I do love to be beside the seaside

It's far easier to take photos when you don't have a load of stuff to do straight afterwards. Stuff going in with an open eye and mind, you need to go in with an uncluttered mind and eye if you want to get any worthwhile shots. Suffice to say I need to have a bloody good tidy at the moment, because nothing is coming off quite how I had either planned or hoped. Alas, such is life and photography.

I'm going to go and play with some film and developer now - I might scan it in if anything worthwhile comes up. In the meantime however -

It's just a waiting game

Photography seems to be a brilliant metaphor for life to me. It's all about biding your time for the perfect combination of factors to come together so you can create something beautiful. Most of the time it doesn't quite work, and you can see some way to improve what you've done. But the important thing is that you've had a chance to learn, and as a result you'll improve as a photographer.

Most people don't have an infinite amount of time to wait however. Some of us only have a matter of minutes to get the shot, whereas others have days or weeks in which to get something which could be considered a respectable outcome. Some people thrive on this sort of time-pressure, and others just crumble, and waste more time worrying about how they'll handle having so little time, wasting yet more of what little time they indeed have.

(This one of the things which really annoys me about most so-called photographers. They spend more time researching and buying gear than they do using it, and then barely push the ridiculously expensive things they do buy to the limits. Now I'm not saying that it's completely the photographer, good gear does ease the picture-making process by quite a considerable margin, but it's hardly the be all and end all. I won't go any further, as so many people have already said this before me as to render anyone adding anything more to the point utterly pointless, but suffice to say that it bugs me to see people buying £3000 cameras and then never taking it off the manufacturer's default settings.)

Anyway, back to my original point...

Photography lets me see more clearly. And the clearer I can see the better a photographer I can be. It's a nice little predictable cycle, and a little predictability is a nice thing in a world where you can seemingly rely on so little to still be there if you turn your back.

Photography is far more reliable than the train I was stuck waiting for when I took this. 33 minutes late. Fucking useless.



And oh yeah - Merry Christmas

55mm * 1.54 = The way I see the world

That's right.

I see the world in 85mm.

I don't know why, but a the focal length which a 55mm lens on my D300 or my S5 seems to be the way I envisage a photo before I've even brought the viewfinder to my eye. I used to be a bit of a 28mm nut, mainly because it fell into the range of that mystical thing, the 'normal' lens (on a cropped DSLR at least), but now I find myself deep in the short-telephoto camp. It just seems the most natural perspective for me.

This may well be because my favourite two lenses of all time for SLRs happen to fall into this category (the Nikkor 50mm f/2 and the Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/3.5), but if that's the case, well so be it. I've taken ALL of my favourite ever photos with either these two lenses, or the similarly worthy 17-55mm f/2.8 (but that's a bit too easy a lens for my liking, there's some pleasure to be had in using a manual aperture and focusing lens which is completely missing from an AF-S, all-auto lens).

I think I might need to train myself to get a little bit of a larger perspective at some point soon though, I'm focusing on the small details too much as it stands.

Things are going...

...to shit.

I get the feeling that I'm not going to be enjoying myself for the next few weeks. It's just not going to be good. I'm drowning in work, I have exams once I'm back from my holiday, I'm in a photographic rut, and it seems that I'm completely stuffing things up as per usual.

However, there have been a few good event photos in the past few weeks, and at least I'm on holiday for a couple of weeks now. Which has to be a good thing. I've also invested some time into creating my very own snoot/diffuser/reflector hybrid for my lighting set-up, which seems to be working very well indeed so far. It's suited to people photos from what I can deduce from my current experimental findings. A few photos of the item itself and instructions will follow tomorrow, but in the mean-time here's my favourite shot taken with it so far...

T.F.I.F.

Yeah, that's right, this week is FINALLY at it's end.

Thank F**k it's Friday

Yet somehow that doesn't mean that I'm out of stuff to do.

1. I have to shift all 12,000 photos on this computer onto a new hard-drive, but not before I archive them all properly via that wonderful little bit of kit known as Lightroom. That's at least a day gone.
2. Then after that I've got about 4,000 words of economics to write up. Which is probably another half a day gone.
3. I've also got another band-shoot at a concert on Saturday evening, which is an evening out already. But then again, that will be as much fun as it is work, which is just as well given that I'm giving the people I'm shooting for a heavily discounted rate as they're friends of friends.
   

I might try to find some time to develop my backlog of film on Sunday afternoon if there's nothing else for me to do, which fingers crossed there shouldn't be. I just got a new batch of Diafine, and I'll do my best to get anything I manage to process and scan up either here or on my Flickr ASAP.

