Punk Before Chips on Radio 6

On October 13th, Martha and I took part in the fifth annual Worldwide Photowalk. The Leicester edition was organised by John Toye of the Leicester People's Photographic Gallery.

The idea of the walk is that the leader comes up with a route around each city that'll throw up some photographic opportunities and anyone that's interested can sign-up and go along. What I didn't realise at the time is that it is sponsored by Scott Kelby, an author and publisher of photography books and is a competition to win some of his products.

I gave Martha my old 350D and planned to use the walk as a chance to teach her a few of the basics. After a steady start, she really got into it and ended up taking 420 pictures in the couple of hours we spent wandering the city - some of them were really quite good.

By contrast, I got home with only 20 shots. Most of them were from my Spinner, including my favourite below.

As we walked by one of Leicester's many (many) abandoned commercial properties, I saw a broken window and had a look inside. It was just an empty room with a bit of graffiti but the hole in the glass was just big enough to get my camera through and pull the cord.

If you click the picture, you'll go to Flickr and be able to see it bigger. What I really like about it is that you can see Martha looking in through the window too...

Anyway, one of the other pictures I shot was taken in Castle View, under St Mary de Castro church. By now, we were towards the back of the crowd which was getting quite strung out. Many of my fellow walkers were shooting a group of artists that were painting and drawing the Castle Gate. 

Not Martha and I though. We had been talking earlier on the walk about how we both liked kicking through fallen leaves in Autumn. We decided that it wasn't as good as making tracks in fresh snow, but not far off.

When we saw the leaves that had been wind blown into small piles, our next photo op was obvious...

I'm delighted to say that John selected this shot as Leicester's best of the day and as a result, the picture will go forward for consideration in the competition against the winners from other walks. Given that there were 59 walks in the UK alone and 1300 worldwide, I don't hold out much hope. But I've already won a book on Lightroom (software I don't actually have) and that can't be bad...

Take It EZ

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dorothy. 

I have more than the odd camera. While Gosia has never told me that I have too many, that day is coming. So in a move that could be seen as a pre-emptive irony, my latest camera is disguised as a shoe box - an item of which there are many more in our house than there are cameras.

Dorothy is a pinhole camera. The most basic camera there is, it has no lens, no film, no battery, no memorycard and absolutely no megapixels. To be more accurate, Dorothy is actually 42 pinhole cameras. 

Inside the shoebox is a piece of brass sheet with 42 holes, each 0.6mm in diameter. They should have been 0.3, but I broke every size of drill that I tried up until 0.6 so 0.6 is was.

Behind the brass is a piece of foam with cardboard packing material cut into it that I got from a skip at work. This keeps the light coming in through the holes separate until it hits the paper that is held in place with some corner guides made from a Pironi beer box. This camera makes my Holga look like a Leica...

So today, after a couple of lunchtimes creating it, I used it for the first time. In the darkness of our downstairs toilet, I took it to pieces and loaded a piece of 10"x8"photopaper. In this morning's sunshine, my rough calculations told me that a 30 second exposure should be enough. 

It's a strange thing to do to sit still in front of a cardboard box for so long.

Once processed, the image looked like this:

But having seen James's similar project, I knew that I wanted to reverse the image to get something that was easier for the brain to deal with. That means using photoshop to take the bottom right cell and place it in the top left. Hopefully you see what I mean...

Thanks to Dick for the brass, to James for the inspiration and Andy for the developing, modelling and firing the shutter.
If you're at all interested in this sort of photography, and especially if you're local to Leicester, you may want to join us at Leicester Lo-Fi Photography.

Athlete Cured

Yesterday, I deposited Gosia, her mum and sister in Liverpool to take the National Trust's tour of the Beatles former houses. The tour was two and a half hours long, giving me just the time I needed to get to Crosby Beach to see Antony Gormley's Another Place.
It is an installation of 100 cast figures (modelled on the artists' own body) looking out across the mouth of the Mersey and into the Irish Sea.

I arrived a few minutes before high tide and was a little disappointed that there were only a few figures to see. These all had their feet wet and so any pictures had to be taken while sharing their view out to sea.

I spoke to an old local fella while I was taking pictures and asked what he thought of them. He said 'They're rubbish! If they'd been any good, they'd have been nicked by now.'
He explained that they had been made of cheap materials to avoid theft. I thought it might have been more to do with the artist wanting them to age badly.

The figures are not detailed but do have a strange, lifelike quality to them. Taking the picture above, I expected the eyelids to flick(e)r open at any moment.

I was there for a couple of hours (during slack water - a favourite nautical term) and as the tide began to recede, more and more heads started to appear. Slowly, more of the figures began to emerge from the waves.

You can read about the objections to this work elsewhere. For me it was a magical thing to see, especially before the dog-walking hoards appeared. I'd love to experience it at all times of the day, in all sea conditions and weathers as it is the sort of art that offers a different experience on each visit/viewing - and that's surely the best kind, right?