Life Less Literary

It’s funny how photography assignments are like buses, you wait ages for one to come along, then loads appear all at once.

It’s been a little like that recently. December and January were barren months for photography, then at the end of January I got my photo exhibition
and a few other little things.

A few days ago I got asked to photograph somebody’s birthday party, then today, all sorts of exciting emails & stuff. First of all, this lot arrived at the door, courtesy of Amazon’s fastest ever “Super Saver” delivery (approx. 5 working hours):

Then I got an email asking me to photograph an art event on Thursday (for money!), another email from Vice Magazine asking to use some photos I took at one of their Vice Kills gigs (for no money, but what the hell, I owe them a few and they ended up linking directly to the photos on my site, which is nice). And then I sold my first framed print (this one). In between times, I got an email from somebody saying they wanted to model for me (I don’t really have anything for models to do, but it was a nice offer anyway).

Not bad going for one day. Let’s see what tomorrow holds…

A few photos from last night - it was almost worth my van falling in a ditch, to get out in the beautiful, snowy, dark, mysterious countryside and take pictures like this.

I have my first ever photo exhibition opening next week - Washtock & Beyond, live music photos from Sheffield. Opening night is next Wednesday (14th February - bring your valentine!) at the Washington, 79 Fitzwilliam Street, Sheffield S1 4JP. Map here.

The exhibition will continue until early May.

Thanks to Marcin for design the poster and flyers.

Well, this year took a while to get started but now, all of a sudden, it’s all kicking off. I already mentioned the Washington exhibition and Open Up event that I’m going to be involved in. In the last 24 hours, a couple more possibilities have come it.

Firstly, I got an email from fellow Sheffield photographer Andy Brown. He is organising a show “6*6″ - six Sheffield photographers each showing six photos, and with each photographer choosing a different subject matter or genre. Andy will be showing documentary photos, and also involved so far are Chris Saunders (music portraits), Denzil Watson (travel) and Stevlor (nudes). Andy emailed me along with 7 other local photographers to see if any of us were interested in making up the final two places. It remains to be seen whether I’ll make the cut, but this is something I’d really like to be involved in.

Just as I was getting over all this excitement, another email comes in, this time from Maramalade Magazine. A couple of months ago, they announced that they would be putting together an issue entirely composed of submissions via their Myspace page. This made quite a hit with the mainstream media looking for the latest Web2.0 bandwagon, and I sent in a few photos although I imagined they would get lost among a tidal wave of submissions. But no, I have been “selected through to the next stage of the myspace issue” - which is obviously no guarantee of being in the issue, but at least it means I managed to cut it through all the dross and now will at least get a fair crack at it. 45Mb (!) of high-res photos now winging its way to them via email (!)

My biggest problem now is finding a way to finance my burgeoning printing costs (I just had to spend £50 on my latest set of 12×8s) and framing (I don’t even want to contemplate that - I need to frame at least 10, preferably 15-20 photos to get a good base for exhibiting, and I’ve been quoted between £10 and £30 per frame & matte).

Some exciting new photo-news. Firstly, I have been asked to hang some of my pictures at The Washington. This is quite an honour: the pub is the centre of Sheffield’s hyperactive music scene (it used to be owned by Pulp drummer Nick Banks, and ex-Pulp members can often be seen in there, along with various Monkeys of one sort or another) and has just taken down an exhibition of very fine musical portraits by local photo-whizz Chris Saunders. At the moment I’m frantically getting photos printed and framed so that I can install some in there, I hope, early next week.

I’ve also decided to participate in this year’s Open-Up Sheffield. What this means is that I will open my house up for people to come and inspect my photos (again, I need to print lots to stick up on the wall, or at least matte them for browsing). Hopefully I’ll sell a few, or at least get some commissions out of it.

