Tag Archives: photography

London Street Photography at the Museum of London

By Michal | Published 02/03/2011

As soon as the medium of photography was invented, people started taking photographs in the street. Mind you, initially they didn’t have much choice. The first cameras were so bulky and exposure times so long that it perhaps made sense to stand in the middle of London and take advantage of natural light.

And indeed, the first images you see when you visit the superb “London Street Photography” exhibition, which has just opened at the Museum of London in the City, are quite blurry thanks to long exposure times. It’s fascinating to see that, in terms of the subject matter, what London-based photographers and visitors to the city upload to Flickr or capture via Instagram in 2011 doesn’t differ that much – broadly speaking, of course – from what the forefathers of street photography captured 150 years ago.

The crowds, the buzz the city generates, the odd characters, the various social classes and behaviours have always attracted crowds of people wanting to capture all that for posterity. This hasn’t changed much. But what has changed is the perspective.

The 19th century “early adopters” documented the city itself – its vastness, grandness, its architecture and vitality. Some of them also already tried to document certain aspects of London’s life. As you progress through the exhibition you notice how the focus shifts from large scenes to more intimate moments, where London – while still recognisable – defines and shapes the subjects and their behaviours, but doesn’t dominate the scene.

I’m still mesmerised by a mini-collection of images by Wolf Suschitzky. There were just three images of Charing Cross Road he took in 1937 and I absolutely loved them. Make sure you spend some time listening to Suschitzky himself, who talks about street photography in a video played in one of the rooms.

The Museum of London has collected these street photographs over the years and eventually decided to share some of them with the wider public this year. Strangely, many people didn’t even know about this exhibition, which is a shame. But it’s open till early September, so there’s plenty of time to visit. Do so.

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Why I swapped The Best Camera for Instagram

By Michal | Published 23/02/2011

 

I’ve been resisting it for months. Instagram, the iPhone app everyone seems to be using at the moment. (I was tempted to say “Instagram, the latest fad” here, but I’m sure it would come back to bite my ass.)

I thought I didn’t need yet another photo app on my phone, yet another way of sharing my images. But a rapidly growing number of friends and online contacts have been using the app over the past few weeks and I was simply curious. I knew it combined the ease of use with a social aspect and some funky visual effects a la Hipstamatic. I also knew there were other similar apps like the Best Camera or Camera +, which offered similar functionality, but which never managed to achieve the critical mass Instagram has probably already achieved. And I was curious why the Best Camera, a precursor of Instgram, never really managed to do what the latter did in less than 6 months. So I installed it.

Do I need to explain what it does? Wired described Instagram as “Twitter for your photos” or “a mashup of Hipstamatic and Tumblr” last October and that was pretty much spot on. You sign up, you follow some people, or not, you take pictures, tag them, apply filters and publish. Then you also cross-post to other services like Facebook, Twitter, Posterous or Flickr, favourite other people’s images, leave comments and look at the most popular images from all over the world.

And that’s, pretty much what Chase Jarvis’s The Best Camera does too. I’ve been using this app for almost two years and enjoyed it so far. So why is Instagram better?

The most obvious answer is the social aspect, which is missing from The Best Camera. Chase Jarvis enabled voting, but that’s as far as the social aspect of that app goes. Instgram allows you to automatically follow all your Twitter and Facebook followers who’ve also installed the app, it scans your contacts to see who else has signed up. Comments, likes and the ever-changing sets of ‘popular’ images make the whole social experience complete. Pity Chase Jarvis didn’t add such features to his otherwise great app.

But the social aspect in itself is not the only reason why Instagram is spreading like wildfire.

The Best Camera offers users several simple filters. Each of them does one thing. One makes an image warmer, another increases saturation. Yet another allows you to add a vignette or crop your image. You can apply just one or a number of filters in many ways. Therefore, from my experience at least, the Best Camera has appealed to photographers or people who love experimenting with their images.

