The Ten Commandments of Photography – Part One.

In which our hero goes all biblical and gives the first of ten (although knowing him, possibly more, maybe less) hopefully helpful nuggets of photographic advice.
Oh, he knows that based on his previous post this is a couple of months late but, well, y’know…

No. 1: Thou shalt take more than one photo.

‘Right first time’ is a common principle in manufacturing, minimising waste in time, money and stock. But what applies to one field doesn’t always transfer too well to another. Especially in this case but also for the other well-known manufacturing principles of: ‘Just in time’ and: ‘Always put your name on your lunch if you leave it in the fridge or it’ll get pinched’.

Photography on the other hand is a discipline with a bedfellow in the phrase that begins: ‘If at first you don’t succeed…’ and ends: ‘…try, try, try, try, try, try, [deep breath] try, try, try again.’ We’ve all known the disappointment of thinking you’ve got the perfect shot only to find that the focus is a smidge out, or a branch has blocked the sun just as you pressed the shutter, or (most terrifying of all) someone with a really horrible outfit is lurking in the background.

Now yes, sometimes Photoshop (or its equivalent) can iron out some of these problem but the best, and quickest, way to avoid these little annoyances? Simply take more than one shot.

In the olden days of old (you can imagine them in black and white if it helps) the number of potential photos you could take was limited to how many rolls of film you could cram into your pockets or afford to buy from those little shops that lurked around tourist sites and seemed to only stay in business through sales of 35mm film and Kendall Mint Cake. Nowadays (so we’re back in colour now, possibly even HD) it’s virtually all digital, and data is cheap, dirt cheap.

As such, with potentially endless shots available, if you can press the button once, press it twice, three times, or more. For fast-moving subjects each frame will be different but will also greatly increase the chances of getting ‘the shot’, even with stationary subjects, e.g. landscapes, there can be subtle changes in light from second to second.

Of course this doesn’t mean that you should skip the stage before you even lift your camera to your eye where you plan your shot. Randomly hammering on the shutter button a few times may give you something decent, but it’ll be more through luck than judgement. So still look around first, choose your angle etc. and then fire off a few shots. After all, if you’ve gone to the time and effort to find that shot, it’s a shame for you just to take one click, hope it’s good enough and move on.

Naturally, the downside to this practice is that at the end of the day you’ll have far more shots to go through, which leads me to…

No. 1(b): Thou shalt not show all the photos you’ve taken.

We’ve all been there, someone comes back from holiday and shares some photos on Facebook, you take a flick through and quickly get the sinking feeling that comes with seeing the same landmark/beach/poolside shot over and over again until you give up.

So don’t be guilty of it yourself. After a day out taking photos you should hopefully come back with a data card considerably heavier than when you left. Now what? Time to trim the fat. This is how I do it, which is to say there’s probably a more efficient way of doing it.

Download the photos and look through them on a monitor screen, don’t trust what you see on the LCD screen on the back of the camera, sometimes it lies.

Any that have obvious faults. Gone.
Any that you don’t like. Gone.
The rest can pass on to the next round.

(By the way, when I say ‘Gone.’ It’s up to you if that means permanently deleted or just set aside. Personally, I never delete anything.)

Now comes the hard bit. You should have at least a couple of versions of each shot that made the grade, so now it’s down to your personal preference to narrow it down to one, which may mean a period of flicking between two or more damn-near-identical photos, going away, having a cup of tea, coming back and looking at them again and possibly more tea. Depending on how many shots you need to go through sometimes it may even mean resorting to old-fashioned means of pen and paper. Even if this does lead to the distraction of another photo opportunity…

By this stage you should have a neat little collection, each of which is a different shot, and possibly an urge to use the toilet. Now’s the time to edit or tweak anything you want to, including removing any photos you’ve decided in the meantime aren’t good enough. The maxim at all times should be quality over quantity, far better to have an amazing album of twenty fantastic, individual photos than an average one consisting a hundred humdrum ones full of duplicates.

