Category Archive for ‘Photos’ at Life Less Literary

Archive for the 'Photos' Category

This man with lanthorn, dog and bush of thorn…

Published by Dan Sumption on July 7, 2007 in It Happened to Me! and Photography and Photos. 2 Comments

This man, with lanthorn, dog, and bush of thorn,
Presenteth Moonshine; for, if you will know,
By moonshine did these lovers think no scorn
To meet at Razor Stiletto, there to woo.

William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With amendments.

Tonight, I’m going to Razor Stiletto. For the first time, I decided to dress up. And to combine my dressing up with some strobist experiments.

The fancy-dress theme for tonight is “Midsummer Night’s Dream - Shakespearian Splendour, Fairies & Woodland Creatures”. I acted in Midsummer Night’s Dream when I was 17. I played Robin Starveling, the Tailor, who appears as Moonshine in the mechanicals’ play-within-a-play towards the end of the show. So in homage to that role, I thought I would play moonshine tonight.

By sheer chance, when I took the kids to school yesterday I discovered a load of drum-heads which somebody had thrown out. Now, a drum-head is round. So is the moon. And most of these were also white. “That’s it!” I thought. “I’m halfway there already…”

Thing is though, the moon is illuminated. I wondered about putting a torch behind the drum-head to light it up, but as I’m going to be wandering around taking photos, using my Ebay remote flash triggers, I thought “why not put a flash unit up there, so that the moon lights up whenever I take a photo?”

And so, I built an elaborate wire headgear which holds the drum skin on my head, and holds the flash unit up a few inches behind it so that the drum skin acts as a rather wonderful diffuser (at least, it would with the flash in the right place - I’m still having some trouble avoiding getting bent wires). To this I added on one side a cuddly toy dog belonging to Rowan and Lola, and on the other side a sprig of miniature holly branches. Voila: the man in the moon!

But I wasn’t finished yet. Having got into the swing of making stuff (something I normally never do, unless it’s “virtual stuff”) I carried on with a project I’ve had in my head for ages: the umbrella reflector glove. Take one fingerless glove. Stick some lengths of garden cane in each finger. Put some silver wrapping paper over the lot, in a “bat hand” sort of shape (actually, I’d meant to use reflective gold fabric, but I couldn’t find it. The wrapping paper was a pain because it kept ripping, but it does the trick). I know Robin Starveling never actually dressed as Edward Scissorhands in the mechanicals’ play, but please allow me some artistic license.

To the bat-hand I added my usual off-camera flash technique, slightly modified: I have the flash pointing upwards along my wrist, so that it hits the umbrella-hand and is reflected back over my subject, suitably diffused.

Here are some slightly dodgy photos of the whole kaboodle (better ones will no doubt follow later):

With the flashes off:

With the flashes on:

I can’t wait to try this out. Wish me luck! Results coming soon to my photo website.

Cherokees go to London

Published by Dan Sumption on July 3, 2007 in Music and Photos. 1 Comment

More photos up on Dan Shot Me - this time, a gig, a photoshoot, and some reportage - all rolled into one! Take a peek at The Cherokees go to Volstead, London.

Meat for a Dark Day photos

Published by Dan Sumption on July 3, 2007 in Music and Photos. 0 Comments

Out last night to see the wonderful Meat for a Dark Day, at the launch of their single Vanity Unfair. Photos here, featuring the dapper and very photogenic Mark Hudson. It felt very weird doing these - I haven’t photographed a gig for what feels like such a long time (probably about 2 weeks), amazing how much can change over that period.

Band Photoshoots

Published by Dan Sumption on June 21, 2007 in Music and Photography and Photos. 2 Comments

I’ve finally got over one of my biggest photographic hurdles, and started doing “posed” photos. This last week, I’ve done photoshoots of one sort of another for four bands/musicians. None has been perfect, or anything even approaching, but all have made me realise how much I have to learn, and have pointed me in the right direction. I still have great difficulty with posed shots, because I am useless at directing people, too nervous myself (never a good vibe in a photographer) and never have any kind of mental image of what the finished photos might look like - I only really discover that once they’re on the computer. In fact, I think these are the two most important things for me to work on: confidence and visualisation, but in the meantime I also need to work a lot on lighting technique - my current approach of using remote flash units on ebay triggers, pointed in semi-random directions, yields some interesting but very inconsistent results. I could do with a proper lighting kit, and I certainly need a reflector. But with every random shot I take, I learn a little more about what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s a photo I took yesterday of The Cherokees:

A day at the Leadmill, a night at the… Leadmill

Published by Dan Sumption on June 19, 2007 in Music and Photos. 4 Comments

A bit different from my usual photoset: on Saturday I was asked to tail Sheffield band Durban for the entire day, photographing them as they prepared for an played a gig at the Leadmill. From practice rooms to soundcheck to backstage debauchery, plus the band’s performance in full and highlights from headliners Air Traffic and support acts Jacob Golden, Dark Sparks, Sonic Hearts and The Stations.

Here are the photos.

Smegma, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock et al - gig review

Published by Dan Sumption on May 28, 2007 in Music and Photos. 0 Comments

Here’s an old review of a Freenoise gig which I wrote for Sandman, published about a year ago.

