Odds & Sods

I haven't been up to much over the last couple of months but in the last couple of week's I've started getting out and photographing again.

The first thing to happen was that the Kodak 2238 project, I was part of had a zine printed for all the photographers taking part, I think in total there was 30 people involved and we each got to have 2 images in the final zine.  I call it a zine but to be honest its more like a book, it is perfect bound and has around 56 pages.

Kodak 2238 Project

Through October we have had the Extinction Rebellion going on in London and I managed to get along to Trafalgar Square and capture some images of the protesters.

The Red Brigade in black & white 

One of the film podcasts I listen to is the Sunny 16 podcast and over the last few months, the hosts have been doing assignments, and encourage listenersto join in, the last one was to photograph Day into Night and I thought I would have a go at this one.

I decide that for me, the easiest way for me to achieve this was to take a series of images over a set time (a bit like a time lapse) and then blend them in photoshop.  I decided that the best palce to get this shot was from the Southbank looking back across to the City of London, with its high rise building and hopefully the lights from the building. 

I worked out what time sunset would be and thought I would start shooting about an hour before that and take an image around every 20 minutes or so and shot for about 3 hours to cover a good period from before sunset until dark.

Things started out well until the rains arrived 2 hours into the shoot, although I didn't get as many images as iI would of liked, I did get enough to produce something that worked out O.K.

I sent the final image into the sunny 16 podcast and it got a good response from the hosts, if you'd like to listen it is on Episode 176

Day into Night

Yodica Films

Yodica Films - Atlas

My latest journey out on the streets was down in Brighton for Brighton Pride and this time I was shooting with film but not any old film stock but one call Yodica.

I first heard of Yodica films on the Sunny 16 podcast and was intrigued by the concept of the film.

Yodica is part of the growing trend in pre-exposed film, this is film that has already been exposed to either a light source or some other way of exposing the film, I have see films with aliens and UFOs or light leaks exposed on to them.

Yodica have 7 different film types out already, all with a range of bright saturated colours, the ones that grabbed my attention were Atlas and Pegasus, both of these have a rainbow effect to them but with Atlas being more random, unfortunately when I went to buy a roll of each both Analogue Wonderland and The Photographers Galley were out of Pegasus so I bought 2 rolls of the Atlas.

The film cannister and plastic cannister are wrap with a representation of how the colours look and is rated at ISO400 but if you peel back the wrap, you can see the original film is Kodak 200.

I'm not an expert on double exposure or film in general but have been told that 400 for the first exposure and 400 for the second will equal 200. 

I shot both roll in my Canon eos500n and as the film wasn't DX coded set the camera manually to ISO400.

Brighton Pride was a good day out, with temperatures in the high 20s and very sunny.

I shot a roll and a half of the Atlas, and though and hoped I had some goood images.

I had to wait a week to use up the rest of the second roll and then get them processed, this was a bit of a palava as my new local Snappy Snaps wanted to charge almost £20. 

So I ended up waiting another week and getting them processed at Jessops for £11.

Once I got the negs back and looked at them I was surprised how they looked. Scanning them revealed that although the Yodica colours were there and coming through, my images looked muddy and underexposed in a lot of the shots, in fact they looked about 1 stop under. I ended up with a lot of processing in camera RAW to try and get the images half decent. 

The best result I could achieve from this frame 

The images that I managed to get to look OK, were pretty interesting but some that were shot I just couldn't get anything out of them and a lot seemed very hit and miss.

Another one that I struggled with

I'm reviewing all this about 4 days after doing the scanning and I think I may know what the problem could have been with the images looking so underexposed.

Mr Gold

That Vintage Look

Unlike digital there is no exif data,so this is only a theory, the film is rated iso200 but both the pre-exposed and my shots were shot at iso400 to balance out the double exposure.

Now when I shot on the street, I use aperture mode and normal set between f5.6 to f8 and let the camera go with a shutter speed, as I said it was hot and sunny and I think the maybe the shutter speeds were to high, I remember a couple of times seeing 1/1500 and 1/2000 of a second. It could be that at these high shutter speeds I was underexposing even more and that would explain why some frames look OK and others don't.

Like I said I'm not an expert so this is all conjecture on my part.

So what do I think of this film stock?

Well it is a bit gimmicky and I think some of the purists in analogue photography may look at it as a film for the Instagram generation, but that doesn't bother me I think it's a fun film. If I could nail down the second exposure's better, maybe shutter speeds in the 1/125 to 1/500 would work then I think I would use it more especially for events were the added colour adds to the image. Images like Mr Gold and That vintage look worked really well.

