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 -

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.

A Flower...



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

The Song of the Week