Amy's engagement photos

Hot off the presses:

Loaded Dice Artwork

Just a quick one. Finished the artwork for the new Loaded Dice single and album. The band has just signed to the US label DPulse. Here's the artwork:

There's another in the pipeline, but that's for another day.

Oh, here's a link to the band:
http://www.theloadeddice.co.uk/

And DPulse:
http://dpulse-america.com/wordpress/
(That's not my picture of the band, btw, just in case you're wondering.

Here are my pictures:
http://www.philip-smith.com/Photography/PhilipSmithMusicManchester/10541602_R65aj#797457710_a9zjB
And here:
http://www.philip-smith.com/Music/Loaded-Dice/12296798_5R7rg#877500921_gYdpj

More Yasmin and Dan

As promised, More Yasmin and Dan shots. As you can see, I've gone for the montage. Everyone loves a montage, don't they.
Well, I do.

Yasmin and Dan's engagement

Here's Yasmin and Dan. I've got some more to put up, but I have to go shopping now, so will do it later, if Sainsbuy's doesn't break my spirit and grind me into the dirt. It's lunchtime, and they never have enough people on the tills.
These were taken a while back, when the blossom was on the trees, and I have some other really good ones. They are a great couple, and were really responsive to having their pictures taken. They were naturals, which makes life so much easier.
More soon.

A little flash with that?

These are shots of the band Loaded Dice who played in Liverpool recently. The lighting was actually rather poor, as is often the case with live music, but I tried using an off camera flash, held low to give the impression of footlights, and I think it worked rather well. The trouble with flash at live music venues is that it tends to kill any atmosphere (well, flash anywhere kills any atmosphere, when it's on camera). Of course, the problem with not using flash is that you have to rely on prime lenses with ultra fast aperture (f1.8 or 1.4). That's great in that you get a nice high shutter speed, and no camera shake, but the downside is that the depth of field (the area in focus), is about the width of a credit card. Great if you're shooting someone as animated, say, as Kraftwerk, but for someone a little more animated (in that they breath), you tend to focus on the eyes, then they move, and you take the picture and end up with the tip of their nose in focus, or an ear, or in Iggy Pop's case, the space he used to occupy before he hurled himself into the crowd and started smearing peanut butter all over his chest (or his member if he's feeling particularly fruity that evening).
This was not shot with a prime, but rather a 10-20mm - nice and wide which gets band and audience in one go, but at f4, you simply have to use flash.
What more to say?
That's it, I think.
Oh, except my ears were ringing for days after.
But luckily the peanut butter stayed in the jar.



There are more pictures of the band here:

Loaded Dice, Liverpool

And there are a couple of shots here from my friend Antonio. Check out his other work, also. It's very good:

Antonio at Flickr

On bicycles

“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”

So said HG Wells, writer of turn of the century science fiction, and, I assume, keen cyclist.

Then again, the automobile was only a decade or so old, so I suppose there wasn't much vehicular choice.

This is a picture of Sean and his bike. It's in my sister's back garden. Sean had ridden there for my nephew's first holy communion. Or confirmation. I forget. I'm quite fond of bicycles, so am drawn to it. I have far too many bicycles. Or so my wife says. I tell her that there aren't nearly enough, seeing as there's still space to pick our way through the garage to the washing machine. If we had to move a bike to do the laundry, then we'd have too many. Actually, I'd probably see it as just having too small a garage.
I like to tinker, and find it relaxing. I buy bikes from charity shops and fix them up with a mind to selling them on should the bottom fall out of the photographic and commercial art world. Working with your hands is a fine antidote to staring at a computer screen all day. Quite often there is blood and swearing, but sometimes you need a bit of blood and swearing to let you know you're not an automaton, which, being propped in front of a monitor most of the day is how I get to feel. When it's not raining, I take the kids to school on bikes. I have a utility bike, which is very continental - it fits two kids and all the school peripherals on the back. I swoosh through the grimy Reddish streets twice a day, defying the congestion like a true European. Unfortunately, the notion of using a bike as anything other than a toy on which to do wheelies  the wrong way up the street has not percolated down from Amsterdam or Freiburg or Copenhagen to the blue hazed streets of Reddish. Indeed, riding anything other than a battered mountain bike or a matt black BMX here is seen as being about as manly as this: link
Not that I care. It's just when they start chucking rocks that I take offence.
I also go away with my friend Graham for a week or so each year. We cycle in Germany, usually, because Germany is an excellent country, much misunderstood and ignored by the masses. Don't say I said that, though. Otherwise someone might hear and go and discover it for what it it - mystical, magical, and fully functioning - which is something you can;t really say of Spain or Italy.
Graham and I tend to ride old fashioned bicycles, though, and tootle along without any real drive. We don't go for the lycra-look, but rather the happy amateur. I suspect we see ourselves as characters in a Jerome K Jerome comedy. Absurd is perhaps the word serious cyclists would use.

But anyway, I don't hold it against them, and am happy looking at Sean's carbon fibre racing machine. I ask him if I can take his and its picture. He seems only too happy. We spend about ten minutes taking the pictures, and about an hour talking all things velo.

As for the image; I've been trying a HDR effect recently, which is a way of combining two differently exposed shots to increase the dynamic range of the shot.
Typically, a camera, especially a digital camera, cannot mimic the way the human eye simultaneously sees detail in shadow and highlight. Ironically, this mimicry gives images a certain unreality. I'm not sure if it's for me, though. HDR shots tend to be a bit bright, a bit haloey. I prefer them to be muted. Er, dour is probably the word to use.

