Slowing down...

If you hadn’t noticed, I visited Norwich’s Rosary Cemetery yesterday for the first time. I am rather well accustomed to a good cemetery, having lived near the one on Earlham Road for a number of years. They are marvellous places to visit. Cemeteries – because I know, I just know that you are giving a withered, disappointed sort of look at the screen right this minute - are at once peaceful and teeming with life, they are sombre and wild, well-maintained and yet left to grow and flourish by themselves. You can never know what to expect in a cemetery. Photographically, they are absolutely wonderful places to visit. Photographing a cemetery is a far cry from photographing events, festivals and city life – the skills you need are almost exactly opposite.

Walking through a cemetery with a camera and a determination to come home with good photographs is a wonderful way to slow down your day. The longer and the slower you walk around, the more you notice small details, and the more interesting perspectives you find. The crucial thing, though, is that the slower you go, the more wildlife you find just in front of you – and if you’re nifty enough, you can really capture some terrific moments. Like this robin taking off:



The real challenge of photographing a cemetery, though, is in the thought process. There is a balance to be found between capturing the overgrown mess, and trying to make it look elegant (which, of course, it is). I didn’t grasp this idea at all when I first began photographing in Earlham Cemetery. If a grave looked messy, I would tend to walk right past it, in my naïve hurry to get a good shot from somewhere. Well, those good shots were right in front of me – if I’d learned to take the time to consider them. Slowing down around the Rosary Cemetery yesterday allowed me to appreciate the small details in these messy graves, encouraged me to take notice of their individual characters, and to use the mess to good effect.





The Rosary Cemetery will continue to be a place for me to slow down with my camera, and concentrate on capturing details; sometimes, capturing a moment just isn’t enough.

The rest of my Rosary Cemetery images can be found on my Flickr page - and you can expect to find plenty more in the coming weeks.

Wee Nugget of Advice...

Since agreeing to an exhibition of my band photography at the Rumsey Wells last week, I have set about putting together a collection of around fifty images, from the various gigs I have attended in Norwich (and beyond) over the course of the past eighteen months. Hugely enjoyable stuff – and out of it all, I'd like to pass on a tip that might be of benefit to one or two of you.

It’s little more than commonsense really, and you'll probably already know about it, but let us rewind to a little over a year ago, when I took on board the advice of that eminent old crocus Dave Guttridge, who suggested not to shoot images as JPGs, but as RAW files. At the time, I wasn’t really sure of the significance of this, but I figured that our aforementioned eminent old crocus probably knew a fair amount more about our profession than I did, so I duly changed the image settings to shoot in RAW format, and thought little more of it.

Let us return, then, to the present, where I sit here after a morning spent reprocessing some of the gig photographs. Guess what? A year on from the original shoots, I am able to completely overhaul every aspect of the photographs I shot as RAW images, starting completely from scratch with a year’s additional experience in processing, and – significantly – far more powerful editing software than I had at the time. The JPGs? They look just fine, but I have far, far fewer options in reprocessing them. As I saved them at the time, so they must remain. Thankfully only two of the fifty images were shot in this format.

This is a lesson I am fortunate to have learned, so many thanks to our eminent old crocus for the advice. I had no idea until last week that I’d ever have any further use for most of these photographs – so to be able to spend some quality time reprocessing them is a wonderful option to have.

Thanks, Dave – I owe you a pint.

Rumsey Wells Exhibition

Oh, very well, as you’re all asking…

I am fresh from a short meeting with Luke Emery, a local artistic talent and curator of Art in the Underbelly at Norwich’s Rumsey Wells pub. Over the course of this little chat, we discussed a few ideas for an exhibition, pencilled in for September/October 2010.

Just as I tweeted earlier, there are some exciting ideas in place. This will be more than a simple exhibition. Luke’s idea is for a musical exhibition, displaying prints of my photographs of bands and musicians, with a couple of lovely, quirky touches – a listening post at each image, at which tracks by the depicted artists, recorded live, will be played, complementing the atmospheres conveyed in the images.

Furthermore, Luke has asked me to make a selection of musicians, from bands that I have photographed in the past, and bands that I will work with in the near future, to perform live at the Rumsey over the course of the exhibition, bringing the photographs to life.

The idea is in its early stages – expect alterations and fresh ideas – but I must put on record that I am enormously excited at this prospect, delighted to have chosen the Rumsey for my first exhibition, and delighted also to be working with Luke. Over the course of this year, he has not been the only curator to invite me to exhibit my work – but he got an immediate ‘yes’, on account of his additional input of inventive ideas, and I think working in partnership with him will make for a tremendous exhibition.

See you in the Rumsey then! Mine’s an Explorer…