Instagram, like Hipstamatic, assumes you just want your image to look funky and simplifies the process by giving you a choice of filters. You choose just one, you can’t combine them. So, rather than thinking which individual aspects of the image to change, you are presented with several versions of the image and you just choose one.

The whole app comes with a visually pleasing interface, which also helps a lot. And its very easy to use. What not to like about it.

So, against my better judgement, I have just added yet another tool to my dangerously long list of social and/or photo apps. If you want to follow me on Instagram, I’m there as michald.

For now, at least.

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Saved by the phone. Again.

By Michal | Published 21/10/2010

Typical. You schlep a bag full of gear hoping to take a couple of decent shots and the world conspires against you. (It doesn’t, in fact, it’s all in your mind.)

Then one day you walk to work early in the morning, bleary-eyed and in need of a really strong coffee, when you spot a fantastic photo opportunity. That heavy bag would come in handy but, sadly, it’s having a day off…

If you need yet another proof that a decent camera phone (I’m ignoring its obvious technical limitations here) is as good as many entry-level DSLRs, here it is.

I took the above picture with my iPhone on the way to work yesterday. The only thing that bugged me was the fluff on my lens, which I cleaned with my fingers (try that with a standard DSLR lens). But other than that I was quite happy with the outcome.

As I was rushing, I only took two pics and posted one of them, the better one, on Flickr.

“Wow, gorgeous! Which app?”, asked my friend, a photo editor for a well-known magazine, when she saw the picture. None. No tweaking. No Hipstamatic or Camera Bag. Just as it came out. OK, a pure coincidence, but hey, that’s how many pictures we like are taken.

Londonist chose the image for one of its posts, and some of my Twitter followers and friends seemed to be impressed too. Which always feels fantastic.

Another proof, as if one was needed, that it’s not about – or at least it shouldn’t be about – the gear. In some circumstances at least. But I’m not telling you anything new, you knew that already, right?

What’s probably more interesting about the picture is the bike. As someone pointed out in comments on Flickr, the same bike was there a couple of days earlier.

Part of the installation or a coincidence? Answers on a postcard…

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The joy of photographing… well, anything and everything

By Michal | Published 16/09/2010

For reasons I don’t necessarily want to discuss here and now, I haven’t had a chance to play with my DSLR as much as I would like to over the past several months. Yes, there has been the occasional iPhone shot, but there haven’t been many opportunities to play with different lenses, long exposures and all the other functionality we take for granted when we enjoy our DSLRs.

Yes, taking pictures is fun regardless of what tool you use, but I sometimes missed the ability to take a shot in very dark conditions or with a different depth of field.

Until my recent holiday, that is. At last, after months of photographic celibacy I was able to go wild and enjoy my camera again. I even schlepped three different lenses with me in a naive belief that I would use all of them all the time. (I did, to a degree.)

And what joy it was to go on walking tours of small Greek island villages with my Canon to photograph anything and anyone. I was like a puppy whose owner has just come back home to feed him – salivating at every photo opportunity and behaving as if that was my first time holding a DSLR. I refrained from humping it, I hasten to add.

This is such a nice feeling – being able to find joy in photographing even the most mundane of objects. I remember when Scott Bourne once mentioned how he admired Rick Sammon’s ability to enjoy everything he photographs. If my memory serves me right, Bourne’s implicit point was this: routine can kill the passion.

For me it was rather a case of absence making the heart grow fonder.

So here I was, happily snapping away in the scorching Greek sun. No complicated shots, nothing too strenuous, ambitious or challenging.

There were the ferry shots to remind me why I love travelling out of season:

- fellow passengers seemed to be pretty excited about the journey too:

Then there were the obligatory “oh-remember-the-sunsets” shots:

and the omnipresent white and blue Cycladic churches and chapels:

All pretty standard, sometimes dull and mostly taken to remember a particular place or moment. But I swear, I haven’t had so much pleasure taking random pictures in a long while. I partly blame it on the fact this was my first holiday after many very long and very stressful months, so I guess having the opportunity to take pictures without worrying about the world was simply therapeutic.

