Look Before You Leap...

Almighty Lord, somebody got my back up the other day. Introducing myself as a professional photographer, I was greeted with a comment that I’d imagine many other photographers get levelled at them. ‘What was wrong with a proper job then?’

I wonder if anyone else gets as peeved about remarks like that as I do. Among some people lurks a preconceived idea about my profession being some manner of airy dreamland for bored and divorced city workers. They’re out there, of course – oh, they’re out there – but what I would genuinely like to know is:
a) for those who did it, what is actually wrong with deciding you’ve got enough out of working in the city, and moving on to something new;
b) what their impression of the photographic profession is actually based on.

Deciding on photography for a living is quite some commitment. Whether or not you decide to take a lengthy course for a qualification, there is networking to do, there is marketing to do, you have to fork out an inordinate amount on equipment you can depend upon, you spend hours and hours (and hours) processing images to the last detail before handing them over, you manage and maintain an ever-growing library of images, you get asked to do a great many jobs that are anything but glamorous (I was once commissioned to photograph a BIN), you do those jobs under intense pressure and, to top it all, the person hiring you occasionally regards you, a trifle disrespectfully, as a dreamy, bored former city worker.

Let me tell you, if you are under any illusion that the photographer’s profession is somehow an easier one than yours, you are wrong. I chose to pursue photography not because I dreamed of being there on the Norfolk coast every morning, capturing boats at sunrise and then selling prints on a daily basis for £250, but because it is something that I am good at, in the same way that anyone does a job based on the skills that they have. Would you accuse a lorry driver, a librarian or a graphic designer of not having a proper job? Of course you wouldn’t.

There is a world of difference between taking a camera to the countryside of a weekend and doing photography for a living. Of course it’s a great pleasure, but it’s also a very difficult pleasure, just like many less 'glamorous' professions. Please understand that, and bear it in mind next time you ask one of us what was wrong with what we did beforehand. If, after that, you still have to ask, there is no hope for you.

Digital Economy Bollocks

Well, all in all, this has been an infuriating evening for me, following as I was the mindless passing of the Digital Economy Bill by the small minority of blithering idiots who actually turned up to the Commons to deal with the matter. As if the evening couldn’t get any worse, I was following the whole palaver on the Grauniad website, which, being the Grauniad, was as lucid about the whole thing as my grandma’s tights.

My interest in the Digital Economy Bill began, really, out of curiosity for the fate of fellow photographers, some of whom rely upon selling stock photographs for publications. If the 43rd clause had been passed, publishers would have effectively been granted free licence to print photographs without credit or payment to the photographer, so long as they could reasonably prove that they’d made an effort to contact them first. The clause was not passed, I am delighted to say, and cameras were tossed gleefully into the air across the United Kingdom.

It’s the rest of the Bill that concerns me, though. It appears that some slippery laws have just been passed. Legislation over copyright infringement could lead to many, many people’s internet connections being limited and even disconnected. All right, all right fair enough. You can get a lot of things on DVD now, piracy costs billions, why should musicians bother making music if you’re not going to pay for it, chunter chunter chunter…

I’m quite sure you don’t need me to cough all those hackneyed, unimaginative, frigid arguments at you. They have become as familiar and irritating as the Kaiser Chiefs over the last decade. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll err on the side of logic, and think about the implications of what has just been passed.

One: Cutting off an internet connection is one thing, but you would, surely, need proof that the concerned property’s wi-fi connection hadn’t been hacked, a phenomenon which I fully expect to increase as, erm, as a direct result of this legislation. Additionally, what of shared houses such as student accommodation? If one tenant gets caught, is it right that everyone should suffer?

Two: Is this Government not a part of the same UN organization which has previously argued that internet access should be regarded as a basic human right?

Three: The inevitable legal fragility of public access to online material is bound to have a profound negative effect on wi-fi connections in city and town centres, universities, airports, trains, hotels, bars, cafés and even, it delights me to say, the Houses of Parliament. Come on, MPs. Which one of those were you in this evening, when the votes were being cast? Wasn’t Parliament, was it? Choads.

Blogs will doubtlessly crop up frantically over the next two or three days, on this subject. I’ll have a keen eye open for anybody who can logically justify this legislation, as I’m sure you will too. I shall sign off to torrent an informative television documentary, mercifully available online, that has never been released on DVD - while I still can. Thanks to politicians who couldn’t be bothered to turn up to the debate, the United Kingdom has just became an altogether muggier place to live.

'Too Many Tweets Make a...'