Perhaps not the most  popular a look on the highstreet, but there you go. As with my choice of bikes, I just seem to have a thing inside me which goes against the grain. Which I don't mind so much. It gets you through the day. Blood and a lot of swearing or no blood and swearing.

A little more ordinariness, please

What can I say? Easter holidays plus a week with daughter number two off nursery with an eye infection have curtailed my output somewhat, but everyone's back at school/nursery now, so the wheels start to turn once more.
So what's new?
Pictures of Suzanne and Paul.
They call them engagement shots, though it's not as if they've just got engaged. It's more a pre-shoot, I suppose, so they can look back and remember how young and carefree they were before being ground into the dirt by months of wedding planning.
These were taken a few weeks ago. We met in the park and the branches were still bare, but the crocuses were out. I took maybe forty images, and much as there are more traditional ones, the kiss, the looking off into the distance, this is my favourite because they are just walking hand in hand (and because there's a splash of lens flare, something of which I'm always fond).
I read somewhere that you should always have a couple walking into a shot, so you see they've got somewhere to go, as opposed to walking out of it, which gives a certain tension. But to me this is a bit too didactic. I like this shot because the eye reads from left to right, and in so doing, travels along the horizon, onto Paul's face, down his arm, where it settles on his hand in Suzanne's. It then goes up to her face, across to Paul's, and down to the hands again.
To me it captures a little moment of ordinariness, which, when you point a camera at someone, is quite often very difficult to do.

Just a quickie...

Finished some publicity material.
I very much like this this one, in a traditional, none traditional way. We have the stairs and the bride and the big dress sweeping down and leading the eye and all that, but I like the way she's laughing. I forget what I'd said. I imagine it was extremely funny, though. After all, it's a one stop shop for laughs, whenever I'm around.
No, seriously.
Of course, I like "Photography for Life". It's what it should be about. None of that high key, gurning nonsense some studios go in for.
Cough, Venture, cough.
Oh, he's off again, I hear you say.
But I'm just waiting for them to did a toe in the wedding market. I'm sure they can really ruin it for everyone. If they do, I'll feel duty bound to gather a mob of we peasant photographers with our pitchforks and rakes (or should that be tripods and lightstands), and march, torches burning (flashes firing) to the big stone windmill on the hill where Dr Venturestein has created his beast.
Of course, if you've seen the films, you'll know the beast always gets away. But at least we'll have a brouhaha as we watch the windmill burn.
Brouhaha. Now there's a word that isn't used enough these days.

Trash the dress...actually, don't

I see everyone's offering Trash the Dress sessions now.

If you're unfamiliar with the whole Trash the Dress concept, it's best described as monkey dung on a cracker.
Actually, I was originally going to compare it to sh*t on a teacake, but that was problematic, as I rather like a teacake with a bit of marmalade on a Saturday morning, and I was concerned that the mental image would stick, and that'd be another little corner of my life ruined.

But anyway, if you must know, Trash the Dress photography is actually a sub genre of wedding photography - a separate session shot a day or so after the wedding (and charged as extra, naturally) which involves the bride and usually the groom in some setting which is not wedding related - you know, the beach, a bit of urban wasteland, a farm - during which the bride is photographed being generally non-bridal (often, though, in a glowing, beautiful, bridal sort of way) and getting her dress a bit messy, and sometimes her face.
If I read it correctly, it seems to be touted as a way of the bride casting aside all her pent up frustrations with the fascist oppression of the modern wedding machine, which would have her a medieval chattel or 1960s Stepford Wife, and, in a way which juxtaposes the archaic, prissy and hypocritical against the rough shorn edges of the real world, regain control of her inner self.  Or something.

It's all very authentic, I'm sure - though I've yet to see anyone so authentic they photograph one of these sessions down our local council estate, in front of a burning Vauxhall Astra while the Police in riot gear try and bundle hoodies into the back of the van, or in the casualty department of the local hospital, with the drunks and security guards and the fist-fight victims spitting blood and teeth on the floor, or in the aftermath of an Iraqi suicide bombing, with lumps of this and that still spattered on the shop-fronts and telephone poles.
Now that would be authentic.
Sadly, I imagine there's a wedding photographer somewhere - New York, probably, thinking: hmmmm. I wonder...

Now don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm against breaking out of the traditionalist wedding photography genre, and finding new ways to express oneself and create interesting and intriguing images, but the trouble is, while sold to the client as cutting edge, once you've seen one TTD (as I'm sure it's already being called), you've pretty well seen them all.

I recently Googled the dreaded TTD and found so many images identical in style and location that smoke was soon coming out of my mousewheel as I scrolled down, down, down into the depths of photographic hell.
Well, that's probably putting it a bit strongly, but I'm trying to make a point, here.
In my first edit, I did include some links, but I'm not sure if that is very gentlemanly, and anyway, it won't take you a moment to find them in all their club-footed similarity.
"I rather like them," my wife says.
"But mix them up and tell me who shot what," I reply.
You get my point.
A monkey with a Polaroid and a Press hat could get similar results, and still have time to rip the windscreen wipers off the wedding car and take a dump in the bridegroom's top hat. It's all just formula: On the beach, in the water, in the sand, in the mud. On and on and on with such breathtaking lack of imagination that I stagger and have to grab for the wall like it's Friday night in Newcastle and I've been drinking with the big boys.