All of which leaves us with just one question, whatever happened to those little shops you used to buy 35mm film from? Maybe we’ll leave that one for another day…

Previously on Light, Glass & Electricity…

In which our hero decides that, after more than a year off, it’s time to pull his finger out and get blogging again. So much so that, without any further shilly-shallying we’ll jump straight into it…

Once upon a time there was a man who lacked the confidence to call himself a photographer, so decided on the slightly self-deprecating title of ‘camera-pointer’ instead. He didn’t tell anyone but he thought that he wasn’t half bad at it so made the decision to share some of his results around the internet in the vain hope that other people might agree. Other bits of life got in the way, as other bit of life tend to do, but he managed to post a few photos every so often and even posted a few photography-related thoughts on his blog.

Then he became a father and things got a bit more complicated, his life became full of nappies and cuddles (but fortunately not cuddling nappies) so certain things had to be set aside for another day. His blog being one of them, he carefully draped a dustsheet over it, turned out the lights and pinned a ‘Gone to Lunch’ sign to the door.

In the intervening time he still managed to take photographs, as ever nowhere near as often as he’d like of course, and in a slightly less time-consuming attempt to tootle his own trumpet continued to post to his page on Facebook to literally a tiny bit of success.

Despite this, his fingers itched to get back on the keyboard again so he decided the time was right to return to his blog, set himself the unofficial target of one post per month and switch from the third to the first person.

So I did.

Now read on…

A receptacle to collect pocket fluff.

In which our hero battles with a problem child of a post that accidentally got published when only half written and then accidentally deleted within a whisker of being finished, proves how down with the kids he is by talking about an app, finds himself using a word he doesn’t like (twice) and tries, but in all probability fails, to avoid using the phrase ‘point’n’click’.

Ich bin ein Instagrammer.

Yes, if you ever needed evidence that Light, Glass & Electricity is always ahead of the curve then starting to use an app a mere four years and a bit months after it was launched is proof positive of this. Prior to downloading it I just used my phone mainly to not return calls, not reply to texts and play solitaire so it was a perfectly valid excuse to start using the camera part to actually take photos rather than just using the lens on the back as a receptacle to collect pocket fluff.

I’ll hold my hand up now and say that for quite a while I was a bit (i.e. very) snobbish about the whole ‘phoneography’ side of things. The idea that you could take a decent photograph on your phone? Sheer folly! Surely phone cameras are only good for selfies or close-ups of nail varnish? Well, as happens quite often, I was wrong, there’s a ferocious amount of talent out there and seeing some of the final images that were being produced was enough for me to want to try and dip my toe in the pool.

(A quick aside: I do have a monstrous hatred for portmanteau words so feel a bit dirty and in need of shower for having used ‘phoneography’. Twice.)

(As another quick aside: It turns out that, along with great photographs, there are also quite a lot of selfies and close-ups of nail varnish on Instagram.)

As you may have guessed by now I get my kicks not only from taking photographs but also playing about with them, tweaking, pushing, twisting the levels to see what I can get out of the starting image, not only just to enhance the original photo but sometimes as a bit of a personal challenge to see how far from the starting point I can take it. Ideally my weapon of choice is Photoshop (albeit my increasingly creaky CS4 version) but as this involves conquering my inherent laziness, sorting my camera out, finding the opportunity to go out for a few hours taking photos and the further opportunity to sit in front of the computer for a further few hours and have a tinker, my window of opportunity for this is rather limited. More so than ever because my son, admittedly the cutest thing in the universe, currently takes up approximately 99.7% of my time (The remaining 0.3% split between sleep, writing blog posts and, of course, Instagram).

All the above means that having access to, what is in all effect, Pocket Photoshop is a bit of a godsend. Allowing me to effectively pull a decent resolution point’n’click (dammit!) camera out of my pocket to snap at whatever takes my fancy. This is

Er…

[Note to self: Never save a draft midway through a sentence and then try to come back to it later, you won’t remember what it was you were going to say.]

One of the big, big pluses about Instagram is the fact that if I see something that may make a half-decent shot I can now capture it there and then, or then and there, rather than mentally make a note of what/where/when it is and then promptly forget all about it or never be present when/if the moment returns that the particular lighting effect/cloud formation/random bit of tat suddenly turns into a wonderful photo opportunity. That’s not to say I couldn’t just whip out my phone before and take a photo but without the editing options the app gives you the result tended to be a bit, well, humdrum, so I only ever used it when I needed a record of something and it was easier to take a picture rather than write it down.

