Upcoming book: Herefordshire Then and Now; a photographic journey with Alfred Watkins.

Alfred Watkins (1855-1935) was a Hereford born Victorian pioneer photographer. You have him to thank for the light meter, he was the inventor of what became known as the Watkins Bee Meter, the first commercially available exposure meter. You might have seen a series of blog posts I did a couple of years ago about him.
    Last night I launched the Kickstarter project for my forth coming book. In it I shall be looking at the photography of Watkins, showing how the county he photographed has changed in the past hundred years or so. For the best part of this year I have been traveling around Herefordshire, seeking out the places he photographed and putting my tripod where he put his.
   We are lucky that the archive of his negatives is held at Hereford Museum, along with his camera equipment, the staff there have been invaluable in the course of researching this book. On the Hereford Museum website they have many of his images on file that you can look at. But by no means the entire archive. Fortunately they have accepted my offer to scan and digitize the rest of his archive, an amazing opportunity! I shall begin doing this in thee next couple of weeks staring with the images needed for reproduction in the book then continuing with the rest of the archive.
    I shall be self-publishing this book, as well as researching, shooting and editing the images, I have been labouring over my laptop...through the night on occasion...getting the manuscript ready for publication. All that now remains is to drop in the digital versions of Alfred's pictures once they have been collated.   Publication costs are expensive so please take a minute to check out my Kickstarter page and support independent photojournalism. A link to this is below:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jimwood/then-and-now-a-photographic-journey-through-herefo

24 Hours in Leominster for the #24hourproject.

This weekend I have spent twenty four hours on the streets of Leominster taking photographs as part of my contribution to a project called the Twenty Four Hour Project. Their mission for all contributors to upload a picture every hour for twenty four hours documenting the human condition.

   2015 was it's fourth year, the street photography platform was initially created by American photographers Sam Smotherman and Renzo Grande. In it's first year contributors were sixty-five photographers the creators were familiar with, since then the project has swelled to mammoth proportions, this years event saw one thousand four hundred participants from four hundred and ten cities worldwide.

    Taking part in this was physically and emotionally demanding. I quite literally walked the shoes of my feet after being awake for a total of 40 hours and covering a distance of some thirty miles whilst walking the length and breadth of Leominster shooting on the streets with my Iphone. Starting off at midnight on the 21st of March, with a dslr and a tripod as well as my Iphone and power bank, I soon dispensed with the camera and the tripod because I found the work-flow easier just using my Iphone, an illustration of why it has become so popular with street photographers and photojournalists...because it is so immediate, simply shoot, edit and transmit all on one device. 

       The resulting images which are uploaded to Instagram are curated and put together in a photo book and exhibited globally.

      To see more about this incredible intitative check out the links below.

Website:  www.24hourproject.org
 IG: @24hourproject
FB: The24HourProject
Twitter: @24hourproject
Flickr: @24hourproject