This is the photography blog of clickclickjim, Jim Stephenson Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see my work.

Stephen Cotterell is a great supporter of other people’s photography. His enthusiasm for other’s work, and the fact he’s an all round good egg, lead to him recording and publishing the Photography 121 podcast. Last week, on May 9th, Stephen came to my house for a bit of a chat over a cup of tea. You can listen to the interview / conversation on the iTunes store by searching for “Photography 121″. Click on my one (Jim Stephenson) and it’ll either download or play in the store. Or you can click here for a link. The others are, of course, worth checking out to.

Generally I sort of know roughly what I’m talking about but I have to admit I’m not the most articulate fella all the time, so here’s a few minor corrections before the pedants email me!

1) Factory Records and Peter Saville put out some lovely stuff after 1984!

2) There is a debate over whether or not Stalin (and Russia’s rule at the time) was fascist, social fascist, totalitarian, socialist, or any number of other things. I don’t think fascist is what I should have used in that context though. “Fascist Architecture” was perhaps the wrong term entirely. “Totalitarian Architecture” would have worked better. The point I was expressing was that certain types of architecture, in those countries, in that era, were designed under totalitarian or fascist leaders as very strong and stern statements of power to both their own people and the wider world. They were not always the most aesthetically democratic buildings, basically. Also, Fascist architecture, cathedrals and financial institutes were not necessarily built to intimidate people. Again, wrong terminology. They all had very different purposes (from wonder and awe to intimidation and power).

3) Ezra Stoller, not Erza Stoller. Shulman worked on the West coast, not the East (I correct that in conversation).

Also, I namecheck a lot of people and organisations, so I thought it might be helpful to give you a mega list of links to their sites or places where you can find more information (in a rough order of appearance, click the name to be redirected)…

Factory Records, Dennis Gilbert, Edmund Sumner, Peter Cook, Luke Hayes, Andy Matthews, Alistair Nichols, Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, Iwan Baan, Miniclick Photography Talks, Garage Studios, Kevin Meredith, Helen Cadwallader, Emma Critchley, Richard Rowland, Photoworks, Arts Forum, Simon Roberts, Simon Norfolk, Lisa Barnard, Laura Pannack, Thurston Hopkins, Louie Banks, Hannah Laycock, Matt Martin, Ruby-May Allcock, Vimeo, Allan Grainger, Edgar Martins, Alex Bamford & James Withey

Hope that helps a bit!

Many, many thanks to Stephen for asking me to be a part of this series. You can view his website, including more info on his podcasts, here.

This is the photography blog of clickclickjim, Jim Stephenson Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see my work.

This is the photography blog of clickclickjim, Jim Stephenson Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see my work.

January and February are notoriously bad times for architectural photographers to do external work. The damn weather means I check the forecast updates as much as I check my emails (almost). Fortunately, interiors work isn’t so affected by the poor weather so that comes to the forefront in these months. Fellow photographer and good mate, Adam Bronkhorst, and I were in Hastings recently for a couple of projects we have on and he took a number of shots of me looking exceptionally pleased that it rained all day…

I don’t think I’m allowed to mention Adam’s project, but needless to say it’s racked up a few miles and is pretty exciting. I’ll tell more when I get the OK from him…

On a slightly nicer day in Feb, another photographer friend Ian Rudgewick-Brown ably assisted me on a shoot I had in the Surrey countryside and we both realised that our job is pretty good if we’re getting paid to spend the day in the sun in the countryside. He managed to capture one of the very very rare occasions where I’m shooting without a tripod…

And there ends this incredibly narcissistic blog post.

This is the photography blog of clickclickjim, Jim Stephenson Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see my work.

I shoot digitally most of the time, since I can turnaround the images much quicker. From time to time a client will ask for transparencies rather than a disc of images and this is great, because I get to get to dust of some film. Lovely stuff. Last week was a friend of mine’s last week at the architects Conran & Partners (who just happen to be clients of mine). On his lunch break I swung by and we took out the Arca Swiss, with a 6 by 7 film back that is currently (and very kindly) being loaned to me by another friend and fellow photographer, Jason Keffert.

Digs is a a bit of a film photography aficionado and I’d told him about the Arca a while back, knowing he’d be interested. It’s a beautiful piece of equipment to work with. All the movements are precision engineered, the lenses are incredible and the whole way you work with a camera like this is great. If you spend enough time with me talking about photography, I’ll probably have a whinge about machine-gun photographers who take a couple of thousand shots of a building and get 30  or 40 “acceptable” ones. I prefer to work a bit slower and take as many images as I think are there to be taken. It’s too easy to forget this shooting with digital equipment, a bit too easy to snap away without considering each frame. With this camera, you have to slow right down and go through a process with each shot. We took this camera out for an hour and took two frames.

Anyways, here’s a couple of behind the scenes images Digs shot whilst I was setting up.

This is the photography blog of clickclickjim, Jim Stephenson Architectural Photographer. As always, plenty o’ pics on my website.

Kirst and I cooked up a big old roast and I rather think she got quite annoyed waiting for her food while I neatly arranged the chopping board.

This is the photography blog of clickclickjim, Jim Stephenson Architectural Photographer. As always, plenty o’ pics on my website.

Here’s a quick glimpse behind the scenes at shoot we’ve been on in the last few months…

Shooting for dreamthinkspeak in a rainy Stamner woods, for this project. You know you’ve made if when you don’t just have a photographic assistant – you have your own bloody butler!

With fellow architectural photographer, Richard Chivers, shooting up at Falmer on his large format Horseman.

And champagne all round once we finished another shoot for dreamthinkspeak at Preston Manor, for this project. Featured are the models, makeup, wardrobe, art director and assistants.

You can see more shots on my website, clickclickjim.