Life: drugs

I was walking down Queen Street tonight. These street performers gave me a can of Guinness. They were pleased with the acoustic stuff I played and also with the House of the Risin Sun. I said it was shit. Even so, they gave me a can. I kept on walking towards home. I got to the next performance. There was a cute girl next to the guy playing. She didn't kiss me. A guy asked me someting.

- You want a sip? - I ask.
- Yeah.

Bloody bastard gives it a loooooong sip.

- Man, take care.
- What you mean?
- I need to go to bed, that's my valium.
- No, come on.
- Seriously, I assure you I have problems sleeping.
- Man, don't tell me that.
- No, I'm not joking, I can't go to bed before three or so, and that if I'm drunk.
- Come on, I've been taking extasy.
- Well, I've been taking valium.
- No, seriously, how many valiums where in that can?
- Two.
- What? I've been drinking, taking extasy and xxxxx, what's going to happen to me?
- Don't know.
- Fuck you! You didn't tell me there was valium in that can!
- I didn't know you were going to down it...
- Fuck you!
- Seriously.
- Fuck you! I've been taking extasy! Man! I can't mix! Please!
- Hahahaha, come on! I'm just joking!
- And the valium?

I love being a bastard sometimes. I'm not sober, though. But I like it when people give me free beer. Some north waelian people also gave me a fiver tonight for being shooting. Life is weird. People seem to like me even if I'm a cynical bastard.

Elsewhere: art and artlessness

I just read this entry in the B blog (what's with all these letters?). I quite much enjoyed this bit when Blake writes about a group snapshot taken 21 years ago in the small village he is from:

"This particular photo seems to support that idea that the more "artful" a photographer attempts to be --the more referential and self-conscious-- the more quickly it is forgotten, while photographers who record reality in less stylized documentary way eventually gain recognition. Some of the greatest photographers of all time --Watkins, Jackson, Atget, Disfarmer, etc-- didn't think of themselves as artists so much as documentary recorders. The recognition as art came later, as artlessness became arty."

The picture he talks about is actually quite cute. It would be nice to see two dozens on the same line by now... but who knows where they're buried. I guess that with the ability of people to delete the crap from their digital cameras, thousands of potential future artworks are lost every week. Will we never see the proof of people picking their noses in school pictures again? Damn.

Bedtime, I managed to arrange greasy breakfast for tomorrow.

Technique: things nobody told you about...

Today I dropped by WHSmith to see if they could help me out with the archival process. I mean, when you shoot and shoot and shoot you end up with lots of negatives. These negatives accumulate in negative preservers (Printfile is pretty cheap and it has a useful tagging system). The negatives preservers accumulate then into ring binders, and ring binders go inside cardboard boxes. So you end up with a big mess. Well, that was a reason to go to WHSmith... they had sales as well. 75% off two ring binders, three big cardboard boxes to store them for £1 and a ring binder with a zipper to carry prints for almost nothing (£2.49). But my most amazing discovery were the tags. Damn, I hoped there was something like this. Small white sticker tags for a quid and the most amazing of all... coloured spot stickers for a quid as well! Finally I can mark all the keepers in each roll by placing a tag of the adequate colour (yellow for stuff you shouldn't forget, green for keepers, red for things that already go inside an edit). Happy times.

Next I'll post something about editing. But editing is impossible without lots of ringbinders, stickers and small prints, so it's good we go through here.

And how do you make sense of your mess?

Technique: Olympus XA-1

I wouldn't usually talk about cameras, but with time the very snapshotty and technically limited XA-1 has got to be my camera of choice. It is a normal film camera with a 35mm lens, no way to focus or change aperture. It measures the light with an old selenium cell that usually overexposes during daylight and you can only set it up for 100 or 400 ASA film. But it's terribly small, easy to carry and a no-worrier... as far as you shoot with flash. At night, things that are between about 1.2m and 2.5m will be focused and exposed. Framing is as simple as looking through the viewfinder.





