Photos by Phoenix

Did I mention recently that I love film...?

Plan B

There’s a moment when it’s best to call it for what it is, and switch to Plan B.

We’d been up and down Highgate Hill more times than we’d relished just finding the cemetery. But now having found it, we had to admit that the shot was nowhere to be found. Paul had seen a great location on a documentary about the cemetery, but hadn’t had a chance to scout it for real, and now we were finding all kinds of fascinating places that weren’t it. He suspected his undoing lay in the hands of creative documentary editing.

It’s a huge graveyard. Not quite the necropolis that Kafka resides in, but expansive nonetheless. And hilly. And after finding ourselves back at the entrance once again, without having found anything close enough for the shot Paul wanted we stumbled instead upon that moment of group awkwardness that invites the question: shall we call it a day?

Paul called it. The shot wasn’t here. Let’s go back to the studio and do something else. The moment was underscored by the attendant wandering over at this juncture and ejecting all of us because she spotted the two tripods Jo was carrying, and suspected us of wanting to take pictures. Never mind three complete digital, one 35mm and one square format camera systems, Highgate clearly object to tripods. Nor did it seem to matter that we’d each forked out £3 each to go in. I’ve never paid to go to a cemetery before. Karl Marx’ grave maybe? Seems ironic, really: “Workers of the world, Unite around the monument to my life, body and ideas, all of which are so dead that the last communal organisation in town is triple charging residents, interns and visitors just to witness and preserve it all. Long live the ‘free’ market. Thank you and goodnight.”

Once back at the Waterloo studio we tried a few other shot ideas we’d had in mind, and everything fell into place. It’s only a small space, so there was a lot of getting in each other’s light, but we had fun. In fact just getting back was fun in itself...

I wanted to try the natural light thing with a black and white film shot of Sophie, but by the time we got to it I realised I’d missed the light I wanted. I opened the blinds just to check and saw the most amazing sunset over London. Great! Switch to plan C! we scrambled over the couch to get to the balcony and I grabbed the shots in under 3 minutes.

Paul got his ‘levitation’ shots on the go (more on those when they’ve emerged from the Adobean vaults) and we had a fair old crack at the Charlie’s Dark Angels thing. Finally his rabbit costume came out and the girls knew it was time to pull the eject handles. We weren’t the only ones with a backup plan….

It was a good fun shoot, and we had the time to get a real variety of images that we might well not have got if we’d persisted in trying to find a compromise shot at the cemetery. Good call.

Noise

Hokay, just a quick thought in the midst of looking back over the year.

My last shoot last year was From The Jam playing live to a packed out Forum in London. Very cool, and great to find myself among several hundred moshers about my age who hadn't seen The Jam play in twenty years and were clearly going berserk with the experience! A great feeling, but a little hard to hold a telephoto steady in amongst it all...

The thought is this: What's so bad about noise?

It happened in HiFi, then in music, then in photography: a desire for 'cleaner' sound or images that somehow turns into an obsession that precludes any thought of the nature of the particular subject matter being represented in each case. CD, ProTools and Logic, and Digital photography, with its obsession with megapixels. (Not forgetting Tuna - 'No bones!')

But what if you're shooting an electrifying gig by a late 70s New Wave band?

Shooting live music for one of the music papers back then (remember Sounds, NME and Melody Maker?) meant pushing Tri-X at least 2 stops to 1600 and maybe processing it in Rodinal if you could a) find some in time and b) actually wanted tighter grain. Gritty, grainy, contrasty images. But it really worked! It suited the subject matter. Immediacy, working with what you've got and banging it out - that was the whole ethos, and it's what made it exciting.

Where's it gone? Are we so scared of 'imperfection' these days? Does it somehow open us to unwelcome professional judgements?

Well, now's a great time to consider it. The advent of the Nikon D3, with huge dynamic range and a feasible working ISO rating of 25600 (!!!) and the workability of HDR techniques even for everyday amateur photographers mean that we can now shoot and represent stuff WAY beyond what the human eye can see. It's astonishing. I'll show you some later - I'm hoping to shoot Gordon Ramsay's new restaurant at the Hilton here in Prague Old Town this week, and for sure I'll take a tripod and get busy with some HDR. Because that's what will make it look best.