Here's a quote from the Times online, concerning a teacher who'd just completed a Trash The Dress session:

“However individual you try to make your wedding, you are playing a traditional role,” she says. “These pictures were more of an expression of who I really am.” She climbed trees in her handmade, strapless ivory gown. “I had no regrets and no intention of saving the dress,” she says. “It got wet, muddy and frayed. My husband thought it was crazy, but loved the pictures - he said I looked so natural.”

Now call me jaded, but the way I see it, she probably wasn't actually expressing who she really was. Nor, I suspect, did she look totally natural. After all, what's natural about climbing a tree in a wedding dress? All she was probably doing was stepping into a new convention and expressing who someone else was; probably an American with a vastly differing lifestyle than hers. If she'd wanted to truly express who she was, I would have advised her to get someone to photograph her asleep with her face in a pile of marking, or staring into space at Starbucks while trying to work out if she can make her mortgage payments after her wage freeze and the bills come in from the big day, or sitting at her father's bedside, he now being in the coronary care unit after witnessing his daughter, at some over eager photographer's bidding, put that £4000 dress in a garden shredder.

Of course, creativity and wedding photography do not always walk hand in hand down the aisle, say their vows and exit the church to confetti, blissful sunshine and a future of long afternoons drinking Pimms. It's often a somewhat staid relationship with quite frumpy children, and I suppose any attempt at injecting a little art into the proceedings should be welcomed.

But where really is the art is TTD? All I see is marketing, bombast and conceit. All I see is vacuity masquerading as creativity - a formulaic template sold as insight. Hey, what can I say - this is my mental dictatorship, and I say it as I see it.
And it's not even that new. I seem to remember Luis Bunuel has a scene in Un Chien Andalou with a bride in flowing white dress running down a coal barge. It's all smoke and dirt counterposed against the purity and delicacy of the white dress. And that was 1929. Next take a look at Clifford Coffin's work from the late 40s of debutants in ball gowns in wrecked houses. I know, not wedding dressed, but it's prettymuch the same deal.
And, while we're at it, who thought up that name? They never invited me to the meeting. Though that's probably a good thing, seeing as I would have suggested something a bit less disingenuous, such as Surrender More Cash or Flog the dead horse, or Please make my pictures look really dated in a decade or so.
I know that last one is a bit long-winded, but I was always fond of a bit of hyperbole.

Of course, ever doomed as a Cassandra, my words of protest and blistering insight will go unheeded by the greater photographic world (probably because I have about three readers, none of them industry big-wigs) and this dire trend of TTD will, I'm sure, gather pace and steamroller the industry into an ever more rigid and depressed (or should that be depressing) mould by convincing brides that they are buying caviar while in reality it's beans (albeit in a very fancy can).

If you do want caviar, try the images by these chaps:

Allister Freeman
Jonas Peterson

There's more out there, I'm sure, but Google's algorythms what they are, it's a hard job sorting the wheat from the chaff when you simply type in creative wedding photography.

For me, these two photographers do something different with the genre, without the need to whoop and high-five. They capture a humility, a poignance, and a creativity which to my eye resides in the space between the photographer, the subject and the moment.

And there's not bride in a tree to be seen.

Thank the Lord.




Edit. I did originally include another photographer whose work I really admire - beautiful, grainy, European stuff with real character. But then it was pointed out to me that he'd been voted number one TTD photographer by someone or other, and I had another look at his website (which I hadn't looked at for a while), and there were indeed, in amongst the dour, gritty brilliance, pictures on the beach with the happy couple in the water and all that...
Oh for shame. The mental turmoil. Had I been too quick to dismiss this genre? Had I just been on my high horse? Should I give my fellow practitioners more of a break? How many question marks can I fit in one sentence? Sure, it's a tough industry out there, and I suppose I shouldn't get all hoity toity while other photographers are just trying earn a crust. But for me the fact remained that I want to see some personal expression, some depth, some creativity in my chosen field. And unfortunately I don't see it in the mass of TTD photography. I just get tired of seeing the same old same old same old same.
And if you don't agree, then, being the dictator I am, I'll just send the tanks in. Probably to a beach somewhere, with a happy couple frolicking in the water and some photographer saying "Yeah, baby, oh yeah, trash it, trash it," or some other such monkey dung.

The secret to a happy life is...

Timing.

When  Napoleon sent his elite guard against Wellington at the battle of Waterloo, what he didn't know was that Wellington had his reserves lie down behind a rise in the hill. Come the moment when Bony thought he had it in the bag, the Iron Duke told his chaps to stand up and bang, there endeth the The Hundred Days.

Timing, see.

I was in a discussion on line a while back, which centred on what was the most important skill a good photographer needed, and there was a lot of talk of technique, knowledge, being able to frame, but I differed.
I went for timing.
Oh, yes, you need all that technical knowledge - how to light a subject, which f stop to use, how to get a subject to pose, not to forget your cameras when on a job, but if you ask me, and a lot of people do (which is a lie), without that killer instinct to get the shot at the moment it really counts, then the rest is all just blossom in the wind.