A great many people chunter on at me about how drably, navel-gazingly dire the world of Twitter is. ‘Who cares’, they bleat, ‘what colour socks you’re wearing, or when you’re putting the kettle on, or which street you’re on at 2.14 on a Thursday afternoon?’ Mmm. I suspect they’re right about the lattermost type of tweet, guilty as I doubtlessly am of it, but the whole argument is, as you will soon see, as dire as these people are. It is an unimaginative straw man of a waste of effort. The drawback they see in Twitter also happens to be its overwhelming wonder. Depending on the individual, the only limit is the imagination. You can use Twitter for anything, from real-time news to football and cricket scores; you can discover new music, gauge opinions on new products; you can get jokes and you can find jobs. It is a matter of knowing what you want and building up a personalised, relevant community of like-minded people. It’s really quite simple.

‘Oh, but people should get out and live their lives, rather than live a false life of microblogging.’ This is an easy line of thinking to blast out of the water. A little further along the spectrum of that argument, we might as well cease imagining. No point in films, no point in music. Twitter isn’t necessary to a fulfilled life, of course it isn’t, but it is entertainment, like television. It is fully customised and interactive entertainment as well.

The line of thought that really renders these critics dreary and unnecessary, though, comes from experience. Over the last week, Twitter has certainly not replaced my daily life, but actually enhanced it. I was babysitting yesterday evening, and quite fancied getting a pizza delivered to quell some tummy rumblings. I had one fundamental setback in this plan, though: I am so familiar with the walk to the family’s house that I had long forgotten which road they live on. Racking my brains, then, to at least arrive at a guess, Twitter friends @paulsaxton, @chrisbardell, @ignisphoto and @womaninblack all kindly confirmed that I was correct, leaving me only to look at the house number on the door and order away. Without Twitter, I might have become really rather hungry yesterday evening. Is that useless fart-arsing on the internet, ladies and gents?

The second exhibit is nothing short of wonderful. In celebration of my sad little Twitter community reaching 300 nerdy, arse-picking followers, I threw open a competition – free print for the person who most imaginatively insulted my profile picture. It garnered immediate responses from across Norfolk, from friends and colleagues to a whole plethora of people who had never even met me. The insults were hilarious and biting, affectionate and perceptive, and each one was delivered in a spirit of good humour that even some friendships and family relationships never arrive at. It was brilliant. That alone attests to the worth of Twitter, but there was a further benefit to the competition, that will send each of its critics creeping back into their closed-minded, beige little hovels: someone contacted me via Twitter to offer me some photography work – and where was I when I discussed it? Not in an office, but in a beautiful park on the north Norfolk coast. Bear that in mind next time anyone whines about social networking, and enjoy these insults from the competition.



‘Nothing I can think of is as much of an insult as having to look at your face for 5 minutes whilst I try to think of something insulting...’ – Eddie Warren

‘Finally, Ryan understands the difference between him and the rest of the male population…’ - Adrienne Jolly, my very own careers adviser

‘Ryan was disappointed by the tame nature of the 'Gay photo book' he bought on eBay.’ - @chrisbardell

‘Gnomes could read books well before colour pictures were invented...’ - @stuartflatt

‘Get a fucking haircut you art-school cock!’ - @mattjware

‘John Gay's observation that Ryan was “a fey twankhole wearing his granddad's wig back to front” was wholly unexpected.’ - @womaninblack

‘You look like Sacha Baron Cohen in "Bruno". Only gayer.’ @johnkahun

Drab and dire, is it? Mmm. Yeah.

Dullards.

It's not the size of your lens, it's what you do with it...

I had the pleasure of having a sit-down, a couple of pints and a chat with the multitalented Dave Guttridge a couple of nights ago. If you’ve ever thumbed through a UEA or Center Parcs brochure, you’ll have seen plenty of his photographs; if you’ve ever looked around the Norwich Playhouse bar or the Arts Centre, or wandered through a music festival, and seen a sideburned oddball in a coat and tails playing music from generations even before his own (hello Dave), you’ll have encountered his work too. It was lovely to chat with him. The part of the conversation I really wanted to mention was the point at which we spoke of our favourite work. It would have been so easy for Dave to point to his best photographs and gas on about why they were so good – instead, we chatted about creative, authentic ways around problems we’ve had, from lighting children posing in woodland, to setting up models in windows, in different rooms of a building, to my incident with Norwich-based lawyer Tessa Shepperson, who needed to be photographed against a white background in her own tiny living room. With everything planned, there was a heavy storm, and I had no safe way of taking my lighting over to her house – so I eventually used two desk lamps taken from her living room to light the background, and a flashgun attached to my camera to light Tessa – who was more than pleased with the result:



By no means can I claim perfection here, but our chat was heartening, for the conclusion that often it really is a case of what you do with your camera equipment, not how much you've spent on it!

