Neil Hopcroft

This is one of the flats I lived in in London, the nicer of them, it was in Finchley, a few minutes walk from the Tube station. I didn’t really like living in London much, there’s a lot of angry people and it kinda makes you angry too. There are some things I miss, like […]

Our friend Matti is not one for doing things by halves – this is Daymo trying to control one of his kites.

I learned to skim stones on a lake in the Canadian Rockies. We went with some friends of my parents and their family, including their children and Gramps, their grandfather. It took hours but with the endless supply of skimming stones and patience I can only dream of, I got there in the end. And […]

The Laxey Wheel is the biggest waterwheel in the world and one of the iconic images of the Isle of Man. We visited and went down the mine associated with it.

We went on a mountain tour on quad bikes while we were on the Isle of Man. I didn’t really get the hang of driving – and drove into poor Mikey when I applied the accelerator instead of the brake. No major damage done. And, fortunately, the picture was taken beforehand, so we were all […]

Three of us went to visit one of our number who moved to the Isle of Man. This was a far cry from the urban life I was leading at the time, and my first (and thus far my only) experience of flying from London City airport. We were met at the airport after we […]

Understanding how light works is a very important part of photography – a flash can bring out colours that would otherwise fade into the dusk, or freeze a nearby object while capturing movement in the background. These days I hardly use the flash, I see it as kind-of vulgar, it makes the photography intrusive. “Look […]

There used to be a tradition of taking pictures of everyone in the tree at the annual picnic. What you never see is the view from the tree.

This shot, from one of the Hampstead Park picnics, started me thinking about how photography could be an art under my control. Completely by accident the hoop framed a number of people – something I have since gotten an eye for and deliberately tried to capture.

I never really got the hang of taking pictures of people. They are too unpredictable, and don’t stay still long enough to line up the shot. This particular party, poor James (not pictured) got the raw end of my inability, with constant flashes from my repeated pointing and shooting. None of those pictures came out […]