I've seen the work of plenty of photographers, especially wedding photographers, who know all the tricks, but just miss the crucial moment. There's a hand in front of a face, an eye looking past the camera, a granny choking on a Werther's Original.
I'd post some links, but I'm too much of a gentleman for that.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I'm the be all and end all. And it's not really a great insight. I mean, Henri Cartier-Bresson's Decisive Moment had been doing the rounds since my dad was putting spiders down back of Girl Guides' shirts, but it's the ability to hit and not miss that really cuts it. Indeed, I'd even go as far as to say a blurry picture, with the wrong exposure is better than a perfect image that just misses the moment, even by a bat's squeak.

Of course, it's a lot easier these days, when you can take the equivalent number of photographs in an afternoon that Cartier-Bresson and his snap-happy brother took in his entire lifetime (probably). You have the option to pick and choose, but it's surprising how those decisive moments can still slip between the shutter-press. Especially when you're more concerned with calculating your shutter speed to keep up with your focal length or selecting your focus point to ensure you don't have to recompose or just cruising the buffet looking for the little sausages on sticks no one seems to do any more.

Consider the picture above. A band called Loaded Dice. I was along to photograph their gig (is that word still used among the young?) at the Bakers Vaults in Stockport. They were just setting up, and I wasn't really sure what I was shooting just yet - hadn't figured out the light, the mood, the character. I was at the edge of the stage, which, when they started playing proper, would be taken up with audience, and could see a spot light which, I knew, would create a really nice halo if the singer just walked in front of it, which of course he never did. Well, not until the soundcheck was over. Then, while walking off stage, he moved just where I wanted him. I took the picture. A little too early, a little too late, and there'd be that diamond ring flare you get when a solar eclipse breaks, and I wouldn't have got that lovely highlight right the way around his head.
A purist (my photography teacher at college, for one), would complain the photo's too dark, and shaken his head and told me to use some fill flash next time to get more definition in the face, or a higher ISO to get some more background detail. But I wanted a bit of character, a bit of atmosphere. And anyway, I always was one for a bit of What on earth is that (which, by the way, is what my wife said when she was proof reading this)
"Art, my dear," I replied. "The briefest moment of clarity in a nebulous world."
She rolled her eyes.

 I have other shots, and they are good (if I do say so myself). You can see them here:

www.philip-smith.com/music

But this one was my favourite, not only for all the reasons above, but because I was the hunter back from the forest, the killer, the sniper carving another notch in his rifle stock. I was, for a moment, the Iron Duke, atop my horse, watching Bony's men fall like skittles. I would have been gracious in victory, though. I would have shown him the image on the back of my camera, and shaken his hand and said something like "Nice try, old boy." I would even have considered wearing my hat sideways like his, seeing as that way the brim wouldn't interfere with looking through the viewfinder. Of course, I wouldn't have told him that. Well, maybe I would, if he'd looked like he'd been about to cry.
But being Bony, I imagine that wouldn't have happened. Not until he saw Beef Wellington on the menu, at any rate.
And I'd be there to get a picture of that moment, too. What a pro.

It only laughs when I hurt

I need a new lens.

Well actually, I don't need anything.

I want a new lens.

A new lens would make life easier.

A new Canon f1.2 85mm would be a great wedding lens, especially for photographing the bride and groom inn those big, dark Churches and Stately homes in Stockport, Manchester and Cheshire (did you notice what I did there?). It would allow me to capture people in dark situations without raising my ISO levels, which causes noise.

I don't mean noise like: "Oh my God, what the hell are all those speckles over my picture?" But rather, well, speckles all over the picture (they are caused by heat in the sensor when the sensitivity is turned up, but I get into the blah, blah, blah part of the message now where I might as well be talking Hubble Telescope - which, by chance, I will be later).

But that Canon F1.2 85mm is something like £1500. 

That's the trouble with photography now - In the old days the mournful sighing came when you bought a body, not a lens. You would buy a body in the 1950s or 1960s, and know you would probably be handing it on to your grandchildren in the 1990s. Not that they'd know what it was. They'd be like the monkeys in 2001 shrieking around the monolith, wondering where the On button was and how you got it to geotag.
You'd photograph an entire life on a single camera, probably with a single lens. If you were a bit of a snapper, you might have two lenses. That was my father's story.
Nowadays, bodies are disposable.
On top of our piano, I have three Canon cameras - a 20D, which cost me £1200 five years ago, a canon 400D, which cost £400, and my new 7D, which cost about £1500, or thereabouts. I also have six lenses of varying quality and settings, which in all cost about £2000 (which is actually not that much - a lot of them were second hand). I assume it will all be pretty useless in fifty years' time. In fact, I think I can actually hear the value of it all dripping slowly down the piano side and soaking into the floorboards. It is the sound of emulsified tears, and way off around the globe, in Japan, there's the sound of laughing in an underground vault.
Of course, I suppose you could argue that I will just convert that money into memories over the lifetime of the cameras, and to some extent that's true, but it's also true that memories aren't the preserve of photography, and I could have done it all, and actually, probably better, with a pencil and a diary. I could have done that with a cave wall and some vegetable pigment, if I'd really been pushed.
That Fed 3 in the picture up there is about sixty years old, and you know what? It still works. Actually, being Russian, it would still work if it had been in Rasputin's pocket when he was shot and stabbed and strangled and poisoned and dumped in a freezing river. It would still work if it had been shot out of a Cossack's hand and then bombed by a Stuka then run over by a tank. I imagine it would have been pulled out of the smouldering ruins, popped in a pocket, carried halfway across Europe, banged, dinted and charred, and still captured the image of some Ivan hoisting the Red Flag over some rubble that was once a city.
Of course, the Ivan doing the photography wouldn't have been able to review the pictures on the back, and if he'd wanted to change IS0, he'd have had to roll back the film, open the back, and change it for another, and he'd have had to set the exposure for himself, and focus, and then remember to wind it on after taking the picture, and, and if he'd wanted to use a flash he'd have to set that up as well, using the little number wheel on the back to calculate the aperture (from memory)...