After a few tentative shots and hesitant posting of a couple of photos with one or two hashtags each my confidence grew until it suddenly seemed to click and I ‘got’ Instagram. It hit me that, what I had originally intended to use as a bit of a tool to scout out possible shots and then come back later and capture ‘properly’ on a ‘proper’ camera, was a fully formed bit of photography kit in its own right. This revelation meant that I swung to the opposite end of the scale, almost constantly looking for opportunities to whip the phone out, take a couple of shots and then spending a chunk of time moving the marker on a sliding scale forwards, backwards, backwards a bit more, forwards again and backwards a smidge before moving onto the next one. Tweaking, tweaking, tweaking until I reach a result I’m happy with. Then tweaking a bit more, realising it’s tweaked too far, going back to the previous version and then resisting (not always successfully) the urge to stick a border on it.

The sheer accessibility of having fairly sophisticated photo editing software knocking about in your pocket has meant that, disregarding the slightly-too-numerous sunrises and sunsets and the inevitable cat photos (well, it is the internet after all…) some of the posts have rather unusual subject matter at their heart. Some cups of tea, wooden pallets, plastic barriers and even a dirty wok have all had their moment in the flashlight. As such at times my Instagram account is almost completely different style to the rest of photos, less formal, more experimental, not always entirely successful but certainly with a wider horizon than those shot with my DSLR.

Long may it continue.

If you’ve battled your way to the end of this post here’s your reward, a few highlights from my Instagram account are scattered throughout the above ramblings, if you’d like to see what else is there the link is here.

A Small Human.

In which our hero apologises for a lack of new posts recently but feels he has a good reason for this slight hiatus. 8lb 3oz of good reason in fact…

As you can probably guess from the foot above I am now a father to a beautiful baby boy. Actually, thinking about it, I probably didn’t really need to use the word baby in the last sentence, I guess it was fairly obvious.

This means that:

a) I’m really, really, really, tired but really, really, really happy.

b) I have a new willing (or more accurately, unaware) subject for photo opportunities.

But this also means that:

c) My availability to regularly post on my blogs is, for the best possible reason, rather curtailed for the immediate future.

f) Sleep deprivation has removed my ability to use the alphabet properly.

As such this is a bit of an apology if, for a while, L,G&E appears to be updated in fits and starts with long periods where the cobwebs gather. I certainly want to try and keep some momentum going, and there’s a fair few draft posts half-finished along with some unwritten ideas clattering around my head. As and when the opportunity presents itself I’ll get these finished off, polished and put up.

In the meantime, I’ve got a small human to cuddle…

City of Angles

In which our hero thought of starting a post with a different phrase but then changed his mind before getting a bit misty-eyed about his hometown, possibly putting in too many links to other bits of the internet and, in what is probably his longest post to date, finally settling down to talking toot about photography…

Ah, Birmingham, bless its concrete heart. If you’re not particularly familiar with the place then there’s a potted history here. Despite everything and everyone it produced over the past few centuries, as a city lumbered with an unfortunate accent and reputation for producing cars with slightly shonky quality control, it seems to have spent the majority of the past 40-odd years much maligned and the butt of jokes made by the rest of the country. As a result, like the way the titular hero in Superman 3 creates a diamond by crushing a lump of coal under immense pressure in his fist, supporters of the city are fiercely loyal, sometimes to the point of fanaticism.

Architecturally the city faced significant changes in the years following the second world war, as part of the brave new world the grand railway hotels were demolished, the Victorian library was pulled down and even a Georgian terrace was flattened in the name of progress. In its place ruled King Concrete and the most brutal of Brutalism, tall, straight, square, occasionally pebbledashed and so Birmingham became a city of angles. It didn’t age well. The 60s and 70s went the same way as the 50s, 40s, 30s (I could go on…) and along with them went the vogue for tall, straight, square, occasionally pebbledashed buildings. Birmingham looked around and realised that, along with an unfortunate accent and reputation for producing cars with slightly shonky quality control it now had a city centre full of apparent carbuncles.

One of the most notorious of these unfortunate constructions that lurked self-consciously on the horizon is the Birmingham Central Library. Surrounded by the ornate trio of the Town Hall, Council House and Art Museum it sits on the site formerly occupied by the breathtaking Victorian Library building and as such was already at a disadvantage, like a newcomer who, replacing a popular former employee, is going to have to work damn hard to earn even grudging respect from their colleagues.

