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.