Although I did try to experiment with my camera a little again, most of the images I took were just very private holiday snaps. With no intention other than to remember (and now share) all those simple, but always flavoursome meals we had:

and the nice and warm people who served them

and the little bastards who were all too keen to share those meals with us:

Unless they just thought I was an oversized, salivating puppy and simply couldn’t stop gawking.

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How to protect images online

By Michal | Published 29/06/2010

I remember doing an image search a few months ago and seeing a copy of a picture I own. The image was posted on a site I didn’t recognise, so my first reaction was anger – somebody stole my picture! On closer inspection it turned out it was my friend who posted it on his Posterous blog with an appropriate credit.

So I was lucky. But how many of you have had your images stolen? I take thousands of pictures, but I don’t publish thousands online. Neither am I a professional photographer living exclusively off the income from photography sales. But if you are, how do you protect your images online?

You can make them small and reduce the quality to prevent people from printing them. You can use watermarks and overlays to minimise the risk of republishing your images online. You can built Flash-based galleries to bypass the right-click “save as” issue. But if someone wants to steal your picture, they will. Then you need to track it down somehow. A needle in a haystack springs to mind.

There are services like TinEye which help track down your images, but yesterday another site, Image Rights, already present on the market with its paid-for tool, joined the game with a free version of its powerful image tracking service.

I caught up with one of the co-founders of Image Rights, Ted VanCleave, to find out more about the service. I’ve asked him to explain in simple terms what Image Rights is:

ImageRights International, Inc., is a company that helps professional photographers and illustrators discover the illegal use of their intellectual property on the Web.

Our advanced visual search and crawler technology continuously scans websites and blogs to protect images for professional photographers and illustrators. The crawler indexes millions of new images every month and uses powerful image recognition technology to compare customers’ photos and illustrations against images found on the Web.

It then detects where the customers’ images have been used, even if the stolen photos have been altered, cropped, rotated or color adjusted. The customer receives a full report, including a picture of the original image, its use online, and the URL and ownership information for the website where it was found.

Nobody has come up with a really convincing way of tracking stolen images. Are you different? What is your unique selling point?

ImageRights was built from the ground up to help photographers find instances of their images being used on the internet and then helping them recover fees for unauthorized use. It’s is an extremely easy to use service. We have multiple web crawlers browsing business, blogs and news and media sites in North America and Europe looking 24/7/365 at images on these types of web sites.

I’ve been using Tin Eye to track down some of my images, last time a ran a search through TinEye they went through over 1.5 billion images for free. Why would I switch to Image Rights or even pay subscription?

Tineye is a reverse search engine. That’s their term. You can only load one image at a time.  And they don’t help you recover lost revenue, which we will with the launch of our Recovery program in July. While TinEye has 1.5 billion images in their database according to their site, they don’t say where all of those images came from.  It’s a good service but of limited use since you can only upload one image at a time. With ImageRights, you can upload 10,000 images and we’ll send your reports all year long as we find matches.

Do you differentiate between published and unpublished photos and if so, are you able to track down the latter too?

We don’t differentiate between published and unpublished. We don’t actually track images, we are pulling images randomly off of business, blogs and news and media sites in North America and Western Europe.

What happens when you actually find an image that has been illegally used, do you provide any legal help too, or just point to the website which violated a photographer’s copyright and leave it up to him to chase the culprit?

We have developed a recovery program for the USA to start, launching it in July. We will help any photographer from any country collect lost revenue from an image of theirs that has been used without authorisation, without a licence in the USA. We will also be rolling out this recovery program in different countries throughout Western Europe over the next 6-12 months.

Who is behind Image Rights?

