Andy Wallis

Jongleurs Publicity shots

2008-07-14T21:46:00.005+01:00

I was recently lucky enough to be able to work at Jongleurs in Nottingham taking photographs of 2 great performers, Ninia Benjamin and Alex Boardman. You should recognise Ninia as last years winner of Celebrity scissor hands which she did in aid of Children in Need. As well as appearences on ready steady cook, master chef, big brother amoungst others, she's a good friend, a great sport and the funniest female comedian i know.

Alex, i only met on that particular evening, he was comparing, as well as being superbly funny and quick witted, he really knows how to sort a crowd out! he is also a DJ on Manchesters Galaxy FM.

Here are 2 photos...the rest can be found on my FLICKR gallery (link on the right).

New Photos, Old cameras

2008-06-28T23:22:00.004+01:00

The photographs below have been taken using the old Fed3 rangemaster and a 1980 praktica EE2 both had fixed 50mm lenses on them. there is some light damage to some of the fed3 shots but i think it adds to it.

See the rest on my Flickr pages (see the link to the right).

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My new, err...old kit!

2008-06-15T23:19:00.003+01:00

Recently decided it was time to go back to basics. so i am now the proud owner of a Fed3 35mm rangemaster. It looks almost identical to a Leica rangemaster but its a 10th of the price! It was made in Russia as a camera for use by the russian army. As its a fully mechanical device to get the best results from it you need a light meter, i thought as its a 1950's - 60's camera i'll get a similar age light meter as this would have been the sort of meter used to help set the camera when it was current.
I'm shooting with Kodak black and white @ ISO400 and as soon as i have something from it i'll post them up.

The psychic chair

2008-06-14T15:49:00.005+01:00

The following photographs were taken at 5.30am in a wood near my home and are edited highlights from a college project.

The photo's in the photo's (!) we also taken by me during a recent studio session.

Recent studio work

2008-06-06T20:27:00.006+01:00

The photographs below are of a friend of mine with a wicked sense of humour and great character.

i had no idea what i was going to ask him to do, so i sat him in a chair and we passed him stuff! these were the results.

Norfolk trip

2008-06-04T00:21:00.006+01:00

During a 4 day break in Horning, Norfolk after the bank holiday i was able to get out and about with my camera.
whether it was 5am in Cromer on the beach or 1am in Horning at the marina.

Below are a few samples, theres more to see on my flickr gallery (link on the right).

Home is where the photography is...

2008-05-19T22:37:00.009+01:00

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

2008-05-10T21:26:00.015+01:00

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

2008-05-09T22:40:00.007+01:00

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

2008-05-04T00:56:00.025+01:00

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

2008-05-01T22:21:00.007+01:00

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.

New Exhibition confirmed

2008-04-27T23:34:00.004+01:00

I have just confirmed a new exhibition date. It will be held at Beeston Library in Nottingham, they let their exhibition space out all year round and have something hanging around in there constantly.

It will be called "The fool over the Hill" - Wallis and Gibson make an exhibition of themselves!

I will be exhibiting along with Dave Gibson a friend of mine who produces some great acrylic portraits as well as water colour landscapes, find a link to him (ArtGibo) on this site.
i'm not sure on the content yet but it's not until February 2009, so we've got some time to think about it!
More info to come.

I've made the papers!

2008-04-26T20:55:00.005+01:00

Ok, so it wasn’t the nationals.

After my work on Stanton Iron Works I got rather interested in its history, so I decided to do an article to accompany my work that I could approach a local paper or two with.
And to my amazement “The Ilkeston Advertiser” took it straight away! As Stanton is in Ilkeston I thought they may be interested due to the local interest thing, and they were! The article was condensed and re written from their perspective but I am very happy with the results.

It has already produced some great feedback and seems to have inspired a few people.

Exert from the Ilkeston Advertiser, Thursday 24th April 2007.

I'm a student again....it's 16 years since i've been one of those!

2008-04-23T22:15:00.003+01:00

NOCN Photography (Digital) Human Form/Portraits Stage 3

I arrived a few minutes early, not really sure what to expect. I followed my nose to the studio and found it quite easily, there were a few there already, all very quiet obviously feeling a little like me, a bit nervous and a little out of place.

still I went in trying not to be too inward, there were two people already in there working, one guy in glasses at a pc he seemed a little flustered, I thought he was our tutor for a while! Then there was another, younger than me, by quite a bit, packing a way a portfolio, struggling with zip. "Student"... I thought..."hhmm, he seems young, ok now I feel old and out of place!”
They both left.
As the minutes ticked by more people arrived until there was about 10 of us.
The tutor, a woman called Kit, dark hair, glasses, came in and started to talk to us, I felt as if she had already said half her sentence in her head before she came in as it didn't seem much of an introduction. She had the air of an artist, by which I mean disorganised! She introduced herself as a photographer and a ceramicist. Once we got settled which seemed to take forever (over an hour) it all appeared calmer and I felt much better.

we spoke about enrolment student cards were acquired, we did a Biometric test to see what sort of a learner we all were…I ended up in the Pragmatist column (person who is oriented toward the success or failure of a particular line of action, thought, etc.; a practical person.) Seems about right!

It turns out that the course is run so that if you would like to take it a little further then you can by opting for level 3 instead of 2, not much different really you just need to submit more theory, so I thought I’m here I may as well do the higher one.

A quick tour of the place, fire exits, library, canteen….coffee nice one, we all had a bit of a chat everyone seems cool nice and chilled out.