Finally, for some months now I’ve been touting Photobox as the place to get photos printed (admittedly it’s not the best, but it is among the best of the bargain photo-printers: cheap, quick and pretty good (and consistent) quality. As I’ve uploaded so many photos there recently for printing, I thought I’d shift a few of them to a public gallery. So here it is, my own personalised photo-shop, you can buy some of my prints and other photo-based gift products here direct from Photobox.

By the way, if you are thinking of signing up to Photobox, please email me first. I have some special offers which means that you & I will both get some free prints when you join.

Last night I (once again) checked out Geo-tagging on Flickr. Last time I looked, Yahoo! Maps for Europe were so sparse that it was hard to know with any certainty that I’d placed a pin in Sheffield. This time around, they’ve made huge improvements, so that I can now virtually distinguish between a photograph taken at my house, and one taken next door. So I decided the time was right to start tagging.

Organizr made the job fairly straightforward, and in under an hour I had most of my 200+ photos tagged (most of the untagged onese were taken in peoples’ homes where I didn’t think location was appropriate or desirable). At the present count, I have 97 photos in Sheffield, 93 in London (most of them taken at Frieze Art Fair), 10 in Liverpool, one in Luxembourg and one in Switzerland. Check out my Flickr Map (zoom in to spread out the dots into more manageable groups).

I’ve uploaded two new sets of photos: Vice Kills, from last Saturday night’s gig at Plug, and Just for Fun Art & Karaoke from a couple of months ago. Enjoy!

I’ve also copied cut-down versions of some of my more recent life photosets onto my portfolio site, to fill the place up a bit.

Following my last post, Guy very kindly sent me this composite:

On Saturday night I went to my first Razor Stiletto (been meaning to go to one of their monthly bashes for almost a year now). I had a great time, the venue (DQ) was perfect, the crowd very friendly and more outrageously hip than any I’d previously encountered in Sheffield, and I was surprised to bump into little Hugh, who I didn’t know (even though I already knew - if you see what I mean) plays guitar for The Pollinates. It was also fun to see Bruce Airhead live, having previously caught a little of his act on kids’ TV a couple of weeks ago, and I had a great time playing the duelling photographer with Jacqui. (more…)

On Saturday, I faced a new challenge in gig photography. I was at the D’n'R bar on Arundel Gate, shooting Sukmunki, Into the Souls and Little Miss Machete. And it was pitch black. Well, I exaggerate, but only slightly. For the first two bands there was no lighting on the stage, or anywhere near. The only lights in the room were at the bar (about 25 feet away and around a corner) and at the mixing desk (right at the far end of the room, about 50 feet away). I could barely see the band, let alone photograph them.

Normally I relish low-light challenges, but this time I had to accept defeat and dig out my flash: even at f/1.4 and 3200ISO, it was pretty hard to produce any kind of result without flash (and even when I did, the “lighting” was too flat for it to be very interesting). But there were further challenges: it was so dark I could rarely see what the band was doing, hence I had to fire off shots pretty much at random and hope that I caught a few good ones. But, even worse, I could not focus: it was way too dark for auto-focus to work (the lens couldn’t pick out any contrasting areas), and it was also too dark to see anything but the most basic of forms through the viewfinder, I certainly couldn’t tell whether I had things in focus (and definitely couldn’t tell whether I had things anything like near enough in focus to work at f/1.4 or anything close). In the end I set my aperture to around f/9, to give me a good latitude for error, and I guessed the distance and focused manually. This seemed to work OK, eventually, although it took me about a set-and-a-half to perfect this approach. Even then, most of the band photos I took were pretty dull, it’s only the audience ones which I found very interesting. But, as with all such challenges, it’s another hurdle I’ve crossed at at least next time I arrive in a similar situation, I won’t feel quite so intimidated.

(Oh yeah, I’m also not sure whether it helped that, by the time the second act came on, I was pretty much blind drunk. Still, I always find that some of my best photos come from flailing the camera around wildly while slam-dancing and then pressing the trigger at what seem like opportune moments. Zen is my best friend!)