ImageRights was co-founded by myself and my business partner Joe Naylor. I’m a photographer and entrepreneur and I have found my images being stolen on a regular basis. Joe is the former President of Web Messenger and comes from a technology background. Over the last two years we researched all of the best technologies available to help stop image piracy. ImageRights is the result of our research and findings. Even if one of your images has been cropped up to 80%, rotated, colors stripped out of it or it’s used in a collage, we can still match it against your original image.

You’ve partnered with, among others, American Photographic Artists and American Society of Picture Professionals. What does it mean to you? What kind of support or endorsement are you getting from them and your other partners?

Each partner chooses what level of partnership is right for them. Many offer discounts to their members for paid subscription services at ImageRights. All of our partners are strong advocates of photographers rights and would like to help stop image theft and help enforce copyrights and educate the public about the need to license images to use them.

So that’s what Ted has to say about Image Rights. I have to admit that it’s great that someone offers a service allowing users to bulk upload their library for free, even if it means giving up 50% of  their compensation if they choose to participate in the Recovery Program Ted mentioned (it drops to 35% if you pay for the service).

I’d like to hear from you if you are a photographer and are worried about image theft. Would you use a service like Image Right? Is this a solution for you? Have you used them – or any other similar service before? Do you think anyone is able to create a database big enough to provide meaningful and robust support? Really curious to hear what you think.

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Bland, tired, clichéd. Welcome to the world of stock photography

By Michal | Published 21/06/2010

Everyone is complaining that it’s more and more difficult to make money on photography and that the stock photography market has become too competitive. Stock libraries spring up every five minutes and they all overflow with images.

Yes, that might be true. But when you really need a good picture, micro stock libraries disappoint.

In my job I often need to browse for images to illustrate various stories. The subjects vary wildly, but in many cases the requirements are not too taxing: a picture of a child using a laptop; or an image of nice garden; or a messy room. You know the score – no latest Reuters shots from Afghanistan or galleries of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Just some interesting, clean, fairly generic, but hopefully inventive images. The last bit – inventive – is however the source of my frustration.

Photographers submitting their images to stock galleries seem to have a problem with thinking outside the box. They either repeat the same bland – and often detached from reality – clichés which over the years have become a norm, or go for very artistic images, which, although technically perfect, are hardly usable.

This morning I was looking for an image of a car with a few rust spots. Had I known I would need one, I would’ve snapped my own rusty car as it combines the two things I was after: it’s relatively modern and working, and it has a few rusty spots. But try searching for a such a car on a certain well-known stock image website and all you get is numerous images of old rusty Dodge trucks, abandoned somewhere picturesque and artfully photographed in HDR. It ticks all stock library boxes, so it gets accepted, yet from an editorial perspective it’s mostly useless.

Next one: knitting. Here’s where all those predictable clichés come out in force. Because if you were to believe in what stock libraries have to offer, you’d have to conclude that knitting is for old frumpy pensioners in rocking armchairs. Therefore, a story on young trendy mums meeting in gastropubs to knit and chat simply cannot be illustrated by a stock image.

And don’t even get me started on corporate photography. Or rather, don’t get me started on images with keywords ‘meeting’ and ‘office’. Seriously, have you ever been to a meeting, mr stock photography? Do you really think that all meetings involve extremely good-looking people in blue shirts, pointing at a laptop screen or shaking hands or gazing at a whiteboard graph?

I recently needed an image to illustrate a story about tackling challenging meetings. The choice was between a group of happy suits gazing at a graph/laptop/whatever else or a room full of snoring office workers. All looked very corporate because yes, in real life meetings only involve airbrushed 30-somethings in Armani suits, sitting in sterile air-conditioned office towers.

Stock photography now appeals to a much wider audience, the rules have changed a bit. It is no longer just a repository of clinical images for brochures and PowerPoint presentations, or at least it shouldn’t be.  Media outlets use stock images to illustrate their content because it’s cheaper. This creates more demand for more original imagery. Stock photographers must start thinking like journalists to differentiate. There is no point reproducing the same old crap – find out who your audience is and do some research on what works for them.

