh mid-day sun as in the pic above, taken in Portugal a couple of weeks ago

FC United 1 Bradford Park Avenue 1

This was devastating. Since the formation of FC United the club have managed promotion every succesive season, for much of this season that looked unlikely but FC came rallying back toward the end and made a phenomenal surge to reach the play-off stages, with the last game of the season being in effect a play off to reach the play-offs – whoever won against Bradford Park Avenue would go into the play-offs…. neither won and the play off place goes to Kendal… its gutting.

I came across a photoshop a while back of a heavily tattooed baby and liked the idea (much cheaper than the real thing) so got thinking what tatts would suit….. and then some Tupac played… I got some studio lights a while back but they are not used in this, just the natural light in the room

I have been reading recently where there is something of a trend in wedding photography to get back away from the reportage style that has become so ubiquitous in wedding photography recently, where people are wanting to get back to the traditional heavily posed and group shots that was the hallmark of wedding photography. Its not hard to see why really, reportage when done well, is superb and highly effective, but it is exactly the sort of thing that looks easy and really isn’t – reportage done badly? you will get better snaps from disposable cameras on your guests tables.

At my own wedding, our photographer gave his cameras to the children at the end of the night and the result was superb – people really let their guard down when children are pointing a camera at them, and even better goof for the camera – a world away from reportage but not quite traditional either.

I have just got some studio lights and am experimenting with them for family portraits – at the minute sticking to quite formulaic ways of doing it, nothing terribly adventurous but seeing what works. I know there was a huge trend for High-Key photography, but that is perhaps passing – so i’m wondering, what are the current trends in family photography?

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Great game, a must win for FC who took the lead, only to go behind and then bring the score to 2-2 at HT. Second half FC looked by far the stronger side and deservedly won.

Off the pitch the ‘Battle Zone’ predicted by the police predictably never happened, leaving 21 officers, three sergeants, four mounted police, several dogs and a force helicopter to make arrests for cannabis posession and breaking bail conditions.

Much as i would love to go into great depth about the history and traditions of Gamelan, I think that people would probably twig pretty quickly that it came from the Wikipedia page anyway. The Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester had a Gamelan concert, I went along to a rehersal, to watch and photograph. Thank you very much to the organisers and musicians who allowed me to be there.

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Karima (prev post) was supporting James Morrison, so i hung around to photo that gig too.