The Roaches, Wild and Free

The exhibition is now on I would love your feed back.


Crafted by professional photographer Brett Trafford and wonderfully displayed in the Foxlowe,The Market Place, Leek from the 1st May to the 31st May 2012.


This free exhibition, " The Roaches, Wild and Free" is a celebration of this great wild space right on our door step. The images show not only the blue skies and purple heather of a summer's day familiar to most visitors but also the stormy winter views and spectacular sunrises seen by hardened walkers.

Busy day

Well it's been quite a few days since I last updated, in fact I've just looked and it's been 2 months, how time flies. Life moves on at an incredible pace, loads of work and not much time for anything else at the moment, but still when my work is mainly taking pictures it can't be all bad. A 14 hour day yesterday starting at 6.30 and finishing around 9.00 after talking to a bride and groom, in between I worked on quotes for some jobs, designed a new business card, sold a picture from my exhibition, designed a Christmas card and ordered a load of prints for the up coming shows. After all that was still only 1/2 way down my to do list. On the home front both Caz and Ziggy are well and both are loving the fact that Caz is home most of the time, Ziggy get way more attention from Caz than he does from me. Picture for today is Ziggy at Rudyard lake on a walk a few weeks ago.

My idea of keeping a blog active.

Well it's been nearly 6 weeks since I last had chance to update the blog so this really is not as active a blog as I would have wanted, but then I am a photographer first and not a writer. I said last time that I wanted to make this blog a bit more personal than it had become and less about work, but the trouble with that is that my work is also my passion and so very hard to separate from my personal side. I think that it will just have to be less corporate than my work blog so if you are easily upset be warned. That said I've nothing to rant about, no crisis on the horizon and my life is going great, I'm even getting time to blog! My biggest challenge is keeping ahead of my paper work and planning to move the business forward. The big job that I will have to start soon is to catalogue all my images, or at least those that my be saleable, around 6000. This task is needed so that I can sell pictures more easily on line and via outlets, at the moment I identify the pictures by titles, which I make up as the mood takes me so its difficult ordering pictures from me and hard for me to keep track of which ones sell, both of which are quite important to running a business. Still time has caught up with me and I need to go and make some Christmas cards, I will leave you with a shot of Rudyard lake that I found while looking for winter pictures.

Important update

I've been blogging for more than 4 years and in that time have posted nearly 1500 post that have been seen over 150,000 times in 174 countries. Not bad for something that was only going to last a year and I'm not done yet. It's been a few weeks or even months since I last posted, depending on which of my blogs you read and this post is an explanation as to why and a update on what I'm planning next and is being posted on all my blogs (apologies if you follow more than one as you will get this multiple times).

First a bit of history...

      Turning 41 is a bit of a let down, you have had your big party for your 40th and 41 is just another year older, so with that in mind I decided to mark my 41st year by blogging a photo a day, not really knowing what a blog was or what a mammoth task it would be. That small decision made over a ten minute car journey changed my life. It changed what was a hobby, all be it quite an obsessive one, in to a full time career and when I say full time I mean nearly every waking minute and some of my sleeping ones too.

Today I'm well into my second year as a professional photographer and after the expected hard first year I am doing better than I had planned for, in fact that is the reason for this post, one I've being trying to write for over a month. Business is good, job following job inter-spaced by good print sales and on going projects, in the last few weeks a Ball, a Prom, a Fete and 4 commissions totalling 550 finished prints, that's images that are shown to the customer, not images taken, (each image is hand processed and only let out once I'm happy its as close to perfect as I can get it) and this month was a bit quieter that last.

So as you can see I've had very little time for my blogs, I have managed to keep my business facebook page updated, see it here, but feel I have neglected the blogs and all you wonderful people that follow them. I known that you may feel that it should be easy just to do a quick post, but being dyslexic writing is one of the hardest thing for me to do. For example earlier on I used the word "decision" I know what the word means and how to use it, I can read the word but not spell it, and when you start it desi or disi not even the best spell checker has a clue, then when you turn to a dictionary your looking in the wrong place, in all, that one word cost me 10 minutes.

The future...

         The plan is to keep the blogs active, so they will stay on line and may even get updated, although not very often, that is the short term view. This takes off some of the pressure (and guilt) I have been feeling and gives me time to rearrange my web presents. My business blog will in time be moved over to Wordpress to link up with my new web site (that is not even started yet) and become a window on to what I'm doing week by week. My 2 daily photo blogs will have to wait for a bit, the Leek one has not been daily for a year so that won't change much, but the Buxton one will have to wait for new stuff as I really can not afford the time it needs at the moment.

365 to 42, my first and favourite blog and something that I am so proud of, will be updated as and when I can and I will try to take it back to being a more personal blog that is about me and not about work, reading back some of that first years post it feels like it was written by someone else and I would love to get that back, I may even get Blog of Note again!


Now the pictures these are 3 of the things I've been working on, pictures of Leek and a school prom.

Dusk till Dawn

Dusk till Dawn is the name of my latest exhibition displayed in the Foxlowe, The Market Place, Leek from the 1st of May to the 31st May 2012.

The free exhibition, “Dusk till Dawn” is exploration of photography when the sun has gone down.

Pho•tog•ra•phy \fə-ˈtä-grə-fē\

The process or art of producing images of objects on sensitized surfaces by the action of light.

Night  \ˈnīt\

The time from dusk to dawn when no sunlight is visible.

Dusk till Dawn \ˈdəsk til dän\

A collection of 12 images captured between sunset and sunrise.

The idea for the exhibition came to me as the nights started to draw in last September. My days were taken up with running a full time photography business and daylight hours were reducing, giving me less time to take photographs.

 A chance comment on a photography forum about the joys of night time photography, coming right at the moment that I was complaining about the lack of daylight, lead me to flip the situation and see the winter as an opportunity to capture sunrises and sunsets with out having to get up at 4am or staying out until 11pm.

The only challenge was that I had very rarely done any low light photography and would have to learn one of the hardest disciplines in photography in a very short space of time. The final images are a mix of old and new shots, reduced down from an initial selection of around a 1,000 images, with the final selection of 12 coming from a group of just over 60 pictures.

The images were taken on a number of different Nikon cameras using both slide film and digital. They were then printed on to the highest quality 100% cotton Fine Art Canvas which is then fixed to stretcher bars made from quality North European Redwood Pine. All the images are for sale at a special price of £70 each, and will be delivered after the exhibition ends.