Smegma / Chora / The Hototogisu / Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock
Freenoise @ D’nR Live

Freenoise have showcased some fascinating line-ups in Sheffield over the last six months. Tonight they’d coaxed veteran “kings’n’queen of Freenoise” Smegma all the way from the USA. It’s a great shame that so few people ventured out on a Wednesday evening to witness the bizarre goings on.

The evening kicked off with local boys (and Freenoise regulars) Chora. Two men scrabbled on the floor, fiddling with guitars, percussion, effects boxes and other sundry noise toys. It didn’t make for great viewing but the sounds they conjured up were awe-inspiring. Actually, the whole 15-minute performance was made up of just one sound: an ever-advancing wall of noise which masked unexpected subtleties, dancing symphonies of tinnitus.

Hototogisu offered more of the same but different. Again, two people tinkered with guitars and toys, making loud-yet-subtle sound sculptures. Their performance had rather more dynamic range than Chora’s, stretches of quiet among the deafening tumult. But they also proved the maxim that less is more: 15 minutes is about the right length for this sort of set, 45 minutes somewhat exhausting and counter-productive.

Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock (from Switzerland via Japan and London) were very different, different in fact from anything I’ve ever seen before. Runzelstirn, looking like a bedraggled S&M gimp, sat in a chair wearing a skirt, rubber gloves and a long black wig. He hardly moved, except to open and close his eyes, but two microphones hanging from the corners of his mouth broadcast heavy breathing to the audience. In each hand was a switch connected to a wire, and as he caressed them the room filled with sounds of children and chaos. Meanwhile his partner Gurgelstock stalked the venue in a goblin mask, unsettling the audience by singling people out and standing next to them, while the tiny Roland amplifier on his shoulder beeped intermittently.

Finally Smegma took the stage. The band have been together since 1972, and had more than a few grey hairs to show for it, but their performance was full of energy. The set was entirely improvised, but their long experience playing as a unit made it incredibly coherent, frequently coagulating into swampy jazz-rock rhythms and funky beats which would hover for a minute or so before gradually reforming into something different.

Shame you missed it, next time, try harder! And keep an eye on www.freenoise.co.uk for more of the same, but oh so very different.

Dan Sumption

Freshly Shot!

Published by Dan Sumption on May 24, 2007 in Photos and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I’ve uploaded a few new photosets to Dan Shot Me over the last few weeks and, as usual, forgotten to mention anything about them here. In fact, I’m not quite sure what I’ve posted here already, but check out the Peek-a-boo burlesque photos, the Everybody loves Hiem (featuring Pink Grease, Darlings of the Splitscreen, the Carol-Anne Showband and a tank) photos, both from last Saturday night, and especially the rather wonderful Pink Grease roller disco photos (also featuring the 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster) and then head over to the photo galleries page and see what else is new.

Photos of photobooks

Published by Dan Sumption on May 24, 2007 in Books and Photographers and Photos. 0 Comments

I finally got around to taking some photos of my photobooks (all pages) and uploading them. Here they are: Ponderosa and Pernoctators.

Pink Grease roller disco photos

Published by Dan Sumption on May 9, 2007 in Photos. 0 Comments

Sorry to everyone who’s had to wait these last two weeks… but I finally got my Pink Grease and 80s Matchbox doo-dad Disaster photos sorted out. Enjoy!

And if you’re in Sheffield this weekend, please come and vist me - I am opening up my house and showing off my photos as part of Sheffield Open Up, details here. I’ll have all sorts of stuff for sale - photos, CDs, books, badges, postcards… - to fit all budgets as long as your budget’s somewhere in between 30p and £80, and I’ll also have free tea, coffee, herbal brews and lemonade.

Clunk, Click, Every Trip… until now

Published by Dan Sumption on May 3, 2007 in It Happened to Me! and Photography and Photos. 3 Comments

It’s almost a truism that, whenever you most rely on it, some piece of photographic equipment is going to fail. This has certainly been my experience, although until now it has been limited to cheap and dodgy flashes and triggers which refuse to work when on a job, but then fire up fine the next morning.

And so when, for the first time, a strange woman walked up to me in a pub, spotted my camera, and started taking her clothes off, you could almost guarantee that something was going to go wrong. I fired off a few shots but then, shortly after hitting (I think) either 60,000 or 70,000 shutter actuations, my Canon EOS 20D stopped working. Auto-focus was fine, metering was fine, everything was fine, it just wouldn’t fire the damn shutter. I could even get the shutter to life using the sensor-cleaning shutter lock-up mechanism, but using the normal photographic mechanism yielded nothing. I changed batteries, lenses, even memory cards, but still no change. Looks like I have to take out one last additional mortgage on my house to pay the £200-odd to get the shutter fixed. Either that, or pay £350 for a new (refurbished) 20D, or £3000 for an EOS-1D Mk III. And then find some more money for lenses

Update: this morning, it works… slightly. I have to squeeze the button very hard, for about half a second, and then I generally get it to fire. This makes me think that the button, rather than the shutter, is what’s broken (auto-focus still works fine on a half-press of the button). Perhaps last night’s strange situation made me sweat too much, and the sweat got in the button and bust it?