I'm not sure whether Yodica films will get to read this post but if they do and would be interested in sending a couple of rolls to let me test out my theory, that would be much appreciated.

If you fancy trying Yodica films it can be purchased from either Analogue Wonderland or if in London the Photographer's Gallery.

Photo24

I'm writing this on Monday 2nd July roughly 2 days after photo24, I'm still feeling the effects of being up for nearly 24 hours. I guess I did around 18 or the 24. My scanner is working away in the background, scanner the negatives from the roll of cinestill 800 I shot, over the 24 hours. 

 

I had some technical issues with my digital camera, which I'll go into, so I ended up relying more on my film camera and shot through the cinestill a lot quicker than I imagined.

I also used a roll of lomo 400 colour film, which I had to push 2 stop to 1600 as I was be now shooting in very low light.

The lomo film will probably have to be sent away because I don't think snappy snaps or Jessops can do pushed film, so I'll have to look into finding somewhere to send that away too.

The cinestill images look to be pretty good, I shot about half the roll on the steampunk people in banksy tunnel along with some of the graffiti down there and later in the evening photographing people spinning fire down on the Thames close to the Oxo tower. The lomo film has the tail end of the fire spinners but it maybe a couple of weeks before I see the results of the particular film.

Stempunk, Cinestill 800

Fire spinner Oxo Tower beach

The issue I had with my digital camera was that the batteries for it are not that powerful and so I usually carry 4 with me.  Which when all fully charge I probably get a couple of days shooting with, but for some reason 2 of the batteries didn't seem to charge, which I didn't find out until I was a few hours into photo24 so this only left me with 2 batteries which I more or less burnt through by 11 o clock in the evening.

Luckily enough I live close enough to London that I was able to get the last train home and manager to get the batteries charged over the next few hours. And I was able to to get back on into London for about 6 the next morning.

The heat was a major problem as it just seemed to be hot all the time, even in the late evening, I was glad I had decide to only take one digital camera and one film camera and the minimum amount of equipment I needed. There did seem to  be a lot of people carrying big heavy packs and a lot of equipment which did seem to weigh them down.

During the 24 hours there was an hourly challenge, each hour there was a theme set and the images were to be uploaded to the photo24 Facebook page, I did enter a few images in some of the categories as there was the chance to win £1500 worth of Fujifilm equipment. Unfortunately none of my images made the shortlist.  There are 2 more competitions with are best street scene and best london scene, I can enter up to 6 images in both but as yet I haven't decided if I have anything worth entering yet but again both of these have a chance of winning £1500 of Fujifilm equipment.

Legs

The event ended at a hotel on the Southbank with the announcement of the 24 hours challenge winner and all the people who finished got a t-shirt. 

The whole experience of photo24 was quite good, I got to meet some new people to shot along with and although I never stay with anyone in particular it was good bumping into other photographers and having a chat while out and about. I will definitely think about doing it again next year, if selected and now know how things work I'll probably do things a little differently.

So that's the end of my photo24 for this year, I know I said I would try to record some pieces while out but there was so much going on that I just didn't have time.

British Life Photography Awards 2017

Last night I attend the British Life Photography Awards, at the Royal Albert Hall in London.  It was the preview evening of the exhibition that runs for the month of January, then goes on tour around the Country.

My Love is...never having to put down your phone was commended in the Street Life category and also appears in the accompanying book.

BLPA Book

All the winners and their images can be seen on the BLPA website.

The dates and times for the Royal Albert Hall are a bit strange but I guess this is to fit in with major events happening in the hall.

The exhibition will be on display in the Royal Albert Hall’s Amphi Corridor, and can be viewed when attending a performance here between Friday 5 January and Monday 5 February, or on the following free open days:

Friday 5 January 2018: 9am – 5pm

Saturday 6 January 2018: 10am – 1pm
Sunday 7 January 2018: 10am – 1pm
Saturday 13 January 2018: 10am – 1pm
Sunday 14 January 2018: 10am – 1pm
Saturday 20 January 2018: 10am – 1pm
Sunday 21 January 2018: 10am – 1pm
Saturday 27 January 2018: 10am – 1pm
Sunday 28 January 2018: 10am – 1pm
Monday 5 February 2018: 9am – 5pm

(These times could be subject to change so please check first with the Royal Albert Hall website).