I smashed mine badly yesterday and the flash stopped working and the cover opened. I have to give it to a mate one day to see if he can fix it. In the meantime I'm looking on ebay for an XA2 (more sophisticated... now you are supposed to be able to choose focus) with a larger flash. My idea was to carry two XA's, one in each pocket. One of them has a smaller flash and it's used for most situations when shooting. The other one would have a larger flash and be dedicated for shooting infrared flash and film. Finally all my needed equipment arrived. Back to ebay...


Picture by Maciej Dakowicz.

Life? John

I was surprised to hear last night in Kiwi's that John had passed away last Friday at the age of seventy nine. He was one of the regulars at the Staff Club and I hadn't seen him since they closed down the pub. It's hard to keep in touch with the people from there as now they are sparsely distributed between different venues. We had a brindis in his memory (Maciej, Holga, me). I'll always remember him like a man with much more success with women than I've ever had or could one day achieve (that comment always made him smile). It's strange that these things don't sink and one still thinks that you can bump into a person even if it's simply not going to happen.





- in the image, Stuart and John

Life: so long and thanks for all the fish

Flickr is one of the most inbreed photographical communities that you can bump into. Some of the people there publish pictures almost daily, and these images don't have any other purpose than hanging up there for the admiration of other fellow flickerites and in a year or two they'll be history. But being a community of communities (thousands of flickr groups) some people try to make something out of it and shoot consistent things. I guess it's just a matter of time till some of the people who have been for years shooting the same 'project' end up doing something outside flickr (in the real world) with it. And so much inbreeding and selfadulation also takes a good share of time, so in a way I'm not surprised that some of the mates I admire are leaving the service. There are better ways to present images than flickr, for sure.

So this post goes for those few that have kept not only street photography but arts photography in general alive for me in flickr, and now are leaving for a better life elsewhere on the net. I know that it isn't the end of it, and I'll keep on bumping into their pictures here and there. It's more of a transition period than an abrupt ending in my head. Now that I think about it... I don't really know why I write this, as I stay in touch with some of them more now than when they were active in flickr. Ah, now I know... I'll miss see all their rubbish and feel bad about being fed with only finished edits! That might be it....





Ben Roberts, who's pretty busy with enough projects already and seems to be more committed to portraiture than street photography nowadays. As far as I know he is in good health and will not stop shooting anytimes soon. If you seen around, feed gently with beer. Ben has deeply contributed to the development of my sense of humour.





Hin Chua, pretty busy as well, but easier to fill up with beer. Not to be given lager after midnight. Nice guy to have a chat about photographic literature.





Naveen Jamal, who I have kept less in touch but whose pictures are pretty much worth checking as well.





And Raoul Gatepin with whom I discuss too much rubbish at worrying hours (mostly due to time difference).


All those guys contributed in one way or another to how I shoot now, even if I really don't shoot like them. Every so often by dropping references, comments or tips, and other times, by feeding constantly interesting images into the vast seas of flickr.

Well, now the moment everybody has been waiting for: So long and thanks for all the fish!


Sidenote: I'm an invited guest at the F Blog thanks to Joanna Kinowska.

How to: Infrared Flash

Many people seem not to be aware of this, but there is a way to use flash without anybody seing the light. The method is simple, the light you use is out of the spectrum that humans can see and the film you use is sensible to it. Perfect for shy photographers or when nobody wants the scene to be perturbed... lets say hello to infrared flash photography!



- by Weegee



- image from The Park, by Kohei Yoshiyuki



Those are probably the two authors that right now come to my mind as taking the most bang for the buck of shooting with infrared flash: Weegee and Kohei Yoshiyuki (who was previously spotlighted here). It happens to be that the technique for producing these images is not that complicated at the end of the day, and one of the contributors to the flickr group Children of Weegee wrote a whole step by step guide to how to build an invisible infrared flash. Check it out. All you need is a film camera, a flash (powerful if possible), some infrared film (the Kodak one is going out of stock and is the best) and an infrared filter for the flash. Well, and glue, scissors and cardboard. Welcome back to primary!