In the mean time - here's a couple of shots from a Karaoke thingy I went to a few nights ago, which was for a local charity. Both were taken with my FM3a and the 55mm f/3.5 shooting Agfapan 400. Hardly a perfect low-light combo (I had to push the film a few stops to 3200 to get decent results and hand-holdable shutter speeds), but I quite like the lo-fi look of some of the grainier shots. All in all it was quite a good night. Even if the beer was warm.

I even got up on stage. A bit of Ronan Keating, which was something of a blast from the past.

Roses

Rock my socks

Colour

I'm trying to wean myself off it.

It's not that I don't think it has its own special positives (and negatives), or a time and a place, I just personally find myself stopping more for black and white photos more than I do colour photos. Maybe it's because the absence colour removes some of the distraction in the image, allowing us to see what really lies at the essence of the image. By removing something which makes an image realistic, the image is being made more real to us.

Realistic and Real aren't the same thing to me. Something can be very real without being at all realistic. Real is to do with a different sort of truth than the bare facts which comprise Realistic images. Black and White is a prime example; by cutting through the distractions to just the quick of form and structure, we somehow have a distilled version of the image. If done right, this monotone image is anything but monotonous. There is something very final about an image composed of grey values, it seems to have a permanence which Colour images just don't. Colour can be tweaked and altered to a far greater extent than the colour mix in a Black and White image, which just doesn't seem quite a honest to me. Of course, photography shouldn't be about sheer honesty, but rather an interpretation, but there's a point where an interpretation just turns into a lie with little or no basis in the reality. Whilst that also has a time and a place, it reduces the extent to which the audience can truly engage with a work, which is ultimately the majority of the point of all art. (That is if you presume that art should have a point at all of course).

In my opinion colour hides a multitude of sins, and actually can make an image which is hugely flawed seem to be a good image, purely because of the punch and WOW factor of the colours. I can't see those sorts of images lasting nearly as long as the monotone prints which engage on a far deeper level. The level of composition, of form, of carefully observed detail and texture.

Black and White engages you, Colour excites you. Black and White will stand the test of time, but something makes me suspect that colour won't.

The Zorki 4K

To call this camera the poor man's Leica is to give it something of a misnomer. To be honest, this thing has little in common with a Leica in terms of the shooting experience. When I come to shooting this thing having had my MP in my hand for a few hours, there's just no comparison. The viewfinder is far dimmer and smaller. The cocking lever is extraordinarily rough by comparison (but then again, even the ratchet on the FM3a seems crappy when compared with the brilliant piece of engineering showcased on the Leica). The rangefineder isn't nearly as accurate due to the less impressive base-length. There are no extra framelines in the viewfinder - it's 50mm or nothing.

BUT

That doesn't quite mean that this thing should be consigned to the scrap heap. At least not just yet. The primary reason I picked this thing up was just how cheap and innocuous it was. I can walk through most of London with this on my person without being unduly stressed, because it was £40 all told and if anyone did try to nick it, I could always just whack them around the head with it without risking damaging it. Seriously - this thing is built better than most russian tanks. It also has a rather good lens attached to it. In fact it's a bloody good lens considering that it was less than £20, and that it is over 25 years old. Even not considering those two factors it's a bloody good lens. Probably the equal of my 50mm f/2 Nikkor H-C, which is high praise indeed from a Nikkor-phile like me.

The Trip 35

The Trip 35 was way ahead of its time. As in lightyears, and in a few ways it's actually far better designed than a lot of far more expensive and modern cameras. Take, for example, the way it powers its meter - a selenium cell, or in slightly less geeky terms, a solar panel. That's right, a camera which was originally designed more than 30 years ago powers a fully automatic exposure system through the only power source that's unlikely to run out. Plus, you wont accidentally have it go off in your bag, wasting precious film, because it will refuse to trip the shutter (nice terrible pun, eh?) if there isn't enough light reaching the aforementioned selenium cell/solar panel. Clever Olympus.

This camera is riddled with nice little touches like this, like the oddly named 'judas-window' in the viewfinder, which allows you to see where you've put the zone focus and the aperture ring without having to take your eye away from the viewfinder, or the inclusion of eyelets on both sides of the camera, so our south paw friends needn't go without a wrist strap.

To think that Olympus managed to create a camera with no battery dependency, which could probably be used by someone who had never even picked up a camera before with little trouble. Just set the aperture to A (for automatic), set the focus to the red group (which sets the camera to its hyperfocal distance), and shoot. Brilliant.

But that isn't to say that this camera is solely for people who aren't really photographers, or to put it another way, overly simplistic. No, this camera actually has a few traits which bely its ability to be used as quite a serious, albeit simple and unobtrusive photographic tool. Why do you think David Bailey used one?