I know there are people who probably make a fortune on those clinical corporate images – and I agree there is and probably will always be a market for those. But budget cuts and/or smarter thinking have forced many newsrooms to rely on cheaper alternatives. Therefore standing out in a sea of blandness is the only way forward.

Maybe the new Flickr-Getty deal will provide editors with more ‘real’ images? But I should deal with that can of worms in a separate post perhaps…

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The best photo apps for the iPhone

By Michal | Published 10/05/2010

The best according to me, I hasten to add, as this is a very subjective list of my favourite iPhone photo applications. I know there are hundreds of apps for photographers, but I’ve been using these for months and can pretty much say these are the best in terms of creativity, fun and functionality.

The order is random, although as you will see, I use some of these more often than others.

Hipstamatic (£1.19)

One of those applications which capture the imagination of both photographers and casual users. The Hipstamatic for iPhone is, according to its creators,

an application that brings back the look, feel, unpredictable beauty, and fun of plastic toy cameras from the past.

And indeed, it’s both fun and unpredictable. The basic version of the app comes with three interchangeable lenses, three different types of film and two flashes. Each of the components produces different results and when combined they offer some amazing ‘analogue’ images.

They come out slightly darkish, blotchy and discoloured. And this old-fashioned, sentimental quality of Hipstamatic prints is exactly what appeals to so many users.

I like:

  • the interface is lovely and easy to use
  • you can choose to develop high quality prints
  • the choice of extras – lenses, films, flashes – gives users a lot of flexibility
  • you can also enter your photos to various Hipstamatic competitions

I don’t like:

  • the classic viewfinder can be annoying due to its size; you can switch to ‘precision framing’, but it’s equally small
  • you need to pay for every extra lens, film or flash, but you can’t really blame the creators for wanting to make some extra money on what is a very successful application

ShakeItPhoto (£0.59)

Also known as fauxlaroid. Like with Hipstamatic, it’s all about sentimentality and recreating the analogue past on your iPhone. In this case, it’s about getting Polaroid prints on your screen.

Having tested several photo apps, I’ve recently realised that what I really value about the best ones is their simplicity. And ShakeIt couldn’t be simpler. You take a photo, decide whether to use it or not, then wait a few seconds (you can shake the phone to develop it faster – this is an unnecessary gimmick, IMHO) and you get a nice Polaroid-like print. Slightly saturated, with a bit of vignetting and the characteristic white frame.

Currently ShakeIt has replaces Hipstamatic as my top photo app. Mainly thanks to the fact that it doesn’t require any additional settings and is simple to use. Which is important bearing in mind we’re talking about mobile photos here.

I like:

  • virtually no options, which is actually an advantage, makes it very easy to use and enjoy
  • prints come out quite big

I don’t like:

  • the ‘shake it’ function only justifies the app’s name and makes use of iPhone functionality, but doesn’t contribute anything and is theferore a useless gimmick (it doesn’t really recreate the Polaroid experience, IMHO)

Best Camera (£1.79)

For a long long time, Chase Jarvis’s ‘simplified Photoshop’ app was my favourite photo app. Not only does it allow users to modify images in a simple way, but also adds a social element to the whole experience.

Each photo can automatically be published no only to individually configurable social networking sites, but also to the Best Camera ongoing contest page. Each user also gets a mini-portfolio, where all Best Cam uploads are collected.

I’ve seen some really good professional photographers having fun with The Best Cam pictures. Its very simple interface allows users to apply one of several available effects (Vignette, Warm, Candy, etc.), crop and frame an existing image. (Unlike the previous two apps, The Best Cam doesn’t allow users to take new photos, it only works with existing images.)

It’s actually pretty amazing to see what this little app can do to seemingly mundane pictures – I took the pic above during my lunch break – the original looked like this:

The Best Cam version of the pic got 21 thumbs up and over 240 views during the time it was displayed on the Best Camera home page. Not bad for a random lunchtime shot, eh?