This task wasn’t going to be easy, it was big, it was square, it was grey. The original plan was for it to blend in with it’s surroundings by being clad in white marble but, well, the money pot was starting to look a bit empty, and concrete was cheaper, so concrete it was. A small number of people applauded it’s brave styling however the general consensus of the locals who saw their new library was that, despite the currency being decimalised in 1971, they had lost a pound and found sixpence. (Going off on a blatant tangent admittedly, but for more details on the complicated but numismatically wonderful world of farthings, bobs and tanners click here)  Even the statues that shared the space appear to have turned their back to it

Fast forward to the present day, then back a decade as we’ve gone too far. Birmingham city centre is undergoing a bit of an architectural renaissance based around the grubby Bull Ring Shopping Centre being replaced by a shiny new version, including the famous/infamous (delete as applicable) Selfridges building. This seems to kick-start an upswell of general smartening of the area, which encourages local, cool businesses run by local, cool people  who actually seem to be proud of the city. The average Brummie, by now well used to being a bit embarrassed about their hometown, suddenly paused, looked about them and realised that, all things considered, Birmingham ain’t actually that bad.

In the meantime the Central Library, specifically designed for a long, hard life lasting at least 100 years is, of course, starting to crumble after about 30 and the decision is made to build a replacement, which is designed, built and opened with, to be perfectly honest, the same kind of reaction that the Central Library got on its first day. Proof, if proof were needed, that most things are the same as they ever were, only more expensive and possibly with a blue LED on it.

With it’s replacement leering at it from the middle distance, debate soon sprang up about what was to become of the old library. Brutalism, like Birmingham, has always had a stigma around it and definitely doesn’t have the biggest fan club in the world. That said its few supporters are fully aware the majority of Brutalist structures have already succumbed to the wrecking ball and are keen to try and prevent the number of remaining examples dwindling even further. A campaign to ‘Save the Ziggurat’ was started, with a variety of uses proposed including a central government building, a satellite branch of the Tate Gallery and even cutting a slice from the middle and turning it into two separate structures. Sadly all these ideas came to naught and the demolition order was signed and it’s due to be replaced by, in my humble opinion, a collection of rather bland boxes.

In order to avoid that slightly nauseous feeling you get when you know you’ve missed an opportunity you should’ve grabbed I actually got off my behind and grabbed some shots of the old place before it becomes nothing more than a handful of dust on the wind and collection of photographs on nostalgia sites. The weather wasn’t great, grey skies, strong wind, low temperatures, but given as I was saying farewell to a landmark it was quite appropriate. At least it wasn’t raining.

This more or less set the tone for the photographs that day, mainly monochrome, grey or with very little colour in them. The sky was one of those uniform, flat skies that give a uniform, flat light that is far too bright but, at the same time, not bright enough. Especially when, being so close to a large building, a lot of the time I was shooting upwards. With a bit of tweaking this can be compensated but I experimented with pushing the image the other way, deliberately making the shadows overexposed and trying to exploit the noise and grain on the image.

I’m still undecided if the image below is my favourite from the day or not. I think it’s certainly one of the most effective, although I can’t claim it’s particularly original. Still, I’m just glad Birmingham City Council got a bit slapdash with keeping their buildings clean. A few more photographs from the visit can be found on my Flickr account.

At the time of writing (February 2015) the cranes are due to start swinging any moment. It’s very odd but this does make me rather sad. The library has always been there, I may not have actually been in it for the past decade, but it has always been there and the fact that soon it won’t makes me a bit… oh, what’s the word I’m after?

I’d look it up in a thesaurus, but you only seem to find them in a library.

The Greatest Photo Never Taken: Two

In which our hero continues his occasional series of missed opportunities and neatly combines it with his virtually permanent series of blog posts that are supposedly photography-based but a bit spartan on the ol’ photography.