The exhibition will be on tour at these venues

• Redbrick Building, Glastonbury, Somerset. 12th February to 25th March 2018
• Kirkleatham Museum, Redcar,Yorkshire. Early April to early June. 2018. (Dates to be confirmed)
• The Auction Centre, Leyburn, North Yorkshire. 28th July to 9th September. 2018
• Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries. 13th October to 17th November. 2018

Oh yeah, my image :-)

Love is...never having to put down your phone

Instagram and my best nine of 2017

All my images are posted to Instagram and around this time of year there is an 2017bestnine hashtag that starts to appear.

 So I thought I'd take a look and see what the likes on Instagram picked as my best nine.

 Below is the result.

Instagram best nine 

This is quite different to what I consider to be my best nine of 2017

Click through to larger images

British life photography awards - highly commended

The British Life Photography Awards were announced last week and although I didn't win in any of the categories, I did have a photograph placed as highly commended.

This means the image will be part of the exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall for a month starting in January and will be in the accompanying 2017 winners book.

This is the second time I have had a photograph commended by the BLPA.

Love is...never having to put down your phone

What I did on a day off

Yesterday I popped into Central London to pick up some film, for my OM10 and look for a roll of 120 for an old camera I found.

The film was bought at The Photographers Gallery; which has Wim Wenders, Instant Stories on at the moment a collect of 200 Polaroids.  I didn't fancy looking at that many small images but its on until February so plenty of chances to see it.

As usually I had my RX100m2 with me but I couldn't really see anything worthwhile shooting, this tends to happen to me when I haven't been out shooting for a while.

Crossing over to the Southbank didn't improve things, as the undercoft was devoid of any skateboarders (not surprising on a weekday).

Next stop was the Tate Modern, the Turbine Hall is filled with lots of three seated swings and lent itself to some images of adults on swings.

1-2-3 Swing!

Not having really having explored the Tate since the Summer of last year, I had a wander around to see if there was anything of interest to me.

The first thing was a giant print by Daido Moriyama called Memory 2012

Memory 2012

Nowadays we all seem to worry about super sharp images without any noise or grain in them, this image goes to to show the great images don't have to be all about sharpness.

Next up was Stephen Shore's American Surfaces, this is a collect of 72 prints form Shore's road trip across America in 1972., the idea was to explore the country as an everyday tourist.  All the images were shoot on a Rollei 35 and Shore shot hundreds of rolls of film, which were then developed and processed in Kodak labs across New Jersey.

Shore's work shows us the a snapshot of life in America in the early 70s, the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday life of motel rooms, grotty lavatories, food on tables, odd people and shop fronts.  This series by Shore helps to elevate colour photography to a  fine art level, which had up until then the preserve of black & white photography.

Stephen Shore's American Surfaces

One thing I didn't know when I saw these images in their frames and matted in the Tate; that when Shore first exhibited them, he wanted people to know that they were snapshots and they were just stuck to the wall, so that people could see that they were Kodak snaps and he felt it made they a cultural object.

Workshops; Are they worth it?

On Saturday I did something I thought, I'd never do and that was to go on a street photography workshop. The reason I never thought I'd go on one is because I was never sure that I would learn anything from one.

Now there are probably hundreds if not thousands of these workshops going on, they seem to be quite popular with a lot of people running them as well as attending them.

The one I was on had twelve attendees plus two 'instructors'.  My reason for attending was that I felt my photography had stalled and I felt I needed help to move forward.

 

The workshop was centred around Soho which is an area I am quite familiar with.

We were separated into two groups to go and do some street exercises,  which was basically walking up and down Gerrard and Lisle Street (Chinatown) acting more like a tourist than a street photographer.  The exercise to me felt pretty pointless and didn't really add anything to the way I would shoot or like to shoot. 

Endless Love
Could I have captured this image without a workshop?
Answer: Yes

This went on for about an hour, and with very little feedback from the instructors after this we broke for lunch which was in Costa, with such a big group, it wasn't easy to chat to the instructors unless you were sitting close to them and they didn't seen to be talking that much anyway.

I spent more time talking to a couple of the other attendees, mainly about cameras and the different workshops they had been on, for some this was they third or four different workshop!

After lunch we moved into Trafalgar Square and was shown a few examples of abstract street photography and told to a find similar things, this time we were told to just wander around and more or less left to our own devices.

There was some kind of demonstration going on, in the top part of the square so this was easy to pick up shots around here, but again nothing that I wouldn't normally shoot on a Saturday in London. 