Back in the studio and we looked through a slide show of old portrait photos from when the medium was new right up to present day. There were some fantastic images from Isombard Kingdom Brunel to Mick Jagger. My favourite stuff had be the more candid shots and one artist in particular Dorothea Lange and her photos from the American Depression in the 1930’s, she was asked to produce these images to raise awareness by the American government, I have to do some work on a famous artist that produced work in a style that appeals so im choosing her.

All in all... a great start.

Bagging machine bits!

2008-04-12T16:08:00.013+01:00

Here's the shots i liked from a bunch of exposures taken of a customer demonstration machine at my work. it's difficult to get excited to be honest but i don't usually see the machinery as a photographic subject and these were reasonble as graphic images so i thought i'd post them.

Click the title to see the machinery.

Video of Stanton Iron works at its peak in the 1950's

2008-04-06T18:43:00.001+01:00

More work from Stanton Iron Works

2008-04-05T22:35:00.012+01:00

After finding that great old workshop where i was rumbled by the security guard...i went back today to set up a shoot in the rooms at the back of the shop...not really knowing what was in there, i took some props as i wanted to put stuff in there that was out of place in this enviroment. Namely, a glass, wine, torches, an orange, a plate, some cuttlery and some tea light candles.
What i was hoping the rooms to look like, was exactly what i found!

I think they speak for themselves, except this above. I read the writing on this wall and imagined there being some sort of seige here and the text being a mark of protest. if something did happen here...how did it end?

Post - Apocalyptic

2008-03-31T21:30:00.008+01:00

These delapidated old buildings were found again at Stanton in Nottingham.
I had to drive through a "Private Road No Entry" sign to find it!
I was caught by a scouse security guard who had been tipped off by someone who thought i had a gun and was out looking for rabbits!
i asked if i could come back and shoot some in the old offices in the workshop as they were too dark to go in at this time of night (too scary!), i was told that the best time to come back would be a saturday afternoon. "why" i asked "is it because the the local work force would be at home?". "no" he said "I work then!".
"Nice one thanks mate!!"

This Building was reduced to this by kids!

With this image i wanted to make it look as if it was a screen shot from a zombie game. The vehicle was layered out and made to stand out, almost as if it wasn't a part of the background of the game and could be manipulated in some way by the player.

This reminds me of mad max.

Don't drop 'em just yet Blossom!

2008-03-31T00:05:00.006+01:00

Theres some great colour in the trees at the moment, and set against a nice deep blue sky they really come to life!

Poppy's

2008-03-28T21:54:00.009Z

Believe it or not, this field is in Beeston!

Around Stanton Iron works

2008-03-25T19:03:00.012Z

I have often driven through the old Stanton Ironworks on my way to or from Ilkeston and admired its old unused buildings. these buildings always looked great in the evening sun. Two buildings in particular, the Exhibition Building and a very big rectangular building with lots of small (broken in a lot of cases) windows.

I want to revisit this shoot, feedback suggests that i could have been lower and further back.

i have had some trouble finding any information about the Exhibition Building having search high and low i discovered an old photograph (below) showing school boys coming out of the entrance with a small caption below it, suggesting it was an old cinema! It looks like it was used as a training building and a place where people came to have a look at what went off in the iron works.

The other building, i believe was used by NTM (Nottingham Tobacco Machinery) who now occupy a building across the road. I could be wrong of course! the internal shot here is through one of the broken windows, i am going to try and gain official entry to this building as i think the morning sun would produce some fantastic effects through its many holes!
Production at Stanton Ironworks in Ilkeston drew to a close when the last pipe was cast on May 24, 2007. The last of the 185 production workers at the pipe-making factory walked out of the gates for the final time.

Jackson and His Mum, Yoko

2008-03-22T12:46:00.001Z

St Ives, Cornwall 2007

2008-03-13T00:09:00.010Z

The only thing these random images have in common is that they have all been taken in and around St Ives, Cornwall in May 2007.

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Halam Village, Nottingham

2008-03-12T20:25:00.011Z

The images below were taken during a day off in 2007 after a nice bit of snow in a village called Halam in Nottingham.
The reason for the day off was courtesy our cat Jack having his jewels removed! you should have heard him on the way there, he whined all the way (25miles) i could hardly hear myself ignore him!
we travelled back later that day in total silence...he obviously thought he'd upset me with all the whining earlier but he hadn't got the balls to apologise! (I'm sorry I've got to stop there and just reflect on that last joke.........................................................................................its got to be the funniest thing I've ever written...pure gold)
He was quite for days afterwards, maybe he felt that the more he made his presence felt, the more bits we'd take off him! Apparently, they don't sew them back up anymore?! what's that all about?
he likes to sleep in the coffee table drawer (while its open of course) on the TV guide.
Now I'm sorry but... trying to read whats happening in coro' through feline seepage is not the best use of my time!
OK so....where was i...oh yeah. on the way back from dropping off jaffa jack (as he is now affectionately known) i took some pics in Halam.
I don't think I'm much of a landscaper its more abstract for me,but i enjoy the process.

Click on the post title to be redirected to Halam's site or find it in links.

A great read!

2008-03-11T00:19:00.005Z

A great book to look through if you want some basic do's don'ts and tips about digital photography is "The Digital Photography Book" by Scott Kelby. He talks to the reader as if he or she is with him on a shoot, not messing about with "why" and talking more about "how"...once you know "how" you can then go back at your lesiure and find out why. I bought my copy from Amazon. Click the post title to be directed there.