The Window Coffee

Had the pleasure and challenge of doing the photography for (probably) the smallest café in the world this week. Amongst the key ideas for the shoot on a sunny Monday morning was a sense of surprising spaciousness, which required me to draw upon all the experience I have in not feeling embarrassed. Shooting in a room that is taller than it is wide, in front of strangers, lying on the floor, cramming my lengthy frame into a corner to get the shot right – that’s where I earned my crust!


I hope you’ll agree that I got it right:




Slightly easier work was making the homemade cakes look appetising...




And the place looks delightful and cosy on a bright day:





Keep your eyes on @TheWindowCoffee for details of the launch of their website - coming up soon...

Humble, my FOOT!

Oh, you could’ve told me. Really, you could have.

Since I discovered it, people have told me that they saw a photograph of mine in a BBC website snow gallery, assuming that by not mentioning it myself, and leaving other people to find it themselves, I was being humble and classy.

Not a bit of it. I entered the photograph by means of Twitter, but nobody told me it had been included. Just setting the record straight. You ought to know that I remain the same classless tart, as ever.

Have a look, everybody - last photograph in the gallery:

BBC Gallery

Thought I’d bring you up to speed with things a little…

As some of you will know, over the last two or three weeks I have been doing my fair share of traipsing, across the towns and countryside of Norfolk. Acts of idiocy this winter, I fear. I made the trip to Cromer first of all, looking out of my skylight and seeing glistening ice and snow on a cloudless, bright morning. The idea was to try out one or two new photographic techniques around Cromer pier, making the most of the morning light, then to spend the afternoon sipping tea and writing letters to a few friends, before returning to my work in the early evening, to capture some more scenes with the additional glow of street lights.

You’d think that a plan so simple wouldn’t fail. Not a bit of it.

Even with a pair of thermal gloves over the fingerless gloves that are so necessary to outdoor winter photography, my hands began to freeze the moment I stepped off the bus. As I walked, a chilling wind froze the blood in my cheeks, and the sunshine that had convinced me to get out and enjoy the day had not, shall we say, travelled well. All in all, I found myself battling frostbite and Arctic winds, and my immediate thought upon my arrival was that if I really wanted to photograph Cromer on a cloudy day, there would be plenty of opportunities in the summer, when the temperatures wouldn’t be so – I’m going to say it - dangerous.

I walked straight to a café, reminding myself as I did so that even in this biting coastal cold, eleven o’clock on a Monday morning would be no time for whisky, however medicinal. I walked to a café and I stayed in it. Letters were written, tea intake was profuse, and, at length, I managed to pluck up some courage to venture outside for some tentative shooting. So much for the morning sunshine, although I was eventually happy to get some work done!



Things were a trifle more pleasant in and around Horsey Mere, the following Sunday afternoon – though, mind, only a trifle. To say nothing of the temperature in the wintry Norfolk Broads, the footpath leading to the derelict 18th century Brograve Mill was… well, it was, er, not a footpath at all, but a messy hodge-podge of grass, mud, reeds, puddles and marshland. Not such an easy afternoon as Cromer was, clearly. Stomping around with a good friend, I spent two hours testing our friendship with a barrage of half-humorous moans and groans, about things like the water entering my walking boots, the cold, the wrong turns we took. At the end of the afternoon I began to realise precisely why nobody likes me – although we did find tremendous solace in a nearby pub, decorated throughout with paraphernalia from the British Empire. Amongst scythes, knives and guns galore, on one wall hung a shrunken, preserved crocodile skin, just at the size and level you might expect of a timetable in a bus stop. Surreal as you like. Robin and I repaired our friendship over a Wherry, and pootled back to Norwich.



My most recent expedition took me to Thetford Forest late last month. The previous day had been gleamingly sunny; the day following the trip was only a trifle more cloudy. What came in between was nothing short of cruel. The bus journey took us out of a rather foggy Norwich, and into a thickly foggy Norfolk countryside, which lifted by around midday, giving way to heavy sleet and, eventually, snow. Utterly miserable, though, I do agree, the foulest of days spent in the countryside is often better than a good day in the office, and in spite of the blasted weather, my cohort John and I managed to make a fun walk of it, getting gloriously lost in the forest, before finding our way up to the village of Brandon, where, we discovered, you can have your hair restyled and get a tattoo, but you cannot get a cup of tea on a miserable, wet, freezing cold February afternoon. Glad to return home – although, of course, I’ll be even more glad to get back out there IN BETTER WEATHER!