Today has been a good day, not that most days aren’t. I have spent most of the day with people I admire and enjoy working with, and been inspired by a few I have never met – and to think I am being paid for this too!. More importantly I have been asked if I would like to be involved in two particularly exciting and enjoyable projects – one huge, and one bigger. Can’t say more at the moment, but suffice to say that I will post more about them when the time comes, and I expect that time to be in the next few weeks.
Anyway, after finishing up I decided to go to the public gallery at the House of Commons, something which I have never done before, and thoroughly recommend that you do if you get the chance. I then went to the UK premier screening of Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission in Soho, before heading back to my office to set up for a shoot first thing in the morning. Not having a subject to check the lights on, I grabbed a rather old and grubby vacuum cleaner and put it in position, and fired one test shot. Reviewing the image I was struck by how good almost anything can look when it is well lit! Which reminded my of a conversation I had this afternoon about the end of the world being built in Lego, a concept that had me thinking that my sons’ bedroom looks pretty much like the end of the world in Lego. Boys, I have some advice: if you light your room well, it will definitely look better!
A little worried after looking at my last few posts that my loyal readers might think I am a sucker for the clichéd sunset. I’m not. So I think a disclaimer might be in order. Something to the effect that other meterological conditions are available, and that your sanity is at risk if you do not keep up repayments on the many other things that happen before you all the time.
That should do it. Let’s have a little stillness and fog to celebrate:
Been a strange couple of days. Yesterday I found myself dangling from the jib of a crane above south east London – something I quite enjoy. It’s starting to dawn on me, though, that I may not be normal. The site manager described me as “ice-cold calm”, before announcing that he would be feeling the polar opposite if it was him. The view was breathtaking, and I was able to get the shots I had been commissioned to take.
Had a whole load of big commissions book in over the last couple of days too, with my printer working over time, and good news from one of my best clients about use of one of my images – watch this space.
Today I found myself scurrying around under the tracks of the Southend Cliff Railway working for a different client. As I returned to my car I was presented with one of those wonderful moments that nature gives you from time to time. A sunset behind low cloud that was just thick enough to allow you to look straight at it, and just thin enough that you could still see the disc of the sun as it slipped beneath the horizon. And in it were at least a thousand shades of orange.
Today’s news that Virgin Money has bought Northern Rock for £747m should come as no surprise for two reasons. Firstly, it was always the government’s intent (both Labour when they nationalised it, and the coalition government when they took over responsibility) that Northern Rock should be privatised when the time was right, and secondly because those with a long enough interest in these things will remember that Richard Branson expressed more than a passing interest in buying Northern Rock back in early 2008.
My interest in this is of course photographic. When in early 2008 Northern Rock was having all its problems, Branson was heavily involved in another of his ventures – Virgin Galactic. On the 24 of January he held a press conference at the Museum of Natural History in New York to unveil White Knight Two and Space Ship Two. That evening, Virgin Galactic hosted a reception for the “astronauts” and other interested parties. It was at that event that Branson met a London based financier who knew of his interest in Northern Rock. Said financier advised Branson that he acted on behalf of two of the biggest shareholders in Northern Rock at the time and might be in a position to help. I took this photograph at that moment. A second later Branson turned to his aide de camp and told him to set up a meeting with the financier back in London for the end of the week.
Of course, there has been a lot of water under the bridge since then. I had originally hoped that the initial Virgin deal might go through in 2008, at least then I would have had a picture that might have been pivotal to that story. Instead what I have is evidence that when things do not initially go quite the way he might hope, Branson is not put off. I suspect that he is the kind of man who takes the view that all things happen for a reason, and all outcomes pose opportunities rather than problems. Indeed it is precisely that frame of mind that has allowed him to build the Virgin brand into the hugely successful organisation that it is.
So here we are nearly four years later, and Branson has got Northern Rock. Has it worked out better for him? Has the tax payer taken a hit? I’ll leave you to consider that for yourself by reading this rather enlightening article published in the Daily Mail just a few days after the photo above was taken. It was written by one Vince Cable, at the time in the enviable position of being the Treasury Spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, and apparently never likely to have make important decisions to affect the economy… like I said, a lot of water under the bridge since then! Do I have a photo of Vince for you? Of course I do. Happy ruminating.
Spend any great length of time working as a professional photographer, and you learn quickly not to become too absorbed in your subject. Why? Because if you do you fail to look around and see what else might be happening. Yesterday is a case in point. On the set of a short film I had a specific job to do and it did require my concentrated attention, but I still found a moment to look 90 degrees to my left when I was struck by this wonderful light. I let go of my tripod mounted camera, pulled the X100 to my eye and tripped the shutter.