We have no idea what kind of writing style he’s going for here either…

Tuesday 25th November 2014, Longbridge, Birmingham, England

It was a grey day towards the end of November, the kind of day where the sky is a single, uniform colour with no clouds to break up the monotony. A faint tang in the air caught at the back of the nostrils, a warning of colder weather ahead. Winter hadn’t yet arrived but, as the Starks would say, it was coming. I wasn’t in work that day, but as I had to drop Mrs LG&E off for her job, and as she had just missed a train, and as I didn’t want her to have to sit by herself until the next train arrived, and as… No, that’s everything. I decided to walk with her to the station and see her on the train.

With my husbandly duties having been discharged and Mrs LG&E trainbound to the city centre I walked out of the station, turned left and headed for the LG&Emobile (i.e. the Peugeot). The tyres of passing car hissed on the wet road before fading into the background hum of a morning rush hour. A slight wind sprang up and there was a faint glimmer of light on the damp pavement as the sun made a valiant attempt to break through the cloudy stranglehold. I paused and looked up, towering above me was a giant metal figure, arm raised with a hammer clenched in its fist ready to strike.

*dramatic chord*

Will I be mashed to a pulp by a vengeful steel monster?

*another dramatic chord*

Will I end up looking like a dropped pizza?

*further dramatic chord*

Will the council have to send out a man with a shovel, bin bag and hose to clean my remains away?

*most dramatic of all dramatic chords*

No.

*sound of an orchestra throwing their instruments down in disgust*

The not-so-mysterious figure is, of course, a statue. One of a chain of sculptures that sit outside each station along this particular railway line into the city centre. This one is called ‘The Genie of Industry‘ in honour of the, now sadly defunct, engineering background of the area. The statue itself is (I assume) deliberately designed to have a rough, industrial feel, made as it is from clearly defined chunky strips of metal with large weld spots forming a regular pattern.

As I stood there with the silver torso looming above an articulated lorry drove past on the road behind me, one of its tyres had a stone caught in the tread so it’s progress was marked by a ‘tick, tick, tick’ as of a clock counting down the seconds. A particularly dark bank of cloud built up behind the statue, at the same time the sun managed to force it’s way out, and glinted really rather nicely off the metal, each weld sparkling like a sparkly thing that sparkled.

Tick, tick, tick.

Click.

There it was. Dark background. Sunlight. Metal sculpture. Textures. Light. Contrast.

No camera.

Tick, tick, tick.

As the sound of the truck faded away the sun retreated behind the clouds and the glint and glimmer on the sculpture faded. The moment had passed, I stuffed my hands into my pockets and, with typical poor posture, wandered back to the car.

As before here’s an artist’s impression:

As before here’s a sincere apology for the artist’s impression.

Jam your Hands into your Armpits

In which our hero finds himself suddenly inspired following a chance discovery and decided to stop messing about and just sit down to pen this in one go. Well, keyboard this in one go, ah you get the idea…

I have certain times where I’ve got my photography head on and I’m determined to take a good photograph, or two, ideally more. The majority of the time it doesn’t really come off, I’ll end up with a couple of (in my humble opinion) above average shots and a sore finger from clicking through the rest. More than once I’ve bundled everything into the car, just driven off and looked into the rear view mirror and seen the perfect picture behind me when it’s too late to do anything about it (mainly because there’s usually an Audi riding my back bumper).

Anyway, this morning, thanks to reasons too tedious to go into, I had the opportunity to take the camera and tripod out first thing. The weather over the past few days has been amazing, fiercely cold but accompanied by clear blue skies and wonderful sunrises so I was determined to take advantage of it rather than my usual trick of waiting for the period of weather to pass and thinking ‘I reckon I could’ve got some really nice pictures from that’.

Crunching through the frost-covered grass the cold began to bite even as I started getting the tripod sorted but I managed to get set up just in time to catch the sun peep over the horizon and grabbed as many shutter clicks as I could before I lost feeling in my fingers. Seriously, they went past the stage of being numb and into the state of flat-out refusing to move, which really doesn’t help when you’ve half unscrewed your camera from the tripod so have to lean it against your chest and pray it doesn’t fall off whilst you jam your hands into your armpits to get them going again. Still, having packed the kit away (if such a phrase can be accurately used to mean ‘put a tripod and camera into a car boot without breaking the tripod, camera or car boot’) and got some circulation going again in my hands I drove off and, again saw a wonderful orange sky behind me in the mirror, before it got blocked by a grille with four interlocking rings on it…

On my way home though a feeling of missed opportunity settled on my shoulders, yes I’d got some shots I was happy with but, meh, I just thought I could’ve stuck the cold out a bit longer and see what happened, scouted a bigger area, bumped into an award-winning photographer and pinched their camera etc.As I pulled onto the drive I saw we had a visitor in the shape of a stray black cat that hangs around occasionally in the knowledge that I’m enough of a sucker to give it some food from time to time.

