Life Less Literary

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?

Photo by Pretentious Artist using my camera.

(I started writing this post just over a month ago. Just spotted it in my drafts, hence it’s a little out-of-date).
Last night was wonderful! I did my first live-run as DanShotMe.com and it worked a dream. And I did plenty more too…

First up, I went to an open studios event at Persistence Works/Yorkshire Artspace. The event itself was a lot more fun than I’d expected, but even better I got paid to photograph proceedings (and I found out when I got there that after some internal negotiation, my initially rather small fee had been doubled!) I was worried that I wouldn’t get anything worthwhile, as I was a bit unprepared and very rushed, but in the event I got plenty of good photos.

After a whirlwind tour around Persistence Works, I headed back out of town to Jonny’s, where a Tajalli Vortex jam session was under way. Annabel, our new singer, joined us, and the resulting music was wonderful, she added a vital dimension, and at last our sound seems complete.

At 11pm, we packed up and Jonny and I headed over to Corporation. I’d told Mark, the owner of Corp, about my Dan Shot Me idea a couple of weeks ago, and he had seemed (if possible) even more enthusiastic about it than me. He rang me again the other day to ask when I was going to come down, so I thought it would be rude not to.

When we got there, Mark showed me around a bit and then let me loose to take some pictures. I was quite nervous at first, doing my usual: walking around and snapping surreptitiously while walking by, then scuttling off before someone has time to object. But then I started confronting people more directly, and at first some took offence but once I started handing out the badges and got

Had a funny ending to the night. I got into an argument with a bouncer because I’d taken a photo of a girl without asking her permission, and she got pissed off. We argued for about 10 minutes over whether or not I was allowed to take photos without asking permission, he asked whether I was a full-time professional photographer, I said no and he said he was so he knew what he was talking about and I didn’t. I told him most of the professional photographers I’ve come across aren’t worthy to kiss my arse, or words to that effect, which didn’t go down to well, but in the end he accepted that I was more-or-less, but very rude. I told him he was right and I didn’t give a shit. Then he went to have a long chat with the nightclub owner (the one who rang me when I was in London asking me to come and take photos). I had to wait outside the door, as if it was the headmaster’s office. Then the bouncer left and I went in to chat to the owner, who basically couldn’t give a toss that I was photographing people without their permission. Nice outcome!

I left then anyway, because my flash was on the blink and I knew I had more than enough good nightclub photos. It was 2am. I put my head up to the frosted windows of the Washington pub on the way back, just to try and discern whether any of the bar staff were still around. Somehow somebody spotted and recognised me through the glass (maybe it’s the beard), so they let me in, I got one last drink while they swept up, and a cab ride back home with the bar manager.

Today I bought a new lnes cap for my cmaera. God bless Ebay!

It’s not often that I stumble upon a Flickr user’s stream who’s photos really grab me, and it’s even less often that I “favourite” one, let alone several, of another user’s photos, but Penoni’s set Procissão de Todos os Santos 2006 is absolutely incredible! The combination of flash-light with Southern hemisphere twilight, and frozen stiltwalkers with blurred, zoomed and panned backgrounds, produces magical realism at its most lyrical and strange.

I’ve put a small set of photos online from the Vice gig last night, using my new off-camera flash setup.

I hope to make a larger set, and upload it to my personal website, at some point in the future. But I probably won’t. I’m lazy like that/too busy. I seem to be increasingly using Flickr to get photos online quickly and easily (and also so that I can get some comments on them, which is always nice). It’s just… so easy!

This is an idea which has been bubbling in my head since the weekend, when I spent half the night trying to hold together my flash and radio receiver, and the other half nursing tempremental electrical contacts, before finally bumping into somebody, smashing the receiver and losing the battery.

I have taped up the receiver so that it’s fairly secure, taped it onto the flash head so that the two don’t keep coming apart, and - most important of all - I have stolen a small piece of sparkly fishnet tights from Rowan, slipped it over my arm, and stuffed the flash inside. This means that I have a fully operational off-camera flash at arms length from me, while my non-camera hand remains free for vital tasks such as carrying beer. Sorted!

Tonight I’m off to the Vice student gig at Plug to test it all out. No doubt something will break, again, but hopefully my ingenuity will find a way around it.

I also got one of these to pack my kit in. It’s a bit bigger than I’d imagined, but really rather swish, and incredibly practical (well, I hope it is. The proof is always in the pudding…)

I am working on a new set of photos, taken in Sheffield’s Ponderosa park. Photos are online at Flickr. Here’s a description of my thinking behind this set:

Two years ago, my friend Hugh was attacked from behind while talking on his mobile phone, late at night on Commonside.

Several months later, I found a mobile lying on the pavement close to my house. I could tell it belonged to a student (there was a message on the screen from one of the candidates taking part in the Sheffield University Student Union Elections, reminding the owner to vote). I assumed it had dropped out of his pocket during a night of drunken over-indulgence. So I searched the contacts for “mum”, and phoned her, only to be told that she was sitting in hospital next to the phone’s owner. When his girlfriend came to collect it the next day, I asked whether he was OK. In obvious distress she said “No, he’s not. He has blood on his brain. He was punched just down the road from here, fell down and hit his head on a metal grate”.

I was deeply affected by this fleeting contact with somebody else’s life.

When subsequently I found an open rucksack and a lunchbox, under a tree in the Ponderosa, I was certain that it was the discarded side-effects of another mugging. I took it to the police station, hoping it might provide some evidence. The desk clerks seemed to think the fact that I’d bothered to take it in was faintly ridiculous.

Soon after that, in exactly the same spot, I was savaged by a police dog which was being used to sniff out a stolen purse.

This accumulation of incidents showed me a different side to this pleasant student neighbourhood. The peace and seclusion of the Ponderosa, the tranquil moments I enjoy there when walking the dog, are also ideal for muggers who go there at night to divvy up their loot after jumping on drunken students or rifling through their houses. Dealing with the police had left me feeling powerless and ineffective, so instead I started to photograph the detritus, evidence, discarded and unwanted traces of night-time crime.

Technically, these pictures differ from many of my others because they are shot with a point-and-shoot camera, and not edited in any way (normally I will make some adjustments to contrast and sharpness, as well as often cropping photos, before uploading them). They are also uploaded at original camera resolution. What they have in common with the majority of my photos is that they are taken direcly as they are seen “in the wild”, nothing is posed or re-arranged to the camera.

A couple of weeks ago I went to an excellent gig featuring Baby Long Legs, The Scaramanga Six and Atoness. Took lots of photos, as ever; this time, for the first time, I’ve saved a few of them in black & white, to get away from that “everything’s gone red” effect. Much though I always claim to hate black & white photography, I have to say I’m quite pleased with the results (certainly much nicer than having everything in red). All of the photos were very quick & dirty edits, because there were so many I liked and I had so little time to play with them. Nevertheless, here is my latest selection of photos, plus a slightly more detailed write-up of the gig.