Tag Archive for "photography"
I recently dusted off my laptop and switched on my laptop for the first time in over a year – I normally use my desktop at home and work laptop if away with work. Whilst looking through the drives to remember what I had stored on their I re-discovered some of the photos I took on my 3½ month drive around Australia in 2005.
I did a warm-up for the main part of the road trip in early January 2005 by driving up the coast from Sydney as far as Brisbane before heading back to Sydney. During this time I hooked up with the best-band-that-should-have-been, The Hauntingly Beautiful Mousemoon, and hung out with them in Byron, Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The band then stayed with me in Newtown after a Sydney show at the Hopetoun in February 2005 and I started my road trip by following them down to Melbourne where they were playing a few gigs, including playing at The Espy during St. Kilda Festival. I think there are some photos from that time that I developed but that have never seen the light of day. I might have to dig them out and scan them in.
But then the real adventure started, with me saying my farewells to the band before they headed back to Newcastle and heading out on the open road.
My trip then took me along the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide, over to and down the Eyre Peninsula to Port Lincoln, back up and across the Nullabor, down to Cape Le Grand near Esperence, along the coast to Perth, all the way up to Exmouth in north WA, back down to Geralton, across via Mount Magnet to Leinster, down to Kalgoorlie, back across the Nullabor to Broken Hill and finally back to Sydney. The original plan was to do a figure-of-eight and keep going from north WA up to Darwin and back down via Uluru and Coober Pedy on the way back to Sydney but in the end I had nowhere near enough time and probably not enough money. And there are some that would have doubted that my $1,900 car would have made it that far…
It’s getting near the time of year when work takes me out of Brisbane – I’m off to Cooktown for work (and staying up in North Queensland for a few extra days holiday) in mid-July and will then be in Melbourne and probably a couple of other places in rural Victoria for much of September. I’m also taking some proper holiday in August, so expect less band photos and more travel/landscape photos in the coming months…
Some more photos on Flickr.
For a long time I’ve been interested in time-lapse photography and stop motion animation with normal still cameras.
Back in 2004, when I was doing my part-time two year photography course at SCOLA, I did a couple of my projects based on these topics.
For one project I looked to make a music video using still photos for My First Knife Fight, a London band that I had used for another of my photography projects in the first year of my course. I was looking to create something akin to Michel Gondry’s video for the Rolling Stones’ cover of ‘Like A Rolling Stone‘.
In preparation for what I had in mind I did some test shots with my friend Wim. The test shots were done on a film camera, which proved somewhat problematic as the camera continuous film advance kept sticking as the film wound on and so the interval between shots became a bit more irregular. The camera should have been able to do 3 Frames Per Second (FPS) but with these problems the FPS kept varying. This would have made it problematic in terms of syncing the images to be in time with the music. And doing all of this on a film camera, I didn’t have the luxury of being able to delete and try again, like you would have with a digital camera these days, but did have the expense of using film and the time that it required to develop the film and scan the negatives in…
I scanned in the negatives for the best sequence of still photos that I managed to get during the test shots and imported them into Macromedia Director in order to animate the stills. When played normally the motion was very jerky.
In order to smooth the animation I overlaid the photos in Director’s timeline, i.e. the first photo overlapped the second photo slightly in the timeline, the second overlapped the third etc. Then I set the transparency of each photo to fade out as the next photo in the sequence faded in. The effect was a lot more successful and more in mind with what I was looking to achieve.
However, the band were having issues and about to split, so nothing ever came of taking what I had learnt during the test shots and doing a shoot to get the images for a full video.
As a result, I just ended up using a whole load of still images that I had taken of the band over the course of a year and putting them to music so that I could finish the project for my course. I was waiting on the band to provide me with an mp3 of one of their songs to use but it didn’t eventuate before the band split. Needing a song to complete the project, and this being in the days before every band had a Myspace page with some of their songs on it, I scoured as many random and little known songs as I could find in order to get a song I could pass off as a My First Knife Fight song to accompany the video.