I swear this story is actually going somewhere by the way, I’m not just rambling. Much.

Once I’ve got in the house, unpacked my kit (if such a phrase yadda yadda yadda…) and given my own cats some attention I grab a handful of food and give the stray something to chow down on and a bit of fuss too. Checking the water bowl for them to have a slurp at I find that, unsurprisingly, it’s frozen solid. I manage to get the ice out in one lump and re-fill it with slightly warm water with a bit of sugar in it (which a) means the water doesn’t freeze quite as easily and b) also is a few free calories for the cats). Just as I’m about to throw out the lump of frozen water I notice that trapped in it are a couple of leaves surrounded by a scattering of bubbles. As I turn it the bubbles catch the light like, well, like bubbles in sunlight.

Hmm, that gives me an idea.

I’ve had enough of being outside for one day so I bring it in and slap a macro filter onto the camera before clicking away and giving me the following photographs which personally I feel are an unexpected bonus that trump any old sunrise.

The moral of the story: Always be nice to stray cats.

P.S. If you’re looking for a few cold-weather tips to help strays there’s some here, or tips to build a shelter here.

Glaring Psychological Issues

In which our hero decides to try something a bit different and is far too busy worrying if it works to write anything more in italics…

I met our interviewee in the grounds of a large, Grade II listed building which he calls home but which the National Trust ticket poking out of his pocket called Ascott House. We shook hands and proceeded to the library which is renowned for the largest collection of both 17th Century folios and Doctor Who Target novelisations in the country. Gesturing to one of a number of elegant chairs I politely declined the offer of a mug of Bovril and opened my notebook.

Let me start by asking you if I can pop to the toilet before we get going?

Certainly, it’s just down to the left past the aspidistras.

Thank you. So, now I’ve lowered the tone already, my first proper question is why do you take photographs?

I don’t want to be stereotypical but I think I’m going to have to be by saying that it’s all due to my dad. He was always into his photography, proper ‘old school’ photography y’know? The darkroom with the red bulb, boxes of paper and the trays of chemicals. He was a member of a photography club and you could always tell when there was a competition coming up as there would be large sheets of sugar paper laid down by the radiator with prints on top to gently dry. I became his (mostly) willing assistant, holding lights in the right place, fetching, carrying, that sort of thing. His particular ‘thing’ was church architecture so I got to see a lot of places, and usually got a pound slipped into my hand at the end of the day as a thank you. Towards the end he was more-or-less wheelchair bound so reduced to using a compact camera but you tell he yearned to have more control over the final image.

I had studied photography at college but, looking back, apart from a mild interest in the subject I suspect it was more down to the fact it was either go to college or get a job. Photography itself has only really become my ‘thing’ over about the past four/five years when I first got my hands on a digital SLR. Before then I was just a point’n’click merchant. The camera might come out for special events but it was only when I moved up to the next class, if you will, of equipment that I started go out with the specific purpose to take photographs.

I guess I take photographs because I like a ‘making’ hobby, one where I have something to show at the end for the time invested and I don’t have the time, patience or skill for something like painting or drawing. Not particularly funny this bit is it, do you want to go back and stick a nob gag in or something?

No thanks, I’ve noticed that when you talk you have a preference for the word ‘photograph’ rather than ‘photo’, why is that?

Snobbery. Plain and simple snobbery in the same vein as the ‘I am a traveller, you are a tourist’ mentality. At some point in my head the idea has got lodged that, rather than the second word being a contraction of the first, a photo is a one click and move-on thing whereas a photograph is something carefully set up and thought over before the shutter button is pressed. Completely incorrect of course but there you are.

Can you lend me a fiver?

Erm, I’ve only got a twenty I’m afraid and I need that to put some go-juice into the car.

Not to worry. What type of photo, sorry, photographs do you prefer to take?