How did people manage all those years ago?

Oh, I remember, they had more time and less choice.

Of course, it could be worse, I could have gone with Nikon instead of Canon, whose lenses, I understand, are even more expensive than Canon's. Actually, I think they are more expensive than the Hubble Space Telescope (told you). Christ knows what they are made of. Precious metals, unicorn horn and the hair from hind leg of Zeus's pet Llama, I imagine.

Rachel brought me back her father's little digital camera - a Lumix FZ7, which she has inherited. It was his step into the digital waters after he had finally, though not quite, decided to abandon film.
Ten years ago, I would have knelt down and worshipped that camera as if I were an animal skin wearing forest dweller and it were a visitor from outer space. But now I look at it and consider it acceptable for carrying around as a back up when my camera phone can't do a better job (that's actually not true, it's better than my camera phone, but you get the point).
It's essentially a snapshot camera where but a few years ago, it was King Kong stomping on mud huts.

Where will it all end?

A lot of money in Mr Canon's pocket and much less in mine, I imagine.

I just wish they'd just stop with the inventing stuff, or if they do have to invent stuff, just keep it to themselves - you know, get the holographic camera out at parties at Canon HQ, take pictures of the saki-fueled shenanigins, then put it away and snigger the day after. That's what I'd do, anyway. 

And perhaps that's why I'm in Stockport and they're in Tokyo with the geishas and the 24 hour sushi chefs, and, what's more, my money.

Sadly, they probably have a whole secrion in their bank vault put aside for my money, and you know what, I imagine there's still plenty of room.

Integration is such a problem

Not that I mean 1960s, Alabama type integration, but rather a getting my house in order type integration. And when I say getting my house in order, I'm not talking about dying either - though if truth be told, I always suspect I am dying in some way or other that the doctors simply haven't found yet - but rather, linking twitter with this and that, cleaning up blog names, linking my blog with this and that, linking it all to Facebook and Linkeln and Delicious and MySpace and all those other websites I have waiting in a big jar in cybersapce for me to reach in and pluck out and get to do something for me, and all to try and get my ratings higher with Google. 
You see, if you google me now ("Philip Smith Photography"), or google, say "Wedding Photographer, Stockport", or "Wedding Photographer, Manchester", you'll see I fall somewhere south of Captain Scott's cabin. 
That's not so good for business.


So, blog, tweet, blog, tweet. Facebook, blog, tweet, blog. On and on it goes.


I don't really like twitter. What can you say in so few words? I wouldn't mind if everyone wrote Haiku. "At waking light comes/the smell of pancakes warm soul/Happiness downstairs" But it always ends up: "Just spilt coffee on my keyboard...Bummer," or "Kuel fart ap for new fone. LOL" or, worst of all "Sittin' on tourbus with a brewski. Just played Georgia. You guys Rock."
So what did I write?
Something about a band I photographed at the weekend, which is the slightly spurious link to the photo above, and the weather. Or was I complaining about Search Engine Optimisation? I can't honestly remember.

Hmmm, says it all.

Like a child with ADD, Google is apt to glaze over when it doesn't see fresh content, and so I have to tweet and blog daily. My first instinct was just to write gibberish to fill the page, dropping in a keyword here and there, like my web address or write a sentence over and over like "Exquisite Wedding Photographs Stockport, www.philip-smith.com" but even I have some pride (just). Unfortunately, though, it does mean that I can no longer afford to spend entire weeks looking into the near distance, crafting sentences in my mind which would make Bono and the Dalai Lama look at me, look at each other, and nod in approbation. 
Of course, that's not to say I'm not going to drop in the keywords (actually, you may have noticed that I've already managed it a multitude of times) but at least I'll try and wrap them up in something of worth, however quickly I have to bang it out.
Hey, why don't you try and spot how shamelessly I do it each day? It might keep you mildly amused while you spill coffee on your keyboard and tweet how much it sux trying to clean it off with your hankie.  

