Exhibition!

It’s finally coming around. Between January 2009 and September 2010, I have been consistently photographing live music at venues around Norwich and across the East. It’s been a quite indiscriminate little journey. From raucous local bands such as The Brownies and Violet Violet, to nationally renowned folk artists including Duke Special and Lau, to internationally known performers such as T-Model Ford and up-and-coming New York band the White Rabbits, I have intentionally photographed musicians with an array of different styles.

If one thing links the musicians to have made it into this exhibition, it is an outstanding ability to inject their music with raw emotion. In my live music photography, I have no interest to speak of in simply capturing well-known or attractive faces. Only the music matters. If a singer’s face is scrunched up, sweaty and exhausted, or a guitarist is making frantic movements at the climax of a song, it is a joy to watch. I can testify that it is also a joy to photograph.



Norwich can count itself fortunate indeed to have venues such as the Arts Centre, the Brickmakers and the Norfolk & Norwich Festival’s Spiegeltent, venues which offer expansive and varying programmes of music, actively seeking and inviting immensely talented performers from across the globe to showcase their abilities to responsive and gleefully open-minded East Anglian audiences. It is a testament to these venues that they should end up depicted in this exhibition, devoted as it is to the same love of well-crafted, fresh music that they share. Special mention, I think, should also be made of the Bassment in Chelmsford, which offers a great deal of support to Norwich-based bands on the road, and which consequently features prominently in the show. I’d like to thank them for all the sellotape…

The show opens on Wednesday 6th October at 8pm, at the Rumsey Wells pub in Norwich. With performing musicians, of course. A warm welcome is extended to all.

A little thought...

I believe I may have touched on this point once or twice before, in previous posts here and there. Earlier this week, as I served beer and chatted with an amateur photographer in the good old Alexandra Tavern, we touched upon the willingness of a great many photographers to fork out hundreds upon hundreds of pounds on bits and pieces of equipment for their kit.

Now. Let's say, before we start, that it is a fundamental necessity to shell out for the important things. I don't think anyone will reasonably dispute the necessity of the right camera bodies, lenses and lighting kits. Those things are pretty danged necessary. I wouldn't advise compromising when it comes to capturing and creating light. I have no wish to advise compromise anyway - only a little pragmatic thought.

Capturing and creating good light are the photographer's top priorities. Influencing light, though...?

Let's return to our friend in the pub. In the 1980s and 90s, he said, photography (in the main) began to move away from being the realm of people who thought with vigorous creativity, learning their craft the hard way. In came cameras designed to be used by absolutely anyone, and absolutely everyone bought cameras. What an impact this has had - many of today's amateur photographers boast of not having to learn what their cameras' settings do. Many cameras are even built without manual settings. Cameras are becoming smaller and smaller, and more fashionable. Image quality has taken its place on the back burner, in favour of image size and the colour of the camera's casing.

Nowadays, this is, of course, obvious for everyone to see. What had also become obvious in the 1980s and 90s, however, was the growth of the camera as a status symbol - particularly amongst men. Alongside your choice of shoes and car, your choice of camera began to define you. Never mind what you could do with a high-end camera, the fact that you owned the thing was enough to make other men in the street and the pub dribble and fawn.

The upshot of this has been that people who don't know very much about photography have been buying equipment they don't know very much about, for reasons they're not quite sure of. This has created a demand for simple things such as flashgun diffusers. Anyone with their own mind would play around with ways of diffusing light. Manufacturers know that many people don't think this way, however, and sell their own equipment at prices they think they can get away with. £45 for a piece of shaped vinyl. £26 for a carved up yoghurt pot (as a friend of mine recently discovered).

They're fine, for their different purposes. As I said - there is a demand, and they are fit for purpose. The creativity and, sometimes, the intricate control of light dissipates though. Why pay £45 for a diffuser that does the same job as, say, a piece of paper and a hairband?



Or a piece of polystyrene with some paper glued on it? (Photograph courtesy of Rod Penn)



Or a piece of bubble wrap?



Or, if you want to show a flash of brilliance in your thinking, why not go to a DIY shop and experiment with your control of light, like Andy Larkin's tremendous image of moving clouds in bright sunshine - using a welder's mask as a filter. Click here.

You don't need to spend vast amounts of money to set yourself apart in photography.

Norfolk Skies

Someone asked me a few days ago, why I so often burn in the skies of my landscape photographs from Norwich and around Norfolk. Allow me to explain.

I have no doubt that those of you living in Norfolk will, at some point, have spoken to someone who moved away from the area sometime in their life, but felt compelled to return because they missed the flat landscapes, or in a few cases loved the enormous expanses of sky that you get around the county. (Although these go hand in hand, it is crucial to note the difference, and I shall clarify it in this post.)

I’ve always been aware of this. In three years of photographing in Norfolk, I have created many, many landscape images designed to showcase those skies – I love them too. You can photograph the exact same location over and over again and get an entirely unique effect each time, with differences in light and cloud patterns. Tremendous stuff if you take every moment you can muster to traipse across Norfolk, as I do.