I tend to prefer situations that I have control over, such as still-lives, or lifes, never been sure what the plural of still-life is, and, to a certain extent, landscapes, architecture and so on. I try to avoid a ‘straight’ photo and do something different to hopefully make an interesting image rather than just being different for being different’s sake.

How do you mean, a ‘straight’ photo?

It’s probably not the most accurate word to use to be honest, basically I mean a straightforward, standard photo of something. As an example: Say you’re taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower.

You’re taking a phot… I didn’t mean that and you know it. You’re stood there, camera in hand with the tower, well, towering in front of you. What I’d describe as the ‘straight’ shot is the stereotypical, sky, tower, grass, side-on angle. Whereas I like to think I’d avoid that (well I might do one for the hell of it) and go for a more unusual angle such as standing at one of the corners right at the base of the tower shooting almost straight up. I’d far rather get a photo that only includes part of the subject or a close-up of some detail but could be considered dramatic and/or interesting than a shot that includes the whole subject and is factually accurate but, honestly a bit dull.

On the flip side, is there anything you struggle with?

People who use the phrase ‘the flip side’.

Fair enough, let me re-phrase that. Photographically what would you consider your weaknesses?

People. Or more accurately subjects I don’t have much control over. Mostly down to a combination of lack of experience and just the way I am. One of the advantages of still-life shots is that if something needs moving you can just move it to where you need it or where the light hits it just so etc. Whereas with people or group shots I just don’t have the assertiveness to boss them about. I was asked to photograph a wedding and honestly the ‘you have to get this right’  pressure and the responsibility to ask people to stand in certain places, and to make sure I got the pictures I needed meant it was more stressful than my own wedding.

Oh, also money. Generally speaking I’m skint. Now, most of the time to be honest it’s not a problem as such. I’ve got a decent camera, a couple of lenses and the only other ongoing costs is the electricity to power the computer. However I’ve hit a bit of a stumbling block as since upgrading my camera, my CS4 version of Photoshop doesn’t recognise the RAW files so I’m a bit hamstrung and have to use jpegs with their inbuilt crippling compression rate. Ideally I need Creative Cloud to get a newer version of Ps but at the moment I just can’t justify the monthly fee.

Christ that’s brought the mood down hasn’t it? You sure you don’t want that nob gag here?

Perhaps you want to lighten it a bit by putting a photo here instead?

That’s better. So,what photographic plans do you have for the new year?

Well, me and Mrs LG&E are expecting LG&E 2.0 (i.e a baby) early next year so I suspect there may be a big (or little, depending on how you want to look at it) distraction luring me away from behind the camera. As such I suspect this blog may turn slightly retrospective and delve more into theory than actual practice.

In other words, future posts will probably just be a load of waffle with the occasional old photo thrown in for good measure. I apologise now.

Finally, Isn’t this whole thing a bit egotistical?

Probably, and there may well be some kind of glaring psychological issues that are being laid bare in pretending to interview yourself. I guess I wanted to try and avoid falling into the rut of all my posts having a structure of: introduction, set-up, photo, waffle, conclusion. We’ll see how it goes.

Seriously, any chance of that fiver? Even a few quid would do.

Get out.

Australia loves me.

In which our hero receives a bit of good news, spangs off on a random tangent as usual, ponders a new job title, drags himself back to reality and considers the benefits of using the right tools, or in this case websites, for the right job…

No one likes Sunday evenings do they? Well, I say ‘no-one’ but what I mean is anyone who has a standard Monday to Friday work pattern. Even, then, if they’ve booked a few days off then they won’t feel too badly about it. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the majority of people who are due to start their working week on a Monday and haven’t got the following day, or days, booked off as annual leave aren’t particularly well disposed to Sunday evenings. There, that’s all sorted now.

What was I saying again?

Oh yes, Sundays. Generally they’re a bit poo. The one last week though had a bit of a silver lining, just as I was heading to bed I checked my e-mails in case some benevolent billionaire had decided to pass on their savings to me (you never know). Sadly this was not to be. In its place however was an e-mail from a website where some of my photographs are for sale to say that someone in Australia had actually parted with their hard earned dosh for something I had done. To be more specific a greetings card featuring this image…

I’m just going to sidestep the whole issue of pinning down the definition of ‘image’ vs ‘photograph’ and at what point one becomes the other. Let’s just assume that we had a long discussion about it and either I gave up and let you win or we settled it in the time-honoured method of thumb-wrestling. It’s based on a rather humdrum photo I took a few years ago that’s been run backwards and forwards through Photoshop a few times until it ended up as you see above. The most important thing is that someone liked it. Liked it enough to spend money on it. Obviously the various people involved with running the website, printing, manufacture of the card etc. all take their cut and leave me with what’s left so in the end I had made a mighty 15p. But for someone seriously pondering pulling their work off the website it’s a very important 15p. The next morning this had turned into a very important £2.30 as either the same person or a different Australian had decided to get the same image on a t-shirt too. Then, last night, the very important amount became £2.41 as another greetings card was sold in Australia, though due to the changing exchange rate this one only netted me 11p. Australia loves me, or the mini.

Probably the mini.

Still, I had now actually sold something. So what does that make me? An artist? A professional artist? I can’t really claim it’s made me a photographer, professional or not, as it’s not really a photograph. More accurately it’s made me a bit of a smug git so we’ll stick with that for the time being.

The fact that it’s this particular image that had a purple patch at the moment has semi-confirmed a feeling I was getting about the particular website used. It’s sold as “a community of artists who upload their artwork in digital form” and you get the impression that the emphasis does really lean towards the artwork side of things, drawing, painting etc. There’s lot of people pushing photographs on there of course and I’m certainly not trying to imply that any possible bias towards other type of art on the site is the reason why I’m not the owner of a solid gold helicopter bought from the proceeds of photographic sales. If I’ve put my stuff on a website aimed in a slightly different direction to the one I want to go in then only getting small number of sales is nobody’s fault but my own. You can’t blame a banana for tasting like a banana, it’s just what bananas do.

I’ve no idea why I said bananas there. I don’t like bananas.

So I might need to do a bit of investigation. I’ve dipped a toe into the pond of photographic tweakery that resulted in the image above a few times, I’ll be doing it again and most likely putting those up on the current site. But I suspect I need to find a new stall to tout my more ‘straight up and down’ photographs. Getting a sale from one of those is my next challenge.

Because I’m terrible at marketing, if you’d like to take a look at what’s for sale just click on the link here.

Because I can’t fly a helicopter, gold or not, I promise to spend any money wisely.

Because I suspect this post got a bit self-indulgent here’s a joke to end with:

What’s brown and sticky?

A stick.

~fin~

One wot I like.

In which our hero very nearly forgot to do the initial paragraph in italics so actually wrote this bit last, but he figures that as long as no-one finds out he’ll get away with it…

I’m currently having a bit of a struggle with the blog. Normally I’m scrabbling for ideas but it’s the opposite end of the scale at the moment, there’s two or three different half-written entries vying for my attention right now but none of them are sitting right, either I need to set about them with the cut & paste function to swap a few sentences around, or I need to be in the right mood for a particular subject, or I just can’t seem to find the right combinations of words to actually pin down what I want to say. As such there’s only one thing to do.

Give up.

For the moment.

Whilst these draft entries are on temporary hiatus here’s something quick and easy. A photograph that tickles my fancy, or to put in another way: One wot I like.

 

 

It’s an image from a couple of years ago at a gathering of classic cars, this is the kind of vehicle that floats my boat (unlike boats, which don’t really float anything for me) you can keep your supercars and high-end luxury limos, give me a few nice curves, a bit of chrome and I’m happy. This was actually taken when I was leaving, behind me was a couple of hundred cars but here, sat in the sunshine was this little Austin on it’s own. It’s a nice and punchy colourful photograph, the levels have been ‘shopped a bit but it’s still fairly close to the bright sunny day when the shutter was pressed. I don’t normally use the word oomph, but it’s got oomph, like a ’50s photos when colour was the in thing so they were processed in a ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’ way to jam up the saturation. The composition isn’t too bad either, possibly a slight crop of the bottom right hand corner would be a slight improvement but, personally, I rather like the whole layout. If I could level any criticism at the photograph it would be that clearly there’s far too much green in it. If I had the patience no doubt I’d manage a half-decent attempt to turn the car a nice contrasting burgundy/maroon/claret, but then if I had the patience you’d be reading one of the posts I’m struggling with at the moment so there we are…