Ed Swinden

Ed Swinden never initially set out to be a photographer, he was originally a Psychology student then later went on to work for Manchester Evening News and BBC then photographed guests for Radio 1 and then finally became a freelance photographer in 2004. Swinden has worked for clients such as NME Magazine, Manchester University, BBC - photographing the last two episodes of Dr Who and Haymarket Magazine where he photographed Tony Blair and Lord Hesseltine. For this series of images Ed won an award at Format Photography Festival 2011 where the theme for the whole festival was street photography. He used wide angle and telephoto lenses to photograph harsh strips of light between high buildings to create silhouettes of the people who were walking by. He said that these images were hard to photograph as the sun had to be in the right place to create these shadows and this would only happen every so often, so when it did he had to drop whatever he was doing to achieve these pictures.

I really like this series of images, i like how the pictures are almost black and white due to the harsh shadows made by the tall buildings and the silhouettes of the people look quite mysterious.

I found the lecture from Ed Swinden not only interesting but also quite helpful. As well as talking about his own work, he gave a lot of advice on how to get work in the photography industry.