I like:

  • its simplicity
  • its social aspect
  • it allows you to stumble upon and discover new photographers via their mini-portfolios

I don’t like:

  • it would be nice to have more options sometimes – I wouldn’t even mind paying for some more advanced extras
  • the tile mosaic which displays recently uploaded pictures sometimes crashes or displays the same pictures over and over again

SwankoLab (£1.19)

Another application which helps develop rather than take pictures. SwankoLab, from the makers of Hisptamatic, is another “let’s go back to analogue” app, which attempts to recreate the analogue darkroom experience on the tiny Apple screen.

And swanky it is indeed. This is the app for which the iPhone was invented. As its makes say, SwankoLab is

a darkroom kit [...]; a loving recreation of the pre-digital era classic. Choose chemicals, process photos, and experiment!

And that’s exactly what you do. You choose the picture you want to ‘develop’, then reach for the chemicals you want to use (they come with useful descriptions which use modern, Photoshop-compatible terminology), mix them together and see what happens.

If you’re not particularly adventurous, you can always use some ready-made formulas. The app comes with its own sound effects and also offers the ability to annotate prints, email them or save to your photo library.

You can extend the app by purchasing additional ‘chemicals’ from Uncle Stu’s darkroom catalog.

I like:

  • the virtually endless possibilities – mix’n'match till you find your perfect formula
  • slick interface, likely to appeal to sentimental photographers trying to re-live pre-digital darkroom experiences and to those who care less about photography but simply like their apps funky

I don’t like:

  • this is my personal preference, but the simplicity of apps like ShakeIt makes SwankoLab seem a bit gimmicky
  • missing the ability to share on Facebook or Twitter straight from the app
  • no Flickr integration
  • despite all these formulas, the prints don’t have a distinctive feel and look and look a bit bland

Photoshop.com Mobile (£ free)

Need I say more? Probably the most widely-used photography software in the world, yet the iPhone/mobile version doesn’t seem to have that many fans.

I rarely use it, if I have to be honest. If and when I do, I reach for it when I need functionality which is not available elsewhere, like a flexible crop tool.

It is a decent application which offers most of the very basic tools that are available to Photoshop users and more. Apart from cropping you can also straighten images (very useful and very easy to apply), you can flip and rotate them too.

Adjusting exposure is very simple – just move your finger across the screen to change the values and see the final outcome. Adjusting everything else – from saturation to contrast – is equally simple.

The iPhone/mobile version of Photoshop also comes with a few effects and a choice of borders, but its best asset is definitely its choice of the classic Photoshop tools. You can’t beat that.

I like:

  • Facebook integration, you can also use your Adobe ID if you’ve got one
  • no need to use sliders to make adjustments
  • instant preview

I don’t like:

  • it integrates with Twitpic, but why only TwitPic?
  • it doesn’t remember the last image, always starts from zero, which I find annoying
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Dubai in 45 gigapixels disappoints

By Michal | Published 08/05/2010

Every few months I write about a new gigapixel panoramic site and every time the number of gigapixels increases substantially.

First we had Dresden in 26 gigapixels, followed by this equally huge panoramic image of Paris.

Now the gigapixels have nearly doubled to 45 and the next destination to get its gigapixel treatment is Dubai.

Dubai sounds like a great idea, however from where the picture was taken it looks like the most depressing place on earth. Half-built skyscrapers dominate the picture (are thy still being built? or have they been abandoned when Dubai’s economic problems started?) – and the whole landscape looks barren and hazy.

The photographer, Gerald Donovan, admits that

“this was only ever intended to be a technical test – I’m making no claims with regards photographic quality or artistic merit!”

I’m always full of admiration for photographers who come up with those ideas and then painstakingly execute them.