The first of these is the scalpel-like lens. This is better than a lot of the modern, expensive Nikkor glass I use, and is able to hold its own even against the sharper members of my Nikkor herd, including the legendary 55mm f/3.5 Micro-Nikkor and the 17-55mm f/2.8 Nikkor AF-S. The results really have to be seen in print to be believed, considering it is a) A 30 odd years old design and b) was mounted on what was intended to be a mass market camera.

The next is the inclusion of the hyper-focal marking, albeit rather subtly. This is quite a rarity nowadays, and I must confess it took me a while to work out why Olympus marked one focus point differently to all the others. Now I now, and so do you. Remember it if you use one of these brilliant little things, as it is key to what I reckon this camera is best put to use as.

"Which would be?"

Street-shooting.

This camera has all the traits necessary to create a truly legendary street camera. It's unobtrusive (especially in the increasingly rare, but oh-so-sexy black finish) because of its leaf shutter, it runs at a constant shutter speed of 1/60 or 1/200 (depending on whether you set the aperture manually, which is supposedly for flash, or leave the camera in A mode) which is fast enough to slow most action, whilst ensuring a smallish aperture is set during daylight, guaranteeing the success of the hyperfocal focussing technique. The choice of a 40mm lens means that shooting from the hip isn't as ridiculous a prospect with regards to composition as it is with other cameras (I personally don't really enjoy shooting from the hip, I'm too much of a control freak, and I don't really enjoy wasting film). It's light, and never needs the batteries replacing, so if you miss a shot, it's your fault rather than the camera's. And they're cheap and plentiful, so you don't have to worry about losing/dropping it.

This thing is simply brilliant, and it isn't half a handsome beast. If I'm leaving the house, this thing is probably in my bag, because even if you're not going out with the express intention of taking photos, you can never tell when an opportunity for an excellent image will present itself. The Trip means you need never miss that opportunity, if you're lucky enough to catch it, that is.

Deal and Walmer

A Flower...



... Seems to be more than just a few bits of cellulose put together.

The Song of the Week

Photography

Photography means a lot to me.

It means a lot to a lot of people. There is something about being able to capture a fleeting moment infinitely so easily which people seem to love. It appeals to so many different people, from those who purely want a pictorial notebook, to those who pursue the perfect light and the perfect subject to the ends of the earth, purely to achieve their best work yet.

I lie somewhere inbetween these two ends of the spectrum, roughly where most people who would deem themselves "serious amateurs" reside. We are beyond the flash-nuked, red-eye plagued party shots of the aide memoir snapper, but not willing or able to give as much time to the pursuit of the perfect moment or scene as people such as Cartier-Bresson and Joe Cornish.

I do a lot of still-life work, and also a lot of stuff around a chunk of the Kentish coast where I have a holiday home. It's a pretty innocuous place, but there's always something there which can catch my eye, and what's more, I always take the time out to allow something to catch my eye whilst I'm there. Now my work is hardly the most inspiring or innovative stuff out there, but it brings me some pleasure, and if I wasn't out there taking photos of this place, I doubt many people would.

My photos may be more about artistic merit than they used to be, but there's still an element of preserving a memory in them. And that's something I never want to lose in them. Sure it might mean that I never become seriously good, but at least I'll still be able to enjoy my photos, and that's really their raison d'etre.

The First Post

Like I said in the description, this Blog is unlikely to be a work which is noted for its dazzling brilliance of language and unrivalled cogency, but that doesn't mean that

1. I can't try
2. It won't all be true and representative of my train of thought

No person handles rejection perfectly. Nobody likes to be told that they're not wanted, but I don't think it's the rejection which is exemplary of your value as a person, but rather the manner in which you deal with the rejection.

Ultimately there is nothing that can be done about a rejection or failure, so why dwell on it? Surely it should be easier to just say...

"Well I ain't letting myself get into that situation again"

...and move on.

Sure it would, but that would be so emotionless and cold as to render it inhuman. The disappointment associated with rejection is key to why we (on the whole) do the best to avoid it, and why we strive to better ourselves. In this way rejection isn't necessarily a bad thing, it can keep us spurred on, rather than allowing us to stagnate. Sometimes we need to dressing down which a rejection provides, and often with hindsight we will see just how important the disappointment was in bringing about our later happiness. Without feeling bad about rejection we couldn't feel good about acceptance, so of course we have to let it get to us, but we can't let it overwhelm us. Just enough to feeling to know we're not numb, but not too much to cause the numbness in the first place.

The simple fact of the matter is that even the best of us will face rejection at some point, but what will really mark you out as being amongst the best of us is whether you have the self-belief and humility to accept it, pick yourself up and move on.

Don't let one rejection brand your self-image with the word FAILURE. One rejection might just be an attempt to steer you in the right direction rather than tell you to give up altogether.