A new portrait from a recent visit to the Cawdor Road estate in Eccles. I’ll post more examples of recent portrait work in the next few weeks.

Parachutes fill the air as a mass drop of approximately 1000 troops takes place during exercise Bright Star ‘82. C-5 Galaxy aircraft are being used. 1 November 1981. (Source: www.dodmedia.osd.mil)

Trawling the Visual Wreckage: A night of screenings, socializing, conversations and chats about issues relating to photography, imagery and film in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Meet the city’s thriving community of bloggers and image-makers (if they show up) and participate in a thrilling raffle for a prize that’s out of this world.

The fun takes place at An Outlet (77 Dale Street, Manchester, M1 2HG) on Friday 29 January 2010 from 7.30pm.

I have 244 images on the stock photography site Alamy (you can see them here). Unfortunately, Alamy has 17.58 million images to choose from reducing your chances of being on the first 20 pages for any given search topic to almost nothing.

I’d almost given up hope of making a sale when I casually checked to find the above image was bought for use as a double-page spread in a German tourist brochure netting me $176.28.

Free money (if you disregard the return flight to Rio de Janiero and the ferry transfer to Niterói).

Images from Connell Brothers demolition of  Manchester University’s Moberley Tower on Oxford Road.

]]> http://davidoates.visualsociety.com/2009/12/25/demolition/feed/ 0 http://davidoates.visualsociety.com/2009/12/15/simon-rhatigan/ http://davidoates.visualsociety.com/2009/12/15/simon-rhatigan/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:43:56 +0000 davidoates http://davidoates.visualsociety.com/?p=541

Simon is a hotelier and owner of the Feversham Arms, Helmsley which was recently voted AA Hotel of the Year 2009/2010.

I went up there to take some pictures for Insider magazine and found Simon to be such a game fellow that he was prepared to get nearly naked in North Yorkshire in December and allow me to get some pictures more interesting than expected.

What is it about this site and prize winners?

Even a die-hard Manchester City fan like me has to acknowledge that Ryan Giggs is a decent footballer. On Monday he was awarded BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year and I went to Carrington to photograph him being presented with his award by Alex Ferguson. on Sunday he went one better and won the overall BBC Sports Personality of the Year, his appearance on this site might not have been an decisive factor. Doubt it.

Cowering under Manchester’s perpetual drizzle while daydreaming of Rio de Janiero inspired me to order some replacement  copies of my Brasil book.

In what might become a regular feature to honour this sites far-flung viewers, today’s post pays homage to the town that provided this site with it’s first ever (legitimate) visitor from the USA,  Scranton in Pennsylvania.

As many readers won’t be as intimately aware of the workings of the town as I, here is a brief potted history courtesy of a popular online encyclopedia:

Scranton is the largest city  in a  former anthracite coal mining area including the smaller cities of Wilkes-Barre, Pittston, and Carbondale. The cities growth was precipitated by the Iron and Steel industry, particularly the production of railway lines. America’s first successful, continuously-operating electrified streetcar system was established in the city in 1886, giving it the nickname “The Electric City”

Harry Chapin’s 1974 song “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” dramatises the wreck of a truck carrying bananas on March 26, 1965 just outside downtown Scranton

A 2001 Washington Post Magazine column described Wilkes-Barre as “awful” and Scranton as “awfuler” and named it a contender for the “armpit of America.”

Scranton has more recently been the home of Dunder Mifflin, the fictional paper company in America’s version of The Office and was also briefly home to right-wing nut job and broadcaster Bill O’Reilly.

Burning culm dump, Scranton, Pennsylvania; from a c. 1908 postcard. Culms are huge dumps of coal mine waste which burn incessantly.

Scranton, we salute you.

Last week I met and photographed Avi, who gave this years Tom Hurndall memorial lecture.

Avi is a Baghdad-born professor of International Relations at  University of Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy. He is especially well-known as a historian of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is considered one of the leading New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel.