Home is where the photography is...

Below are just a few images created from stuff around the house.

The above being a spice rack hanging in the kitchen.


The above was taken during a recent power cut! The wine glass is lit with candles.


"family", again lit with candles.

"conscience"

Ilkeston Town Centre

Today I was up early after not much sleep; I took a dawn trip in to Ilkeston to have a look about to see what it had to offer.

Well, not much as it turned out…maybe there was more but was tired so there! I had made a new pinhole for my canon body that was half the size of the other one I made previously. With it I wanted to capture an image of the great old frontage to the Scala cinema. The light was a little disappointing this morning I was hoping for a nice fresh bright looking day with plenty of contrast, but it seemed a bit flat and muggy.

I set up my kit to the right of the building whilst my over sized coffee cup stood precariously on top of a waste bin! I took a quick shot to check composition as you can’t see much through the pinhole. Disappointingly I was far too close and couldn’t get any further back due to a fenced off section behind me.
So I settled for a cropped composition instead.

I continued through the centre looking up and down trying my best to look away from the shop frontages at what might be the shopper’s eye view and attempted to peer more creatively at my surroundings.

To be honest it wasn’t happening today and the bad light and dodgy set up early didn’t help.
I plodded down the street , still not much inspiring me, I came across two guys who were setting up a little veg shop who said if I came back at 7.30 I could take some photos of his shop! It didn’t look great though so I passed.

All in all it wasn’t really a great success, I did get a couple of nice images of a door way to the old swimming baths which I was able to make in to a nice black and white and I also posterised another shot of the same door using Photoshop.

So below you will see two of the doorway one black and white and one posterised and a heavily graphic image of the Scala cinema taken with a pinhole camera.

I am extremely pleased with what I did get; just wish I felt more creative at the time.



Above: The pinhole shot of the Scala Cinema

NOCN digital photography course - week 3

I arrived early this week and room was boiling as it was a really nice bright warm day!
As mentioned in last weeks post we were asked to bring in items that suggested something of ourselves so that we might produce portraits through objects using studio lighting.

As soon as the majority of the group had arrived we all went down to the studio that had apparently been set up for us to use…..err…no! One of the studio lights had been plugged in to a socket that made it swing around as the chord was too short so I suggested we plug it in on the opposite side of the room. As I plugged it in I noticed that the socket was turned on already…so was the lamp…”hang on!” I interrupted Kitt in mid flow. “The socket is on and so is the lamp yet, we don’t seem to have light!”. “Oh god…I could scream!” she exclaimed. It seemed this wasn’t the only thing that had gone wrong for her today. Her son had poured coffee all over her computer earlier.

None of the lights worked as it turned out so after a bit more stressing and exasperating we all went back to our hot room and abandoned the shoot! I had already done my contact sheet and evaluated my images from last weeks shoot at home but some hadn’t so that was the next task. I found a pc to sit at and worked out my log in details. To my surprise it worked, although others weren’t so lucky, that I wasn’t surprised about! Also printing was not possible either for most (me included). Tutor Kitt looked about ready to loose it at this point (understandable) but decided that if we didn’t mind she would like to move the weeks around and do an introduction to Photoshop instead. I have been using Photoshop for over 2 years now but was happy to do this as I am self taught and I was looking forward to finding out if I was using it correctly.
As it turned out most of what I have been doing has been correct, it also help to de-mystify a lot of it and it taught me a few things too.


I had a bit of a moan to kitt about the level of technical let downs we have had and I was told its sort of par for the course (so to speak), “that’s all well and good but we have paid for this course you know?”. I didn’t actually say that out loud but I thought it with a stern look on my face!

So the upshot is we have to take our objects in again next week, fingers crossed all will be well.

Nottingham City Centre

I was on a night out with the lads in Nottingham and got bored! So I disappeared for a bit and went on a walk around the city centre looking for my next photo opportunity.
I found a great old building on Pilcher Gate in an area called Hockley, very dilapidated, obviously empty with great textures to its exterior and plants growing from its drainpipes!

The old green door had a lock on it but the whole plate was prised off…I almost went in but then decided not to, at least not at 10pm!

I woke really early on the morning of the 3rd May (about 4.30am), so I decided to go over to Pilcher Gate and take some exposures. I got there at about 5.15am and there was absolutely nobody about. Did some work outside and tried the door a while later…stuck fast! I was almost relieved, because if it did open, there is no way I could have stood on the step and wondered, no way at all!





The shot above was taken by changing the zoom position whilst the shutter was open and is actually the padlock on the door.




I sneaked through a big iron gate up a fire escape to get this one at a building called Shorthill flats.


Well you may say that equipment is important and it sort of is but the building above with a monster sky was shot at 6am in the square, it is our council building. It was taken with a home made pin hole camera! I used my canon body and drilled a 6mm hole in the body cap, then pushed a sewing needle through a small piece of coke can steel, sandpapered the hole smooth then stuck it over the larger hole using electrical tape to block the light from the sides. Then I put it on a tripod and messed with the exposure time till I had a few shots with different qualities of light. From these i made up a HDR image of 3 shots and tweaked it in Photoshop to put some menace in the sky.

I love it...and i think i will build a project from this by doing more famous land marks around me using the same method.
You see everyone has shots of these places but not in this way.

Anyway, while i was there i was approached by a homeless person who was interested in what i was up to...he wanted money so i said to him"i tell you what...i'll do you a deal...i'll swap some of my cash for your portrait" he loved that!...as i was buzzing around him shooting i was asking him why he was here and how he came to be drunk at 6am!

he told me "Divorce!" he used to live on a boat and had a great time. i think he lived there with a woman after he was divorced. he was a little cagey, understandable i suppose. He asked me why i was doing photography, i told him i wanted to make a change in my life and that we are only here once and we should try to make the best of every day we have. He agreed with me and said he liked me, i have to be honest i liked him to, he had an innocence about him, i thought this was a suprising trait for a man with his status!

it just goes to show what happens when you put yourself in new situations.

brilliant morning!

NOCN digital photography course - week 2

This week was all about taking in our ‘home work’…it feels weird calling it that; home work was something I used to forget to do or drop in a puddle or something!

We were asked to look for a portrait we liked by a well known photographer and that had a style that appealed to us.

I felt extremely green to all this as I don’t know any photographers, only friends and acquaintances!

But after a lot of clicking around on the internet I settled on a photo called “Ditched, Stalled, Stranded” by Dorothea Lange.
“Dorothea Lange was a natural photographer in the truest sense because she lived, in her words, "a visual life." She could look at something: a line of laundry flapping in the wind, a pair of old, wrinkled, work-worn hands, a bread-line, a crowd of people in a bus station, and find it beautiful. Her eye was a camera lens and her camera--as she put it--an "appendage of the body." During her last illness, as a friend sat near her bed, she suddenly said to him "I've just photographed you." Lange had engaged in this camera-less sort of photography for decades, from the time she was a young girl, and it served as both the foundation of her art education and her first apprenticeship.”
(Taken from “ARTIST HERO: DOROTHEA LANGE” by Susannah Abbey)

She had been overtaken by her love for photography and seemed to mentally frame all she looked at and although she made a living from photographing the wealthy, she loved capturing basic life in a candid way, making images of real moments almost making it appear that her subjects were completely unaware she was holding a camera while they looked her way.

I can empathise with her at times, as I too feel that I am constantly framing things and almost taking shots without the camera. I now carry a camera with me nearly all the time so that I don’t have to wish I’d had one!
Ditched, Stalled, Stranded - Dorothea Lange


I much prefer a portrait that has a more documentary feel to it than an obviously staged image.

We showed our findings to the rest of the group which sparked off some great comments.
There was work there by Lord Snowden and David Bailey amongst others.

This brought us up to a break and we all disappeared to the canteen for a plastic cup full of a generic hot drink! I’m not sure what it is from that machine you know, I reckon that no matter what you pick it will taste the same. Coffee, tea, anything! After that we were asked to get in to 2’s or 3’s and take portraits of each other using a set guide as follows;

1. Full body shot
2. ¾ body shot
3. ½ body shot
4. head and shoulders
5. full head
6. close up (part of the face)

Now the idea was to make a series of photos inside and out but it was raining pretty hard so we decided inside was fine!
I didn’t feel as if we had much time and so we sort of rushed about trying to do our best I’d seen a few great spots as we had our drinks in the canteen early and wanted to shoot some stuff in there so we dashed over. Natasha, Ian and I buzzed around the room trying our best; I was shooting mainly in auto just to get something on the card!
As usual the best stuff seemed to happen as we walked back and snapped other people in there groups.