I eventually found a song that was quite short, at well under 3 minutes (and so cut down my workload), had a grungy sound like My First Knife Fight and, coming from a friend in London’s Triple J Hottest 100 compilation, would be largely unknown in the UK. Trouble is that I moved to Australia in mid-2004 and ‘Berlin Chair‘ by You Am I is slightly better known here than in the UK… In putting the final video together I did a series of tests to sort out the best method to use. Below is the final trial and the method that I ended up using for the full video. There are a couple of mistakes in this test but it gives an idea of what the final video looked like.
Although I started off this theme of blog postings with Steve Gullick, that was largely as a result of his new exhibition in London and the associated interviews and write-ups that he was getting. Although he is one of my favourite music photographers, the true number one spot should go to a photographer who I only became aware of in the last few years, Herman Leonard.
As with myself, most music photographers seem to be completely unaware of Herman Leonard, even though they might have seen his work in print. I think that this is largely due to having moved in slightly different circles by photographing jazz musicians, meaning that he flies under the radar of most ‘rock’ music photographers. In addition, I think the fact that he started photographing in the 1940s means his work largely pre-dates the music photography of the 1960s of classic rock bands that photographers associate with as the starting point of music photography.
He used a large-format camera with sheet film, a world away from the digital technology that most photographers now use, and by using a large-format camera, the level of detail in his photos is amazing.
He did have one advantage over most modern day photographers in that a lot of his photographs were taken at rehearsals/sound checks, allowing him to bring and set up his own lights and not rely on the venues own lights, or more likely the lack of light.
But that should in no way take away from his work, which is truly exquisite and completely awe inspiring.
What I’ve tried to take from him is his portrait style of photographing and also the beauty of monochrome; I still convert probably the vast majority of photos to black and white or convert and tone them even when they look good in colour, and even photos taken in daylight. There’s just something about black and white that can take a good colour photos and amplify the results substantially by converting it to a monochrome image.
By chance I was re-checking out his website late in 2006 and saw that he was doing at book signing of his new book ‘Jazz, Giants and Journeys: The Photography of Herman Leonard’ at Book Soup in LA and that you could order a copy over the internet. So have a nice signed copy on my shelf, as seen in the photo at the top of the page.
However, I also picked up a copy of one of his previous books, ‘Eye of Jazz’, on eBay cheaply and if you can get hold of it, I really recommend you do so, as it’s fantastic and soley devoted to his music photography, whereas ‘Jazz, Giants and Journeys’ is a mix of his music, travel and portrait photography.
There’s a really good 30 minute interview Herman did at San Diego’s KPBS radio on their website, here.
Hope I’m sounding that good and being that passionate about photography when I’m 84…
Today is the second anniversary of me starting to do a regular photo blog. Everything that was on my old Myspace blog has now been transferred over to this site and all the links and images that weren’t working (due to websites I have photographed for in the past changing their site layouts and page naming conventions) have been fixed. Some things I have learnt over the last few weeks:
- In the two years I have written 103 blogs, with this post now being blog number 104;
- In those two years my Myspace blog has had 4,645 views; and
- In the 5 or so weeks that I have been putting content onto This Is Not A Photo Opportunity I have had 8,447 Page Views. And not all of them have been Google bots…
So it’s all going well and I’m really happy to have moved away from Myspace and set up my own formal little bit of the internet. Lots more stuff on its way in the next week or so, including Sinead O’Connor, Whitesnake, and hopefully Queens of the Stone Age and the Jesus and Mary Chain.
Stay tuned.
Made the most of a free weekend and finally put a website together.
I put the site together using Flash, which I know isn’t the most ideal or obvious way to do it but in some bizarre twist of logic my brain has always found it easier to piece together Flash than Dreamweaver or anything more than very basic HTML. The photos are externally loaded so will take a few seconds to load up.
Everything should work ok, but let me know if any problems. Or if you’ve got any comments/suggestions/criticisms etc
