Technique Tony Sellen
Award-winning photographer Tony Sellen is passionate about fine art, long exposures and London, the city he calls home. He loves to travel, capturing architecture, seascapes, landscapes and street images. Tony runs 1:2:1 workshops, licenses images and accepts commissions. To find out more visit www.londonfineartphotography.co.uk
The
shape of the city Buildings are designed for people, so including a human element in your pictures can help you to tell a story. Tony Sellen talks to Tracy Calder about his skilful black & white technique
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KIT LIST
‘I would go months without touching the camera, but then I’d learn something new every time I did pick it up,’ he recalls. To hone his skills, he took up bird photography, experimenting with depth of field to get ‘a nice, blurry background’, before deciding to attend a workshop focusing on long exposures. ‘At first I didn’t really understand what long exposures were or how to use them, and I couldn’t get my head around the maths,’ he recalls, ‘but
Prime lenses
Prime lenses force you to work harder when it comes to composition, but the results are worth it. Tony will sometimes shoot with a 24-70mm zoom and return later with one of his favourite primes such as the Zeiss Makro-Planar T* 50mm ZF.2.
doing the workshop made me realise that you don’t really need to know that much!’
Find a style
Capturing wildlife remains a great passion for Tony and he believes that if he’d picked up a camera earlier (or lived ‘in the middle of nowhere’) he might have made it his focus. But living in London he felt his options were limited. ‘What was I going to shoot? An urban fox, a sparrow, some
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W
hen Tony Sellen walks into a building, his brain perceives a mix of lines, shapes, light and shadow. ‘Everything is a picture to me,’ he reveals. ‘When I walk into a hotel lobby, I notice the design and the thought process behind the seating arrangement.’ But it hasn’t always been that way. In fact, Tony only decided to take his photography seriously in 2014; before then it was more of an on/off hobby.
Nikon D810
The Nikon D810 is Tony’s main camera. When you’re shooting in low-light conditions, you need a camera that handles noise well – the D810 has an ISO range of 64-12,800, which makes it ideal.
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