Spring finally arrived at the weekend. It’s Monday morning now and it’s gone again. But the weekend was blissful.

Did these in the Lightroom 3 BETA. Love the new grain filter.

Out in the garden this weekend for the first time this year – weather was just on the right side of bearable. At least there was a nice blue sky. Cold weather is so much easier to bear when there’s a nice crisp blue sky.

This picture is a big fat cheat. I took it a couple of years ago on a glorious week away in the Scottish Highlands, and it relates to this project only in the fact that it was taken at f22. But it wasn’t taken for this project. I pulled it from the archive because I failed to shoot an image this week. Too busy! Too lazy! I can’t remember which.

Week 4 of a 52 weeks project I’m having a crack at where every photo has to be taken at f22, meaning the pictures will be unrelentingly sharp across the focal range.

This one was shot from the other side of the house to the first image in the project, and yes, I feel bad for being lazy and not getting out into the world and shooting properly for this project! The problem is that it’s fucking cold at the moment and I don’t feel like it. Ha!

Annoyingly though there was a great shot to be had at the train station today. They’re doing engineering works (are they ever not?) and there was an army of engineers crawling about the train tracks wearing ludicrously bright high-vis orange suits. The colours popped out from the drab grey and green background they were milling about on beautifully. Alas I didn’t have my camera with me.

We were on our way to see the Chris Ofili retrospective at Tate Britain, which I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would. On the train on the way back, the high rise buildings and gas towers that litter the route out of London Bridge station mocked me for leaving my camera at work, as they strutted against a perfectly clouded, late afternoon sky. Next weekend I’ll have to go out especially to try and photo some of them. I’ve got about 4 gas towers in mind now, and I reckon the high rise flats of South London will look great at f22, so long as I can find the right vantage points.

Another disappointing week as far as this project goes but I’m not sweating it. My Gran died and it was her funeral last Friday, so I’m not going to be too hard on myself for not putting a lot of effort in!

This pic was taken after we got home from the crematorium. As you can see it was a befittingly downbeat day weather wise.

I’m enjoying doing this project, but I’m struggling a little to come up with ideas that best take advantage of using f22. The most obvious use of the aperture is to take landscape shots, so that’s what I’ve been tending towards so far. That’s fine, to an extent. I’ve not been taking as many landscape images in the last couple of years, preferring instead to focus on portraiture, and it’ll be fine if I finish the year with a more developed landscape portfolio, but I’m hoping I can come up with some more diverse ideas and uses for using f22.

Entry 2 of a ’52 weeks’ project I’m having a crack at wherein every image of the project will be taken at f22 and will therefore be unforgivingly sharp throughout the focal range.

I love these structures and think I will probably take quite a lot of photographs of them for this project, but it’s a bit of a miserable one this … it was grey, dull and rainy, and there’s so much clutter. I’m not sure I like it a great deal but I suppose it’s not feasible to expect that I’ll be happy with every image I take for this project. I guess it’s half the point that you don’t, and therefore learn something.

Here’s an image I took of some gas towers in Hackney when I lived there a few years back …

Last year I bought a wonderful lens – a Sigma f1.4 50mm. It can take pictures with extreme ‘bokeh’ – a very shallow depth of field – where only a very small part of the image is in focus, and the rest is blurred. Here’s a couple of examples:

The effect is very pretty, very impactful. It helps focus the attention of the eye, and removes distracting background clutter by blurring it out.

The problem is that it’s too easy! It’s almost like cheating; like adding free pathos to every image you take.

So, in order to try and avoid getting stuck in a rut, and to help keep my brain working, I thought I would make f22 the theme of my 52 weeks project. For the uninitiated, this means that the whole image will be in crisp focus, no shallow depth of field helping to make my pictures look better than they really are.

Above is my first effort, somewhat lazily taken out of the roof window of my study, overlooking the houses of Forest Hill.