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Ah yes, here I am.

This time last week I was close to abandoning the Mobile Phone As Serious Documentary Photography Tool philosophy, having experienced the immense technical difficulties of shooting reportage-type material with my Nokia at the Jewish memorial service. Today I'm once again wildly excited about the philosophy. The type of pictures that I can rely on my Nokia to deliver are precisely the kind of pictures I enjoy taking. I’m still a long way from knowing what I’m talking about, but this course is really helping me develop as a serious photographer.

It’s been a fun-packed, interesting and altogether positive nine days since I last reported from here. Here are some of the highlights.

A small crowd of 200 or so locals including representatives of the police force and Greek Orthodox church, who were both important players in the saving of many of the Jewish population of Volos during WWII, were already assembled at the Jewish memorial when I arrived last Sunday morning with Anita to continue with the pictures I’d taken earlier in the week. Essentially improvising, I’d deliberately taken only my mobile phone and wanted to see what there was to shoot when I arrived. The limitations of the phone (most notably the lack of a zoom lens) made getting any shots that really said something about the event impossible, and as the army band played and a succession of people including the town’s three remaining Auschwitz survivors laid wreaths, I mingled in with the crowd and failed to take anything even vaguely interesting. The most memorable moment came when I was plucked from the masses by a large Greek man in mirror shades, who turned out to be a policeman and who wanted to know who I was and what I was doing. It was interesting to see that the other people there with cameras, members of the press and television stations, all looking professional with their tripods and big lenses, were left alone. I was reminded of the Luis Malle film My Dinner With Andre, when the protagonist spoke about his trust in people in white coats inside a hospital, regardless of who they might actually be. I was taking pictures with a mobile phone, so I couldn’t possibly be serious. Afterwards everyone shuffled inside a large hall to deliver speeches, including the mayor, whose absurd grinning for the cameras made the entire day seem rather cheap. After that we all piled out for a finger buffet inside the exhibition I’d shot being set up earlier and got the only decent pictures of the day, of the older members of the assemblage who stuffed their faces with food and promptly left. Later in the day we drove up a mountain to visit a retired English couple for lunch in their old stone house with a glorious view of the sea. Douglas and Elena have had their roles reversed since Douglas had a massive stroke a few years ago. Now it’s Elena who does everything. Eight days later (today) I realised they’d make a wonderful subject for one of the relationships assignments and called to get their permission. I’ll go and spend some time with them early next week when I get back from my next short trip to the UK.

On Monday we drove north to Thessaloniki. An almost exclusively non-photographic day, I did at least get one quirky and altogether furtive picture (with my Nokia of course) of a Greek Orthodox priest shopping in IKEA.

Tuesday I was back in Kato Gaztea where I’d shot my first People At Work assignment, this time to get some pictures of a local restaurant manager, who in true Greek style treats work like a philosophical adventure. I liked the idea of looking at work in a slightly different way and was rewarded with a few interesting pictures of the man in question drinking with his clients and generally fooling about. It was from him that I learnt about the fate of the local fisherman. Five years ago there were several traditional boats fishing out of the village. The one I filmed on was the last, and its days are numbered. Large boats from along the coast have recently been given licenses to empty the bay of life, and the locals have got nothing left to catch. Savas, the fisherman I filmed, is lucky if he catches enough fish to pay for his time at sea. I realised that the village would be an interesting place to spend time in, getting to know the locals and their stories. Ever since my days of making documentary films I’ve always felt uncomfortable about parachuting in somewhere and grabbing material without really knowing the subject. If I was going to live forever, and if I had the resources, I’d spend a year in Kato Gatzea doing my own photographic version of Smith’s Spanish village.

Wednesday saw me grabbing some pictures of a Roma gentleman complete with pork pie hat, playing what must be one of Europe’s last barrel organs for loose change in the centre of Volos, followed by another two-hour session with you lot. It was interesting to go over the careers of the two photographers in question but I felt that there was something missing. It was almost as if Cartier-Bresson had invented the subject, whereas there were of course people way back before him doing similar work. I must remember to find out if there’s a good book on the complete history of the subject.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking through Volos at night. Passing a bakery I was mesmerised by two men pulling trays of cakes out of a large oven in the wall. As I often do, I snatched a quick photograph of them with my Nokia, and looking at it later thought the place would make a nice subject for one of the People At Work assignments. A deal was struck, and at 7am, with a few hours to spare before my one-to-one tutorial I arrived to shoot some pictures. Each assignment is different in both how to approach the photography as well as the particular relationship(s) with the subject(s). Still struggling with operating a hefty camera with everything switched to manual I decided to sort out the latter beforehand as much as I could by taking along an interpreter to ask a few questions on my behalf as well as to explain to the baker and his two assistants what I was expecting from the pictures, for them not to grin at the camera, etc. It paid off handsomely, making the shoot a lot easier than it could’ve been. Anyway, I think I did a fairly decent job for an amateur in showing the entire process from making to baking in a traditional wood-fired bakery-shop. Having been bored stiff by school and not receiving any formal education since being kicked out of school way back in 1981, it’s an amazing, exhilarating and entirely novel experience to be doing homework and understanding why I’m doing it etc. After converting the images and putting them online it was time for my session with Paul, which again felt positive, worthwhile, etc.

Needless to say all of this has been punctuated with large bursts of employment, and not long after logging off I was on a bus for a 12-hour, overnight bus journey to the Albanian capital, Tirana. Exasperated by a constant struggle with serious management issues for an Albanian publisher client myself and my business partner have been working for in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro for the past couple of years, I was in Tirana to make an offer to run the business ourselves. Gazi, our client, is a jovial millionaire who was one of the first post-communist Albanians to have studied at Harvard. Being his guest is always fun, as we get driven around by a chauffeur, taken out for expensive meals and generally treated like royalty. It’s interesting to see both sides of what remains Europe’s poorest country, and I was more than delighted to hear Gazi accept our offer of a business partnership with him. This gives me some financial security for the duration of the course, a constant worry for freelancers. Anyway, whilst I was walking around Tirana (arguably one of the most photogenic cities in Europe) I spotted that the World Press Photo 07 exhibition was in town, so I slipped in. I happened to arrive an hour or so before the official opening, and, because I was using my mobile phone, was left alone to wander around the exhibition taking pictures of the waiters who were going to provide food and drinks for the guests, looking at the pictures. Paul told me about the Albanian documentary photographer Bevis Fusha, and after looking at his interesting work on the internet decided to use my Gazi connection to see if I can get in touch with him.

Watch this space.

It’s now Monday evening and today among other things I’ve shot the first of the Relationships assignments, a simple set of pictures of a teenage boy and retired lady sat at an electric piano. Joe is keen to improve his musical skills, and Susan, an old friend of Joe’s mum and a former music teacher, look great together when they’re both sat at the keyboard. I’m sure I’ve missed lots of things out here, like what I’ve been reading and my adventures with another one of my cameras and the fabulous second-hand camera shop I just discovered in Volos and my attempts to start a Flickr game called Shoot My Elephant and how we’re all starting to work together and get to know each other and how good it all feels and why I’m still not living in Montenegro and the extraordinary man I took photographs of the other day and how I was amused to discover Paul mentioned in one of Susan Sontag’s books and loads of other things, but right now I need a Metaxa and feel better that I’ve at least managed to put some of what I’ve been up to down on the blog.