We were give around an hour to 'work' in the square, I shot some stuff but have to admit the square isn't one of my favourite places to shoot, its to open and as silly as it sounds, there are to many tourists.

I spent a fair bit of time talking to another attendee, who didn't think it was a good workshop, his comment was 'it was more like a sponsored photowalk'.

Red Hat
Ok; not a great image but no better or worse for being on a workshop

While walking around I did bump into one of the instructors but he didn't ask how things were going or pass on any advise on where or what to look for.

Next we move on to Soho and again there was some vague instructions about light coming into the streets and how to use it. 

Again Soho is a regular shooting area and  I know the streets well and where to look for shots and good light and again we were left to ourselves to wander around and to met up again in a hour.

So I just walked the usual route of Berwick St, Broadwick St, Carnaby St, Brewer St and Wardour St.  By now the light was starting to fade, so it was a quick trip back to Chinatown and a quick walkthrough what we had 'learnt during the day'.  

Silhouette
Not difficult when you know where to look

A few of us swapped instagram handles and there was talk of a hashtag to attach to any images uploaded but as yet, neither of the instructors have acknowledged anything I have posted.  I never had a real chance to ask any of the others what they thought of it but not sure that this is the done thing.

I tend to be quite obsessive with any thing I do, be it music, books, collecting memorabilia and will consume vast amount of information on a given subject, I can honestly say that I have learnt more watching youtube than I did on this workshop. 

Over the last few years I have put on photowalks, and have always tried to make them interesting, mainly because its something I want to do.  Usually it is just a core group of people I called friends but sometimes an acquaintance will come along and I try to help them with as much information as I can to help them enjoy a trip to London.

These are my thoughts a week after the workshop and I'm still not it 100% sure how I feel. I don't think the workshop was worth the money, there wasn't enough interaction with us (the attendees) the structure of the workshop was quite flimsy and personally I think there were to many people attending.

Swap Crazy

Since my last post, it seems as print swapping is becoming a bit of a crazy.

Along with the Magnum one, which has now closed; there are two others that have appeared online.

The first is Photography on a postcard which will give the winners a change to be displayed along side artists like, Martin Parr, Dougie Wallace, Homer Sykes and many more well known artists.

Entry is free, and up to images can be entered, and with a shortlist of 200 being exhibited in October. Although not actual a print swap, the public will have a change to buy a ticket which will guarantee a photograph.

The second is part of Hoxton Mini Press' Street London Symposium, The Symposium is a three event over the 18-20 August and part of this is a Print Swap. This one allows up to 5 images to be entered and again a shortlist of 200 will be chosen.

Full details of both events can be found on their websites.

 Joel Meyerowitz exhibition at Beetles+Huxley

Fairs, prints and zines

Ed Templeton @71a London

For the majority of this year. I have felt pretty uninspired when taking pictures. Nothing felt new or interesting, I even started a project to try to make me to go out and shoot images, this has help but is now on hold for a few months but some other inspiring things have come along which I hope will help me to feel good about photography again.

The first of these was the Deadbeat Club's exhibition at 71a London.  The thing I liked was the down and dirty aspect of it, no fancy frames just images either pinned to a wall or hung with bulldog clips. It was all so grungy, so far removed from the usual stuff we would see at Beetles and Huxley or the Photographers gallery. Their whole ethos seems to be go and enjoy the taking of images but also support each other when the time comes.

This is alien to me, as I find photography quite a solitary pastime, I have shot with others but can find this counterproductive as we can spend more time talking than shooting and outside support is only from likes on social media. I am usually happy at looking at my own images and deciding what is good or bad (some may say the're all bad) but sometimes it would be nice to have a second option from people that shoot is the same genre, and have an understand of what you are trying to convey.

Offprint London

The second was Offprint London, an independent and self-publisher book fair held in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Along with some high end book by the likes of Daido Moriyama, there were loads of small self published works covering art, writing and especially photography.  There were some pretty random stuff along with run of the mills photo essays, which again got me thinking that there would be no reason for me, not to have a try at producing a small run photozine.

I feel as though images should be more than just 1s and 0s on a computer screen and the best way forward with this is either as prints or zines.

A collection of zines

Prints

My final piece of inspiration comes from a post on the Magnum website about swapping prints with other photographers. Now I know the article is talking about well-known high end photographers and we normal's don't have a chance to swap with them.

But surely within our own social media group this is a possibility, I have read that like click don't really mean that much but surely a like means you like that particular and if offered the change of a print of it, wouldn't you take it?

Print swaps may already be going on and I have join the party later than all the rest.