Hi, Hola, Bonjour , Ciao , مرحبا, 您好, bok, hei and welcome.

My name is James Murray and I live in London, England but love to go exploring in foreign climates. Coming from a design background I look at photography as an extension of this, recording the lifestyles and architecture that make up are world.

My passion for photography started when I first picked up a film camera (wow I miss the darkroom), capturing the moments of my accident filled childhood. I transferred this passion into my studies mixing in all of my design influences to create my own style.

Architecture and photography are the perfect blend each complementing the other. As a HDR (High Dynamic Range) enthuiast, I use this technique to enrich my images.

I have worked as a photographer since 2010, taking photos of the enviroment that I lived in around London, selling images as artworks and to companies. In 2011 I worked for Disney on their cruise ships with the big mouse himself. Onboard I worked as a portrait and wedding photographer, learning new techniques and feeding my travel bug.

Every photo is a memory; there is no better way to capture it then how you see it, not how the camera sees it.

 

Stacky Theme by Andrew

Pathway to the inside of the Cardinal http://bit.ly/Jv1xch

The Mystery Cardinal Building http://bit.ly/JeZaam

Rugby

I walk past this shop in Covent Garden every day to get to work (although as you can tell by the christmas trees) this was taken before I started working here. Its probably a shop that I will never step in, unless I win the lottery or marry someone really really rich (I am fine with either of those by the way).

It is of course the Ralf Lauren shop in Covent Garden, placed right next door to the Apple store there. I used Nik Software’s HDR Efex Pro to process this image for a change. I never used to like using it due to the fact that it was very very slow on my old computer but it works great on my Mac. It gives a very different effect to Photomatix so I will have to keep on using it of I want to know the settings. Perhaps one day.

Countdown

Well I still have a backlog of Christmas images to post so I hope you don’t mind but here is another. Ok it has another theme aswell. Now it is 2012 London is going on a massive high for the olympics, especially recently where tickets went up for sale for different events. Naturally none got what they wanted and no I didn’t get any but I will be in London this summer and perhaps will stalk the Olympic village for photos. 

With the christmas tree in Trafalgar square was (and still is) the countdown clock to the olympics. You can work out when this photo was taken by looking at the countdown or you could cheat and look at the name of the photos, but thats no fun.

Rudolf the giant green reindeer, has a very shiny nose.

Merry Christmas and all that jazz. I hope all of you had a great christmas day bout for some of you the festivities are only beginning. If your family is anything like mine you will now be preparing to the mass family get together. That means all cousins, young children and distant family relatives will be sitting on chairs of all different heights around a dinner table.

For those of you who are all christmased (yes I made up that word) out now of the time for shopping in the sales; although for those of us in London will perhaps not have that joy as the Tube strike is now on making like hell for Londoners.

This giant reindeer lives in Covent Garden for christmas. People always gather around it as a meeting point this time of year. 

Anyway, what ever you do today I hope you enjoy it!

Happy Christmas Eve Eve everyone!!

Such an occasion merits a christmassy picture and I would say the Christmas decorations at Covent Garden deliver. These are hanging in the famous Apple Market, small niche shops littering the walls. You can see the string bank players at the bottom of the stairs. There is always some band playing there selling their CD but on this occasion I think that they were just singing carols.

I hope you all have a fantastic christmas and drink lots of eggnog (or other alcoholic beverage of your choice) and eats lots as you should at christmas. See you all on Boxing day.

Apple on Apple

London is full of christmas lights for the festive season and on this trip I fully intended to just take photos of those stunning lights but something else was on my mind. I had ordered a Macbook Pro so when I was going through Covent Garden I stopped to take a photo of one of their flagship London Stores.

This was the first photo that I processed on it after 2 days of transferring files, programs, reformatting hard drives and adding plugins. Who new transferring to apple would be so much hassle but it well worth it.

Glass next to St Pauls

I went up to St Paul’s Cathedral to take pictures of the protesters as there was a rumor that they were being made to leave. Of course that didn’t happen and they are standing as strong as ever. The place was full of photographers. They must be used to it by now, everyone wanting to get photos of some of the Anonymous group members. I got some of those aswell that I will post next week but for now here is one from my walk to the entrance.

This is a shot of the One New Change shopping centre that I have been in many times to go take shots of London from the roof top.

The Pod at Dusk

I find that it is hard to get a great picture of the London Eye close up. There are so many details that you can miss. The clouds were not that great on this day so I used a bit of Nik Software to spice the sky up a little. It enhanced the colour alot bringing out the fading light.

The wheel takes 30 minutes to go around once and it is a good trip. Well perhaps not the queueing before hand, which can be a very long time on sunny days when the tourists flock down to the Southbank.

Have a good weekend everyone and I’ll be back on Monday.

Art by St Paul’s

Yeah I know what your thinking, another one of St Paul’s. What can I say, I’m addicted to it. I have noticed this sculpture many times, infact there are three of them all in a row which always have someone climbing on them.

St Paul’s Cathedral is still closed to the public because of all the protesters around the front. Check out my photos of them here. I’m not sure when it will be open again but I have yet to go inside and take photos so I hope it is soon.

Flare in the eye.

People ask me how long it takes me to process a HDR photo. The typical photo takes around 15-20 mins as I have now got quite quick at it. Sometimes though it can take up to a few hours for an individual photo. This one took me 2 hours to process as Photomatix created alot of clean up issues around the structure of the eye that I had to repair in photoshop.

It didn’t help that I took the photo handheld. The tripod police are always snooping around here and I have been stopped countless amount of times. Instead of fighting the battle (which I usually win), I now just do not use a tripod in this little area.