But was this worth it? Not really. The images – taken with Canon 7D and the 100-400mm f 4.5-5.6 zoom lens –  are hastily stitched together.  The quality of the final image is therefore compromised. But hopefully the fact it was just a test means there’s something more – and better – to come. Luckily, Gerald has taken some more stunning pics of Dubai – see his portfolio here.

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Keep calm and carry on (shooting)…

By Michal | Published 09/03/2010

phnat

If the recent media stories about the threat to our freedom to photograph in public places worry or anger you, don’t let them.

As for every “Photography under threat” headline, there’s an amazing story on how photography changes or at least influences lives .

So, don’t worry, photography is not under threat. It will be, when you stop shooting.

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London photography from the upper deck

By Michal | Published 03/01/2010

Every now and then I’ll be chatting to photographers who inspire me or do something unusual with their cameras. This is my first quick chat with a London-based photographer, Przemek Wajerowicz, who some time ago set out to create a project called From the Upper Deck.

Here he talks to me about in more detail about his project and the inspiration behind it:

253_Euston_IMG_1006_01-1

The project started soon after I arrived in London in 2005. I’m a street photography fan and From the Upper Deck is weird version of street photography. The view from double-decker buses fascinated me from the moment I arrived in London. I’ve always taken pictures from buses, sadly I lost the very early ones when my hard drive died some time ago. (Three low-res images survived here http://plfoto.com/730749/zdjecie.html http://plfoto.com/765776/zdjecie.html http://plfoto.com/777852/zdjecie.html – these were my first pictures from the upper deck.)

After a while the whole idea grew into a project and in 2007 I decided to ride every bus route in London from the first to the last stop. The following year I started my photo blog.

What camera are you using? Do you stick to just one lens or do you change them?

Currently I’m using Canon 5D and a Canon 50mm f 1.8 lens. The 5D allows me to take good quality pictures at very short intervals, which is a great bonus when photographing the street from a moving bus. Plus it’s a full-frame camera too. 99% of all my pictures were taken with the 50mm lens. In my opinion the 50mm focal length manages the task best and is ideal for me. And besides the 50mm is like cheap wine. Why is cheap wine is good? Because it’s cheap and good.

I agree, I love my 50mm f1.8 lens. Incredible quality for such low price. Which aspect of this project do you find difficult, what’s the biggest challenge for you?

I don’t look at it this way. It’s difficult to say what the most difficult thing is. Most things about taking pictures are exciting. The most boring – and therefore the most difficult aspect – is not getting lost in all the information: when and where I’ve been, which route I’ve covered… All that admin stuff (two spreadsheets, calendar) is very ungrateful, but I need to remember where and when I’ve visited. The biggest challenge is getting on every single double-decker route in London from the beginning to the end.

15 to Paddington © From the Upper Deck

Have you ever met with a negative reaction? Or do people prefer to pose for pics?

Usually people don’t see me. But when they do, they react in various ways – they’re surprised, they smile, they seem reluctant. But there has never been a negative reaction – maybe just surprise. Here are some examples:

http://www.ftud.net/p/494
http://www.ftud.net/p/87
http://www.ftud.net/p/357

Has this project changed the way you perceive London and its inhabitants?

No, although I’ve seen places I never knew existed, mainly on the outskirts of London – places like Purley, Biggin Hill or Hillingdon.

How was the project received by other photographers and the general poblic?

I think the feedback was positive. The project was picked up by the BBC website and other blogs/online publications, including a prominent German site I never knew existed :)

341 to Angel Superstores © From the Upper Deck141 to Palmers Green © From the Upper Deck

How many routes have you got left to cover and how are you planning to cover those without double-decker buses?

I don’t know exactly how many as not all of them  have double-deckers. I think I’ll simply ignore those.

What’s the next step for the project?

The main aim is to publish an album then to re-edit and rebuilt the website to allow for easier picture browsing.

You can follow Przemek on Twitter and check his site www.ftud.net

All images © Przemek Wajerowicz, used with author’s permission

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