Photography: At The Bus Stop

Bet you all thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?

I hadn’t. But a couple of days after I first posted about it, they started digging up the road. They finished digging it up a couple of weeks back, but I was busy with stuff at work, and other randoms stuff, and didn’t really have time to think about it. And anyway: the weather’s improving a bit. And while I do want some shots in the rain, my general preference is likely to be for sunlight. Of some kind.

Those of you wondering what the fuck I’m talking about, by the way, should go here, but the brief version is that I have a number of friends who belong to one or more subcultures that involve dressing up, and I want to do a series of photos with willing people of two shots each – one in normal clothes, the other dressed up in their finery, in identical poses at the bus stop.

I’m planning to get groups of 3-6 people in at a time – that should give me enough time to get decent photos of each person, and mean that we’ve enough space about the place for people to get changed, apply make-up, and so on.

So, for those of you interested (and if you didn’t say you were interested last time, you can always say so now), please indicate dates that you would be willing/able to lug a costume to my place in Tooting, and have a few shots taken of you, in exchange for all the tea and biscuits you can consume, and hi-res digital copies of the two resulting images.

I’ll then drop people emails trying to sort out specific dates/times/groups. I’ll probably want a range of daytime/evening/night shots.

NB: like I said last time – this is a moderately busy bus stop, on a main road. You won’t be out there in your costume very long, and it is literaly outside my front door, but still: it will be pretty public. That’s the appeal of the project – the very ordinary context. So if you’re nervous about being seen in public in the outfit you want to use, do say – we can always try and arrange a night shoot, when the street is emptier, but I would like *some* day shoots if I can…

Everyone follow that? Good. Please to be ticking the boxes.

Shadowplay

Shadowplay

I was round an art exhibition the other week with some friends. Some of it was unmitigated toss, some of it was OK, and mostly it was the building that was the star. But here’s a shot of one of the better works. Still if I’m honest, my photo of this piece appeals to me far more than the piece itself did. This is another shot where I knew exactly what effect I’d be post-processing for, removing detail, and replacing it with heavy shadow, before I even took the shot.

Links For Wednesday 1st April 2009

Links For Friday 27th March 2009

Links For Thursday 26th March 2009

Publication!

If anyone of this parish happens to be the sort of person who might pick up a copy of Bizarre magazine now and again, then you could do worse than pick up this month’s issue, as one of my photos is in it, alongside their review of the Amanda Palmer gig I was at the other month. I sent them a choice of photos, so naturally, they’ve used the one I like least, but still, that’s one of my photos in print that is. I am now an internationally published photographer. (I’ve previously been published in Sweden, some years ago.) Which is nice.

Wireform

Wireform

It’s a photo of someone else’s art, that, on the one hand doesn’t entire do the piece justice. On the other, I shot this working in the pitch sodding black, with a tiny light source, and a less than ideal lens, and it came out as more or less exactly the shot I was after. Go me.

Links For Tuesday 24th March 2009

Drowned in Sound

Specifically, Jon Boden’s completely superb new album “Songs From The Floodplain”. I have owned it for slightly over a week, after a friend recommended it, and I thought “it’s that chap out of Bellowhead, I ought to see what he does solo”. And as a result I appear to be developing a worrying obsession with this set of 12 songs. A quick look reveals that I have listened to this album more than any other in the last 12 months, and I’ve only owned it for a week. To be honest, I’m sort of hoping that writing a bit about it might allow me to let it go, and listen to something else.

It’s a concept album – all the songs are folksongs from a post-apocalyptic England. Never mind just songwriting – much like say, Tom Waits “Mule Variations” this is an album that contains some of the finest writing of any kind I’ve heard so far this year. Really stellar stuff. I appreciate that folksongs about a landscape of dead motorways and crips packets are very much my thing, but even if you don’t have my particular combination of Ballardian futurism and hippy mythologising wired into your brain, it’s still a must-buy.

There are a number of absolutely stand out tracks – on another album, pretty much any of the first six tracks would be the single stand out track, and here there are six of them, culminating in the utterly ace “Beating The Bounds” which is a superb synthesis of ancient myth and post-collapse storytelling, an old folk tradition recast as an invocation of Britannia in the guise of a chav goddess. (And a couplet from another track, the phrase “the sweet perfume of petrol / like a lover’s parting kiss” from “Days Gone By” is just about the best metaphor I’ve heard so far this year.)

And having written this, I’m off to listen to something else for a while. Because otherwise the novelty is going to wear off.