The Postman Cometh

You don't know how difficult it is. Graham knows how difficult it is, because he sits there patiently while I take a test shot, then check its levels, then adjust the aperture, then lower the flash output, then take another picture, then move the diffuser and the reflector, then take another picture and get rid of the reflector and try a second flash, then move the flash towards the wall.
Flash is a pain. The trouble is it's all so overpowering. To avoid images which look like your drunk granny took them on her instamatic, you have to work - unless, that is, you have one of those studios with the big skylights, and an assistant who runs around and does it all for you as you wave your hands and say things like "I just don't think it's there, yet." Or "Can we get a bit more...oomph?" Or "Surely I had a cup of tea a moment ago, and what's happened to the gramophone?"
I'm talking about Cecil Beaton, there, by the way, whose work I do actually like, but did in the studio about as much as my father did in the kitchen, which, believe me, was not much. I'll illustrate the point by noting that my father's signature dish was baked potato with a fried egg on top. And when I say it was his signature dish, I mean he cooked it once, when my mother was in hospital, and the chipshop was closed, and he simply couldn't get out of entering the kitchen and seeing what all the shiny knobs did. Where he picked up the knowledge to bake a potato and fry an egg, I don't know. Perhaps it was inherited memory. Where he got the inspiration to combine the baked potato and fried egg, I do know. Sheer necessity. I'm actually surprised he didn't add some cheese, ketchup and ice cream; those being the only other things in our house which didn't require cooking. Well, those and the dog food, which I assume he would have moved onto should the potato and egg cupboard been bare.
But I digress.
Despite all the fuzziness in the studio, I imagine it must have been a grand life, though, being Cecil Beaton. You'd lounge around a pool in Capri or Monaco, in a  floppy hat, coming out with pithy remarks about Greta Garbo or the Prince of Wales while martinis appeared by your manicured hand and the afternoons ran together and everything got woozy, and occasionally, just occasionally, you'd mention to Larry Olivier, who'd be smoking a cheroot and staring off into the middle distance at the lounger beside you, that perhaps he could pop round for a picture or two when back in blighty.
"What a terribly good idea," Larry would reply. "And shall I bring Vivian?"
"Oh no, Larry," Cecil would reply, "just you and me and the boy. I'll see he does a good job of you."
And that would be work for the next six months.
I, on the other hand, am big-studio-with-skylight-and boy-less.
Which is a shame, because I very much imagine Graham would like a martini right now. I take a few shots, but it's not really happening. I fall back on my old standard and tell him to think of something sad. And it kind of works, if a look of vague but persistent flatulence is what you're after.
I try a different tack.
"Imagine you're a movie star," I say.
"Which one?" he asks.
"Whoever you fancy," I say. "Just so long as it's not Klaus Kinsky or Brian Blessed."
"Can I go for Humphrey Bogart?" He asks.
"Only so long as you don't curl your lip. You'll look like Billy Idol's coal-mining uncle."
He looks a little crest fallen. "How about Jimmy Stewart?"
He does an impression which, is, frankly, quite poor.
"Wasn't he a bit of a fascist?," I say.
Graham considers for a moment, then sighs.
"And anyway," I add, "I don't really see you with a stutter and an imaginary rabbit."
He thinks. "Sandra says I look a bit like Kevin Costner."
"Hmmm," I say. "Shame about the Robin Hood thing."
He brightens. "There's The Postman. I quite like that one."
"All right, then. Go for him."
Pop goes the flash.
"Nice," I say, looking at the results.
I skim back to through the images on my camera, ending at the think of something sad one. I ask him what he was thinking about.
"Burnley losing this Saturday." he replies, frowning. "It'd be tragic."
Try as I might, I can't imagine Larry coming out with something like that.

Hollywoodland

I read a book recently, a handbook for lighting, which advised on lighting women from the front, with a big diffuser, to give the most flattering image. It smooths the skin and hides imperfections, and acts like a Hollywood retoucher without the tantrums.

I'm not so sure.

I like a bit of modelling on a face, especially a woman's face where it is not often seen.

It reminds me of the Thirties, of  George Hurrell with his sculpted lighting. Hollywoodland, was, after all, the place to be.

You smoked, you drank, you died young, probably in a car crash, or, if you were less fortunate, washed up in a cheap motel with a cheap script by your expensive shoes, or, like Tallulah Bankhead, you smoked, you drank, you died not so young, of lung disease, cigarette in one hand, oxygen mask in the other, her last words, apparently: "Codeine...bourbon."

I fear my last words will not be so memorable. Probably something along the lines of:  "Can you scratch my nose?" or "Nurse, I need the bedpan."

I recently made my daughter, seven at the time, watch a lot of old horror films from the Thirties: Frankenstein,  Dracula and The Wolfman. We were on holiday in the Black Forest, where the general atmosphere was gothic. That's how I saw it, anyway. You see what you see, I suppose. Rachel, my wife, saw a beautiful rolling landscape with pretty villages in thick pine, vineyards and sunflowers and meadows in which you could lay a spotted blanket and throw bread to the birds. I saw Frankenstein country, even if, strictly speaking, it wasn't.

I made my daughter watch the films because I watched them when I was her age, and because I am constantly trying to construct a bullwark against the rabid pinkocracy of the Disney Channel. The frequency, though, with which Hannah Montana is still watched at our house suggests I have left it too late.

I'm not sure Lydia understood the motive, or even the stories. They are so slow by comparison, and require an input of concentration not really suited to the modern world. But I like to think of it as training for all those films I'll play her in the future. Napoleon, for example. 1927,  five and a half hours in length and best viewed on three screens.
Of course, she needed a running commentary.

"Look at the way the space is defined by the use of light and shadow," I said, nudging her, as the Bride of Frankestein, twitched like the Devil's whippet. "Look at the way the way the cinematographer directs the eye and dictates the moment. He's modelling with three types of light - key, fill and backlight. The key is the main light, and the fill and back pick out the structure of the set. He doesn't overdo it, though. He lets the shadow act as the canvas. That's German expressionism - Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but it comes from way before then. Rembrandt."

"Chocolate," my mother interjected. feet up on the sofa, enjoying the proceedings immensely.