Such a great many photographers endeavour to convey the Norfolk skies effectively and realistically - only for the results to fall a little flat when served up after processing. There is a very basic reason for this, judging from my personal experience – most of the time, the photographs are in colour. This depicts the skies, but it doesn't necessarily draw attention to them. It is difficult not to notice the flatness of the landscape in Norfolk – that is a rarity anywhere in the United Kingdom – but I wouldn’t be surprised if fewer people truly recognised the big skies that go with it. Anyone, anywhere, can go outside and see the sky, which makes it far easier to take for granted. In the same way, wherever you go, you breathe air, but you don’t usually take any notice of the fact that you’re breathing. If you see a normal-looking sky in a photograph, you don’t usually stop to appreciate it.



Considering this, I began working in monochrome and playing with the tones of the Norfolk skies, often (though not always) burning them in to make them darker and more noticeable. I noticed that these skies became more than just expanses of blue – they took on different shades at different points in the image, and the clouds became more than just clouds – they became prominent points of contrast. It is the basic principle of monochrome photography, to draw attention to a subject’s form, and I think it really works well with Norfolk’s skies – the equivalent of making your outward breaths dark grey. You’d notice them then, wouldn’t you?

Facebook Image Rights...

In recent weeks, it has increasingly come to my attention that photographers are working themselves into a frenzy about the rights controversy concerned with uploading material to Facebook. Some refuse to upload images; others have turned away from Facebook altogether. I suppose this is responsible enough, as we shall see. What encouraged me to look into the matter, however, was hearing of an extreme case of a photographer emailing a client, threatening legal action if they uploaded an image to Facebook that the client had actually purchased. Let’s have a look and see how justified that actually is.

The issue with Facebook is – and do pause for a quick yawn here, I did - clause 2.1 in their Terms & Conditions:

‘For content that is covered by intellectual property rights… photos and videos ("IP content"), you… grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook. This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account…’

The howling turds, you cry. A sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use photographs? Pshaw! Well, I mean, fair’s fair, but that’s just silly…

No, it isn’t a fair agreement. Yes, there is a strong case for crying foul and being protective of one’s intellectual property. It would be ridiculous to so much as attempt to defend such a one-sided clause, even if I were an employee of Facebook, but especially as a photographer myself.

The thing that makes me wonder, though, is that I am not actually aware of a single case of Facebook using a photograph under this clause. I could have missed something, but from here it does look like a bit of a storm in a teacup. Mark Zuckerberg has explained that Facebook ‘need certain licenses in order to facilitate the sharing of content through our service’ – and in the absence of any evidence to suggest that the clause is any more nefarious than that, I for one am prepared to believe him. Photographers seem to be spending more time than can possibly be healthy, worrying about the clause. It turns up in conversations and blogs and has even featured on the radio recently. It’s good that attention is being brought to the issue, but surely there is no need to go overboard.

Which brings us back to our litigious photographer, my inspiration for this piece, whose failure to understand this matter appears to have cost him a client. Whatever may happen in the future with this clause, he appears to be more of a threat to his own business than Facebook is.

For what it’s worth, my message to any photographer would be as follows: Don’t avoid Facebook because of its rights policy. Avoid it because it reduces your images to a poor quality, pixellated mush.

Ho-hum...

I was in an imponderably baffling situation a couple of weeks ago. It was a situation I didn’t think too much about at the time, although the actual extent of the farce became clearer after a few days passed. Names will not be named. This post is being written with nothing more in mind than the hope that someone can explain the, erm, what shall we say – the opaque thinking of the person I spoke with.

I suppose this has happened to most photographers, and more than once as well, but here goes. An eminent figure within the hospitality industry offered me a photographic job, providing fresh images for their brochure. In exchange for the images, I would have been paid… well, let’s simply say I would have been credited in the brochure and given the opportunity to cover future events held at the venue. The unpaid opportunity, might I add. The benefit of this, you ask? I would be allowed to keep any money I generated, selling images from these events to the guests in attendance.

I know, I know…

I enquired as to why the venue in question, given its reputable standing throughout East Anglia, would fail to set aside even the faintest whiff of a budget for such an important task as renewing their brochure. My thoughts on the logic of being paid in further unpaid work, which might or might not eventually be remunerated by people with no connection to the venue whatsoever, remained private.

‘We do have an in-house team of creatives who would normally do it’, was the reply, ‘but they’re busy at the moment, and we’d like the photography done soon. Furthermore, there are a lot of photographers who are interested in doing it, so we don’t see the need to set aside money.’

Right. So. Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable for a company not just to drive down the cost of a professional photographer, on the grounds of the job having many possible candidates, but to completely eliminate it - and then attempt to save face by stating that other people might make the job worthwhile if the photographer continues working for them. Come on. Photographers aren’t that thick. It is the equivalent of buying a new television, and saying ‘well, I shan’t pay for this, but I will recommend you to a friend, and they might buy one.’

I have my own thoughts on the principle of this. If you implicitly attempt to choke an industry by refusing to pay a penny for a photographic project like that – not even peanuts – then you will without doubt end up with the quality you deserve.

I await the results of the venue’s blinkered thinking with quite some degree of anticipation. Unless can anyone elaborate on why people make such strange offers as these…?

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.