Giant rainbow flag carried by parade participants at London Pride
7th July 2019

Like I try to do almost every year, I attended the London Pride again in 2019. It's always a colourful parade and a full day of joy, fun, quirkiness, and love. And in these past 2 years, I also went with the clear intention to shoot some good portraits. For somebody as shy as me, the London Pride is always a great chance to do so, because people expect to be photographed....

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warm sunset over West London
21st June 2019

I often get my best results when I follow my gut feelings rather than plan for something. This story is a good testament to that. Since I returned from beautiful Georgia (more on that in a future post), the weather in London has been pretty grim and depressing. It rained almost every day, and it was generally cold and grey most of the time. This day was no exception. And frankly, there...

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Fading figure leaving along rail tracks
9th May 2019

You might have heard of this thing called “shadowban”. Allegedly, Instagram has ways to punish spammy content and counter the rise of bots, fake accounts, etc. What Instagram does is flag suspicious accounts and consequently slash the reach and engagement that these accounts receive. And that would obviously be a good thing. You see this shadowban term surfacing in discussions because perfectly legit accounts get caught in Instagram security's net. I'm sure...

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Backblaze photo backup | Computer display shattered on the floor
26th March 2019

You read horror stories online but always think they can never happen to you. You are more careful and surely the victims must have made some silly mistake you never make. More specifically, there is no way you can lose hundreds of gigabytes of photos all of a sudden. Well...

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Abstract wallpaper
20th March 2019

Everybody loves abstract wallpapers and free stuff, right? I installed a new app called Spectre on my iPhone. It's made by the same guys behind the Halide app. Which is, right now, one of the best camera apps for smartphones. But Spectre's purpose is to help you with long-exposure photography. So you won't find it if you look for something to create abstract wallpapers. I mainly use it when I'm out, to...

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Instagram logo on display
7th March 2019

The other day, I saw somebody I follow on Instagram celebrating their “instaversary” (or however you name it). And it made me think about how I started on the platform myself. I am a compulsive early adopter of apps. I get very excited about everything new that seems novel and disruptive. So, I jumped on board the Instagram train very early. Some background It was 2009. I had just purchased my first...

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panorama of London surrounded by fog
24th February 2019

We just had 3 days in a row of morning fog here in London. It was all over Instagram as people were excited and filled their stories and feeds with London fog photos (#londonfog). Of course, I published a couple of stories myself on my IG (@fabienb). But I haven't posted on my feed because most shots I took were wide landscape shots, and these look tiny in the app. Instead, I'm...

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Close-up shot of the moon
20th February 2019

In January, the Super Blood Wolf Moon was only half a success because the clouds arrived to “eclipse the eclipse”. That meant I needed to try this again with the new supermoon in February, the Super Snow Moon. What is a Supermoon anyway? You know that the moon follows an elliptical orbit around the Earth. Within this trajectory, the perigee is the closest point to our planet, and the apogee is the...

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A close-up view of the lunar eclipse of 2019
21st January 2019

Still in the first weeks of the new year, there was already an exciting photographic occasion: the Super Blood Wolf Moon. Such a dramatic name stands for a supermoon that happens at the same time as a lunar eclipse. Something quite rare: consider the next eclipse will be only visible in the UK in almost 11 years (maybe less?)! If you're already googling the date to pin it to your calendar… Probably...

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A photo of Camden Lock at night, with the reflection of the bridge on the canal
18th January 2019

I decided to kick off 2019 with a new photographic series on Instagram, all about city lights at night. In London but not only.My feed was never too consistent, despite all the recommendations you hear about making it so. In an effort to achieve better consistency while retaining the diversity of my style, I thought I'd share my photos as a series. This way, a good amount of similar shots will appear...

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Kyoto Golden Pavillion
7th January 2019

In this blog, I start disclosing my editing workflow, and the first topic I'd like to introduce is Luminosity Masks. Luminosity Masks are something you might have heard before, mostly if you shoot Landscape/Cityscape. In a nutshell, they are selections based on tones that allow for refined adjustments. In their basic form, they broadly target highlights and/or shadows. But they can be further refined to include mid-tones or narrow down an image's...

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The Gatwick Fiasco
22nd December 2018

The Gatwick Fiasco. Or how the second largest and busiest airport in the UK couldn't handle a drone alert and ruined the Christmas plans of 150.000 people. Including me. I'm sure you all heard what happened a few days ago. Alerts of drones flying near the airport runway caused a shutdown of all operations. Every flight on Wednesday got cancelled. Then, on Thursday, it happened again when I arrived at the airport....

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