The creature shrieked on seeing her intended husband - the monster from the first movie. It's a shriek that still impresses after all those years.

Lydia cowered behind knitted fingers.

"Oh, look, Lydia," I continued, "she hates the monster because he's so ugly...He's angry now. He's been promised a kiss and a cuddle, and he's waited and waited, and she hates him. She can't bear to look at him."

"It's only a film," my wife interjected.

"No. That's life," I'd reply. "They don't tell you that in High School Musical, but it's the truth."

And so, when I photograph Cathy, I throw away the book that says shoot from the front to flatter, and go for a combination of side lights. The key light at about nine o'clock, the fill at about two. Cathy has a fine face; well proportioned yet human. She can handle a bit of modelling, and anyway, I'm pretty sure she doesn't want results that make her look significantly younger than her daughter - who's eight.

I have been wrong before, though.

In my other life as a painter, I did a portrait of a woman - commissioned by her husband, a famous architect from the Middle East. It was from a single photograph. The woman was perhaps forty, and had a forty year-old's face. That's not to say she looked bad. She just looked her age. Being a commission, and on instruction from my agent (Nick Betney, Artzu), I toned down the lines around the mouth and eyes, and made her look maybe thirty. My agent was happy. The husband was happy. I was getting paid, so I was happy. Of course, on unveiling, all the way in Dubai, the woman was not. Though she could obviously see the lines in the mirror,  she certainly did not want to see them hanging on the wall.

"If I made her look any younger," I told my agent, "people would think she'd married Jerry Lee Lewis."

"It's £1000," my agent said. "Let's work it out."

You see my dilemma.

I try a few shots, and then move the key light to the side to give even more structure. It shows lines more, catches any little blemish, but still, I'm glad I did. I like all those imperfections, because perfection is such a soulless word. Why you would strive for it, I don't know, but then again, you only have to look at my face to see I was left behind by that wagontrain a long time ago.

So, I get her to lean into the camera and her face darkens. The results are good, but she still looks like she's being photographed. I ask her to think of something sad. Something personal. It's a strategy I sometimes use, along with look at the floor...now, ready, look up at me. It momentarily dupes the I'm being photographed part of the brain and lets some of the life out into the light. It's a bird momentarily in flight.

Cathy knits her brow, angles her head and purses her lips. I take the picture, of course, and then let it go.

It doesn't do to push it. The bucket of woe we all carry round can be pretty full sometimes, and it's too easy for the slops to ruin your good shoes.

You could say it's disingenuous, a trick to get what I want. But it's no less disingenuous than Yousuf Karsh's famed photograph of Winston Churchill - which records not Churchill's dogged tenacity, but rather the ensuing sulk from having the cigar pulled from his lips and thrown out of shot. 

Of course, Hurrell wasn't so interested in imperfection. This image of Jean Harlow, for example, is retouched to the point where she appears made of glass, but notice the shadow across the face. He understands the craft of cinematographers of those great horror films. He understands that darkness is the underpaint on which a few strokes of light create depth. He also didn't have to resort to cheap tricks. He had actors at his disposal, who were paid to take direction, and probably knew their faces well enough not to need any. Elsa Lanchester (the Bride of Frankenstein) was never, to my knowledge, photographed by Hurrell, which was almost certainly because she was not a classic Hollywood beauty. With that awkward face, retrousse nose and dimpled chin, she didn't fit in with the system.  But I must profess I found her, and find her still, amazingly beautiful. Maybe it's a flaw that will not serve me well in photography, or maybe I just have a thing for a seven foot women in  bandages and lead boots, a bedsheet dress and towering marcell wave with white shocks up the side. Or maybe it's just that even as a monster, she looks so much more, well, human.

The Russians are coming

I spent a lot of my youth wanting to be Russian. What can I say? I liked the hats.
It was all so exotic, not just continental, but more. I longed for a life in that glittering white landscape through which Julie Christie and Omar Sharif  jangled on their horse drawn sleigh in Dr Zhivago. I longed for a dacha in which to light a fire and cut the bread and rub the frost from the glass. Most of my friends would have been happy with a Scalextric. But I always had broader horizons. Or narrower, depending on your definition of the attainable.
Of course, in Stockport, in the late 1970s, there was very little so exotic as a dacha in the woods. But in my mind - I admit, a somewhat esoteric place, at the best of times - I was ever tromping through the birch forest in felt boots and a padded coat, a carbine, a rabbit or two over my shoulder and a grimace behind a big thick beard. In reality, I couldn't even grow bum-fluff, and had to make do with a parka and Wellington boots.
But I was happy. Especially, when on those occasions less rare than now, but rare still by Siberian standards, it snowed.
Unlike most children, I very much disliked the summer with its holiday languor and long evenings doing very little. I was more of a winter mindset. I did love midsummer but only in as much as it signalled the turn of the year and the eventual plunge into the dark still waters of winter. The powercuts of the late seventies, the smog and general sense of shabby, dirty decline suited the melodrama in my head. My father added to it with dire political prophecy and much pipe smoking in front of Weekend World, and, being of a less molly-coddling mindset (which nowadays I suppose would be classed as negligent to the point of prosecution) I was at freedom to escape, alone, into the dark nights where I would dissolve into a world more full of thrill than threat.
I remember trooping like a Red Guard, my parka hood pulled up, breath effervescing in the cold night air, longing for a world forever in the clutches of a minus thermometer.
Alas, I am less enamoured of winter, now. Even autumn with its golden light fills me with dread. I hear the dull toll of the bell and sense winter's battalion goose-stepping towards the blossomy springtime garden in which I ever now want to doze, newspaper over face, a little woozy from too much early-cider.
But that said, when it snows, I still get a tingle and a jingle and a spring in my step. I settle again into my younger self. I find myself getting out my big coat, and my big boots, and my favourite Red army hat (I, of course, have more than one), and find myself out and about, clomping through the streets like a St. Petersburg revolutionary with change's cologne in his nostrils.
That I'm probably just walking the kids to school from the car, or going to the coffeeshop, is another matter. Clothes maketh the man, and the man maketh the plan and the plan maketh history. Or some such nonsense I tell myself when I suspect I'm being sniggered at by passing schoolchildren.