A little while back I posted a photograph and commented on the fact that from time to time your gut tells you to trip the shutter and you get something you weren’t quite expecting. Well it happened to me again yesterday. My wife and I decided to take our boys to Minnis Bay on the north Kent coast in the late afternoon for a spot of paddling, sandcastle building and fish and chips. By way of an aside, if anyone had ever suggested to me that I would be paddling barefoot on the Kent coast while wearing shorts and a t-shirt at 7pm in October I would have said they were barking – still, I suppose it is in our nature: a bit of decent sun and mad dogs and Englishmen come out to play!
Anyway, as the sun set and the tide ebbed away, I turned from the carcass of my cod and chips to see the beautiful colours of the evening on the sand. Something said grab your camera, so I did, dropping to one knee for the angle. I tripped the shutter. I had not even seen the girl walking across the sands, but she chose that instant to leap. I have no idea who she is, or why she jumped, but it sums up a fabulous weekend of unexpectedly good weather nonetheless.
If you have been alive long enough you will know that periodically the national telephone companies will announce that they are adding an extra digit to phone numbers because they are running out. There is always a bit of an outcry that we will have to remember ever longer numbers and that businesses have to spend a fortune reprinting all their stationery etc, but in the end we all get used to it. I remember when my London phone number started 01, then it became 081, then 0181, and then 020. No doubt there will be more.
So what has all this to do with photography? Well, not a lot. But it does have to do with this site and my main site. At the moment the internet uses something called the IPv4 protocol. Designed in the 1970s, it was built to accommodate about 4 billion devices connecting to the network. That seemed like a lot at the time, but the explosive growth of the internet means we’re closing in on that number. In order to allow the internet to continue to grow, a new protocol has been created: IPv6.
Unfortunately, the IPv4 and IPv6 networks are incompatible. Unless you have a gateway of some kind if you’re on one you can’t visit websites on the other. And, even more unfortunately, the gateway solutions typically are hardware-based and cost tens of thousands of dollars per website to deploy. This means that most of the world’s websites are unavailable for the 1% of the internet that is already using IPv6, and the percentage of users on IPv6-only networks is only going to grow.
Without putting too fine a point on it, I will be buggered if I intend to sit idly by while my web presence becomes less and less visible, but equally I do not have the tens of thousands of dollars to invest in beating the problem. As a result I have recently begun using CloudFlare, a free online based resource that improves user experience of my website, and as of today allows me to make my sites IPv6 ready. If you have a website, it might be worth your looking into this too.
With thanks to CloudFlare for the info and the solution.
What ever line of business you are in, there will always be people and companies that you love working with. I am lucky in that I have many clients that I am very fond of, but one in particular is Sensei Tim Steel. I have known Tim for about 10 years, and he is one of the most affable and enjoyable people to spend time with, and I had the pleasure again this morning, shooting a series of images for a new website for his karate school, Zendo Kai. Don’t be fooled by the picture, he’s a wonderfully calm and peaceful character!
I was directed to a short film on the CNN website today called “Film: Not Dead Yet”.
Among working photographers that should come as no surprise. But I am intrigued as to how often I am stopped by people I encounter in my work who enquire whether I am shooting on film or digitally. Clearly there is an expectation among layfolk that if you are a “professional” photographer, you must being doing something that sets you apart from the hoi palloi.
This is a slightly curious film, certainly in so far as the manner of its narration (it gives the impression of being a computerised archivist in a library of the future), but with contributions from six proponents of doing it the old fashioned way, including no less a man than Elliott Erwitt, it achieves its effect of painting analogue practice as the “true” photography. There are many that no doubt will take issue with that idea, and Erwitt to his credit tempers any such notion with what I regard as an absolute truth that to be a successful photographer you have first and foremost to be curious.
Personally, I regard all these arguments as being so much hot air and a distraction from the world we should be taking an interest in. Analogue or digital, they are all just tools. It is the subject which interests me most.
I implore you to watch this brilliant documentary by Seamus Murphy. If you do you might just start to understand... http://t.co/vZGqAP78 [#]
What is the collective noun for porn stars anyway? [#]
Is anyone else finding that they are being followed by a plethora of porn stars, or is it just me that they find irresistable? [#]
RT @SarahbaxterSTM: Stuart Franklin of Magnum says Michael Rand, ex art director of @TheSTMagazine and Don McCullin deserve knighthoods. Lets start campaign! [#]
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