And, of course, some of those techniques can be applied to most things, even live music. The question is do we want to? Here's a conventional image (RAW, 1600, telephoto at f4, pretty much the limits of the gear I had on the night) - how much more do we want to see, and what will it tell us?

We have a choice, now, surely? We can make truly subjective judgements on the quality of resolution and feel we want given the subject. We did it with portraiture - the advent of sharp lenses in the mid 20th Century made us realise that we don't want to see everything in microscopic detail! Hence soft focus, and the now bewildering array of expensive special effects to make you look like you were shot with a cheap 1930s lens. (And let's not get into vinyl noise samples in the background of CDs...)

So let me pin some colours: I love rock. It's my cultural background. R&B was always aspirational: it totally makes sense to shoot Hi Def pristine Hasselblad H3 39megapixel shots photoshopped to oblivion as part of the Merc 'n' chick 'n' gold scrapbook; but the only aspirations we had in the John Peel music pub on the estate in '79 was to be in a loud band.

So at this noiseless best of times, I ask again: what's so bad about noise? Ladies and gentlemen, a message From The Jam.

PS - on the subject of doing it the old way, I should pick up the pushed Tri-X shots of Hugh Cornwell's latest recordings in ToeRag studios. He did it for real, so I figured I should too. I'll share the results soon.

The Travels and Travails of February

What I remember most about February was the cold. There was a lot of travelling to be done that month and I wanted to be as easy on myself as I could be, so I took the train and retraced a wonderful trip I made on my 25th birthday. First stop was Cannes for Midem, the big European gathering of the music industry.

To say it was bitter is an understatement. It just ate through me in the way that it’s not supposed to once the temperature drops below a certain level. But it was all worth it, and I’m now thinking about how better I can plan my visit this year. See you there guys!

From there I wanted to busk a night train to Venice – the retraced tracks part of the journey. I felt rough as a badger’s arse but the booking went like a charm, even with my schoolboy French, and all that remained was to wait a few more hours in the freezing cold for the train.

And then wonderful sleep; then wonderful Venice.

It’s hard not to literally point and shoot in Venice. Try an experiment – close your eyes, point the camera in a random direction and press the button – hey presto! Art. Try it on the bridge; try it in the market; try it over coffee.

One of the breakthroughs seldom mentioned about digital photography is the huge humanitarian and ecological relief to the slaves and natural resources of the forests and silver mines formerly required to photograph and print the same views of Venice (and other offenders) for the last century. How many pictures like this do we need?

Much better to set the silver slaves to work for pictures of the return journey, for the kind of shots that just don’t work with digital.

Digital, for me at least, is about what I can see. What’s there. Film will always be about what I feel. I’m fairly sure this was shot with the same compact camera I used all those years ago on my first train trips in this part of the world, so it’s not about posh optics. Just film. And how I felt.

While the 21st century zooms in to auto skin-smoothing plug-ins for Photoshop, botox and implants de rigeur, and now HDR imaging in digital I find myself drawn to 20th century backwater discussions of which lenses produce the nicest bokeh (the out of focus bit of the image) and mechanical cameras that still keep clicking when the temperature drops and tugs battery voltage with it.

Cannes was freezing. Venice was truly, excruciatingly freezing. Prague was… ok, actually! Nice to be back, in fact. But having seen clearly in Venice that the beautiful surprises are in the details I went looking closer in my home town.

Everyone knows how beautiful the architecture is in Prague. But sometimes the whole can overshadow the details that make it. And those details may not have been planned by the architect.

It’s also about the people and the mobile architecture, too. It all adds up to the feel of the town. Besides, the other thing Prague is famous for is the beauty of the Czech women; I’ve been guilty of the sin of omission so far on this blog, so let’s put that right now.

Only a few months ago, but it feels like I’ve missed a year or even two out somewhere. Maybe I should check March and April out and make sure.