Today, with snow thicker on the ground than anytime since I was in my teens and the schools closed, my children and I take an expedition to the local Sainsbury's. Tesco, of which I am not fond but of which my wife sadly is, said they could deliver our weekly shop, but like a teenage friend too good-looking for your company, the promised knock on the door never came, and we sat waiting and waiting, until all hope was lost. Tesco's, I suspected with bitterness, had bigger fish to fry.
"Sod 'em," I told my wife. "I'll go to Sainsbury's in the morning."

And so I dig out the car and dress up the kids, and skid off into the snow. It's like the Ice Road to Leningrad, only much shorter and without the dive bombers - about a mile and a half, to be precise, though it takes us about three quarters of an hour. We slip and slew our way along the empty streets, and once at Sainsbury's, buy in food like we expect the booming of Nazi guns by evening.
Something gets into your head when you look out of your window at 8.30 am, expecting to see the usual rush hour logjam and exhaust haze, only to see clear air and empty streets. That feeling is refined when, on your drive, you encounter broken down wagons and BMWs' slow donutting across the carriageway and into the kerb, and, when you finally make it into Sainsbury's carpark, you can't actually get into a parking space because they're all under a foot and half of snow. And if you have any reserve of clarity in your mind, by this point, it soon vanishes with the radio predictions of  minus 10 degrees for the next week or so and biting winds from north and east.
I am in my element (pardon the pun).
I had presumed Sainsbury's would be on a war footing. Actually, it's very much the opposite. The shelves are bursting, and  no one is fighting over the last pack of mini-muffins. That's because about three shoppers have made it in. I'm a touch disappointed.
The kids and I wheel our Bolshevik trolley around the bourgeois aisles. Our choice is determined by thoughts of survival: bread, and sausage, obvioulsy, but also coffee and chocolate and various tinned goods which will do well on the inevitable black market. We even pick up some cat litter. Not because we have a cat, but because I once read that it's effective as road grit. It's only £1.00, and so am prepared to give it a go. I'm sure Stalin would have done the same.
Actually, he probably would have just stayed in and had someone shot. But I don't have that luxury. Not yet, anyway.

It takes us about half an hour to get home, and about another half an hour to get the car back on the drive. And then, after Lunch - soup, how fitting -  Catriona comes round to play with Lydia on the Wii. Not very revolutionary, I know, but there you go. At 45, I can only keep the red flag flying for so long.
Catriona doesn't mind the inevitable photoshoot, which I, of course, cleared with her mother first.
Catriona soon has that look in her eye, though, which says: I'd rather be playing Mario. I have a head full of broad lighting and short lighting and faff around with my reflectors and diffusers, but I can see time ebbing away, and Catriona assuming Lydia's latest photographic demeanor, which is arms folded, face like thunder. Catriona also has an unruly flick of hair from an experiment with self-coiffery, which I know is going to take an age to fix in Photoshop. And so, after a few shots, I get my favourite Russian hat, plonk it on her head, and tell her to imagine she's Julie Christie in Dr Zhivago, looking out across the Steppe.
She looks non-plussed.
I tell her Julie Christie is like Stephanie from Lazy Town, only dressed in real fur and doomed.
Lydia, holding the reflector, rolls her eyes as if to say: he's off again.
I try another tack: "She's like Cheryl Cole in Disneyworld, only it's snowing, and she's sad because Ashley's away playing football."
Catriona can picture that. She smiles, and I take the picture.
I don't add that, given rational interpolation, Ashley would be on permanent transfer across the continent, with bleeding hands and frostbitten feet, only to see Cheryl one last time, years later, during Mickey's big parade, where he would clutch his chest and drop dead to the ground before Cheryl could see him, his broken body swamped by a surge of Mousketeers all making for the newly opened teacup ride. Mickey Mouse, in the fullness of time, would have Goofy, Donald and Minnie, shot, and the Mousketeers banished to the Gulag, while he himself would eventually die feared by even the Alice in Wonderland guards at his mouse-head shaped bedroom door, victim of his own ruthless hegemony. Cheryl, aging poorly, her voluminous extensions long cropped and her now grey wave wrapped in a drab headscarf, would spend her nights drinking vodka and sighing for Ashley, while the paper peeled and the taps dripped and the sound of corks popping and music playing and Hannah Montana laughing maniacally would drift out from Sleeping Beauty's castle and in through the window of Cheryl's tiny, shabby, concrete apartment box.
Catriona's only nine. It seems unfair to burden her with all of that.