Walking along the beach the other night as the sun was going down there was a palpable sense of excitement, in anticipation of a glorious sunset and display of rich colours in the evening sky

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Photography workshops - with a local focus.

Rowner and Gosport Mix-Up youth groups took part in a series of photography based workshops, based in and around their own areas. Trips, which are always an important, lively and stimulating part of our workshops were selected with the groups, and included places of interest and importance we could get to easily and cheaply. As an aside, trips don't have to involve coaches, days out and lots of money; they can be a walk down a high street, or visit to the local park - as long as we make them relevant and special.

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Listening to 92 year-old Eddie Grenfell in his 14th floor, warm and cosy flat overlooking Portsmouth’s Naval Dockyard, it is impossible to imagine the conditions and horror of his story.  Eddie is one of around 200 survivors left of WW2’s Arctic Campaign, out of more than 64,000 men who served. He has also been leading the Arctic Medal campaign for more than 15 years, to get recognition for all those men from Government. Eddie’s story is about the campaign to supply the Russians with supplies for them to defeat the German Army on the Eastern front, as well as a moving account of his own experience and remarkable survival.

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Perhaps once in a lifetime, or if you are really lucky twice, does an opportunity to visit Borneo come up. And so it was for us – this last Christmas – a 3-week trip to the island. Prior to this, I wasn’t even sure where or what Borneo was. Now I do: it is an island, the third largest in the world, in the South China Sea, north of Java, Indonesia that is about 73% Indonesian,1% Brunei, with the remainder taken up by Malaysian states, Sabah & Sarawak. It is home to, and largely covered by, one of the oldest rainforests in the world. It is also, in short, a slice of paradise.

Our latest community project is with over 60’s groups in Paulsgrove and Portsea, Portsmouth, and in conjunction with our Museum and Records service’s, Charles Dickens Community Archive project. Inspired by the Museum’s archive collection, the groups are investigating their own community’s heritage, and recording and sharing their own personal stories and memorabilia in weekly sessions.

The Portsea group are working with the theme of pubs, clubs, cafes and restaurants, as in their own words, “there used to be a pub on every street corner”, and they have many a tale to tell!

After WWII, because of heaving bombing in the city, many families were re-housed in new, modern homes that were built in Paulsgrove, north of the city. Residents of some of those original homes recall their experiences and have been remembering what it was like to live through that time.

Both groups’ work will be developed into magazines and calendars as a legacy of these workshops, and will form part of an exhibition at the City Museum about the Charles Dickens Community Archive project, in 2012.

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Fes el Bali

The prospect of traveling by overnight bus on a ten and a half hour journey, wasn’t one that we had looked forward for a long time, but it seemed the best way to get to Fes - given that we wanted to spend as many days as possible discovering and exploring Morocco – and it was.  As it was still Ramadan, the evening buses were delayed by one hour so the drivers could enjoy ‘Iftar’. Often shared with family and friends, Iftar is the evening meal when Muslims break their fast, during the Islamic month of Ramadan, and it starts at just after sunset.

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A Desert Experience

A bit like Cockfosters, Upminster or Morden on London’s underground, Merzouga is at the end of the line. Except Merzouga is not a tube station in the suburban fringes of our capital, identified by a red circle with horizontal blue line through it, it is a small village of around 600 people on the edge of the Erg Chebbi dunes, in the north eastern part of the Sahara Desert - the world's second largest desert after Antarctica - in Morocco. It also has the largest natural body of water in Morocco and, is only 50km from the Algerian border.

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Flowers must be one of the most photographed subjects. On flickr there are no small number of groups interested in photographing different aspects of flowers and literally millions of images – and that is on just one web site.

As discussed on these pages, apps make iphoneography. We are excited by them; trying and testing them out to see if, when and how we can best use them. Some of our favourite, and certainly ones we would recommend playing around with are as follows. Enjoy:

Pro HDR (High Dynamic Range) takes one exposure on the highlights and another on the shadow area and then merges them. This is a photographic technique that requires skill and a considerable amount of knowledge about DSLR cameras. It that shows a lot of information in an image, allowing detail in both shadow and highlighted areas to be much more visible.

Lo Mob. Taken from LOMO, a French - Russian limited company, (Leningrad Optical Mechanical Amalgamation (Ленинградское Oптико-Mеханическое Oбъединение), founded in 1914 to produce lenses and cameras. They produced a photographic style that is hugely popular and characterised by a lo-tech look. This app gives a range of film type, retro effects. For example, Polaroid type 55 and cross-processed slide film, which because it was processed in different chemicals, gives a super saturated colour.

Hipstamatic is a range of novelty lenses, from damaged to lomo (style of camera with super wide-angle lens, large aperture and saturated colour).

Retro Camera creates old fashioned type effects, such as sepia and duo toned,
‘Daguerretype’ (after Louis Daguerre, a French artist and chemist who created the first photographic plate, in the 19th century), ‘Calotype’ (early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot), as well as other more recent retro effects; Fuji-slide film, high grain black & white.

Film Lab has tried to recreate every film type imaginable; from Agfapan 25 for super-fine grain black and white, through to push-processed Ilford HP5, super high-grain, low-light, high-contrast.  Colour films include Polaroid 5”x4”, transparency film to cross-processed, Kodacolor Gold.

iPhoneography: images created and edited using an Apple iOS device, most often an iPhone.

‘Mobile’ photography has been around a while, as most other mobile phones have photographic capabilities. What they don’t have however........