I can't keep it in my trousers

Despite my very best efforts to shoot my first assignment last week using just my dSLR, I just had to take my phone out of my pocket and take a few shots. Remember, this is a 2 megapixel camera with an appalling little plastic lens. I'd be interested to hear what people think of this shot as compared to the other black and white shot from my big camera (see below).

Shoot My Elephant

I nearly forgot. I set this up today.

Two things

Have a look at this. Believe me I’ve got nothing against Cathal McNaughton's work, but I was reminded of this particular picture and the problem I have with it (read the final sentence of the accompanying caption) during Wednesday’s tutorial when we were told of Cartier-Bresson’s penchant for sniffing out a location and waiting for the moment to happen (I was mildly horrified). For me this is as contrived as setting pictures up to make them look natural. I’ve never done this when I’ve been out and about in the streets because somehow it feels like a completely wrong way of working. Something false. Something not in the spirit of street photography. However, when I get the time (and the weather) over the next few weeks I’m going to give it a try.

Last night I went to the Synagogue in Volos at the invitation of the local Jewish community to attend a small service (with my camera) to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz as mentioned below. When I got there the lights were on but the gates were all locked. There was a doorbell and I didn’t press it. A wonderful moment of crisis. At least I know I’ll never be paparazzi. The accompanying picture was taken by accident on the way home.

White elephant?

To paraphrase Henri Cartier-Bresson, your first 10,o00 blogs are your worst.

Er...

Just a quick note about the Digital Railroad site. I'm still utterly confused about it. Having FTPd the 144 pictures I took at sea the other day they appeared in UNPUBLISHED as 'schofield' like I thought they would. All jolly good so far. I then renamed the group 'Fishing off Kato Gatzea (Sco)' and left it at that as I had plenty of other things to be getting on with.

And when I went back, the title (Fishing off Kato Gatzea (Sco)) was also showing in PRIVATE, although the actual pictures in there were the ones I uploaded from the stuff I did with my mobile phone in Athens last week.

I'm neither sure nor all that impressed with Digital Railroad so far. If anyone out there knows how it works I'd be delighted to hear from you.

Notes on an evolving Jewish side project (1)

The other evening I met a 70-year-old American-Jewish lady called Anita who moved to Greece in 1960 and married a Greek a year later. Anita, whose grandfather was a German-Jewish criminal lawyer who once faced (and beat) Adolf Hitler in a court case in the 1930s before fleeing Germany for the USA via Italy, had to convert to the Greek Orthodox Church in order to get married and is positively bursting with interesting, intriguing and thought-provoking stories. For me, Anita represents very well indeed the kind of ordinary person who isn’t ordinary at all once you scrape away the surface that I’m interested in as a documentary photography subject. Among many other things Anita told me that this coming Sunday there’s going to be a memorial service at the Jewish monument in Volos to commemorate the day that Auschwitz, where many Volos Jews perished, was liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. There’s also going to be an exhibition of photographs and other material following the memorial service, which Anita was helping to set up and to which she invited me. I thought shooting some pictures of Anita setting up the exhibition could be an interesting way of looking at work and asked her if I could take some pictures of her as one of my three assignments. Because there was going to be another person helping set up the exhibition and because Anita felt slightly uncomfortable about my being there taking pictures we decided that I wouldn’t, but I was still very interested to come along, which I did yesterday morning. We arrived at 11am where a lady whose name I forget (research on this ballooning, incomplete project to follow, this is just a place to scribble my notes, thoughts, feelings and ideas remember) met us warmly. She’s a local architect whose father survived the Holocaust (see below). She’s also the leading light and driving force behind the small (Romaniote) Jewish community in Volos. After helping carry one of the panels to be used for the exhibition upstairs, we made our formal introductions and it soon became clear that it would’ve been fine to bring my dSLR along. Nokia E61i to the rescue! I spent the next hour taking about 250 photographs of the two ladies setting up the exhibition, with half a mind on the idea that I could use the material for one of the work-based assignments and the other half on the fact that my frenzied shutter-clicking meant I was going to completely overshoot and therefore make the pictures invalid. It was interesting to learn more about the Jews of Volos as well as to discover other facts about Anita, who among other things was instrumental in the awarding of a Righteous Among Nations to a local Greek Orthodox priest who helped save Jews during WWII. It was lovely to watch the two women working together and I believe I took one or two strong pictures among the many. The idea of a bigger project (but not too big) made itself clear as I was invited to a service at the Synagogue in Volos this Friday, where I’ve been invited to meet the father of the architect, who at 86 is something of a local celebrity and whose photograph as a young man serving with the Greek resistance appears in many collections of historical photographs of Volos. I believe I have the start of some material that I can finish off and put together as a small slide show using Anita’s voice to move the story along (if of course she’s willing to help out further). An example of how stories sometimes help themselves get made was shown by the following. As I was on my way to meet Anita I passed the Jewish monument where the service will take place on Sunday. I noticed that somebody had tagged it with a bright pink marker pen since I’d first seen it a couple of days before. I mentioned this to Anita, and, as I hoped, after the exhibition was set up she marched over there with a packet of paper hankies to sort it out. As we arrived two young women were standing and looking at the monument. One of them was particularly interested and was soon helping Anita clean up the mess, even providing a small bottle of water to wet the hankies and make the job easier. I got some nice pictures of this, which echoed the earlier pictures of the setting up of the exhibition. I was particularly struck by the fact that both sets of pictures of the pairs of women working involved them raising their hands above their heads. There’s something very strange and ritualistic and religious in this. Anyway, soon the monument was clean and a young Greek woman on her way home from skiing in the nearby mountains had a new interest in the Jewish history of Volos and Greece in general. Anita then took me to the Synagogue to show me where it was (she’s not attending on Friday as she’s got an offer to spend the evening in a Finnish friend’s sauna), and we parted company until Sunday. If I can get her to provide a narration I believe I’ll have an interesting little project. Although I already know that this isn’t the medium I want to work in I see no harm in doing it anyway. Many of the processes involved can be applied to styles that I’m more interested in developing, so there’s no harm in that, plus it’s one more example of the enormous benefits of doing this course. I’ll be learning something new, will have the choice to examine what I’m doing in more detail than I would if I was working in a more informal style, and, hopefully, the work will generate some much appreciated feedback. When I got the pictures home and transferred them to my laptop I was truly interested in what I saw, as I’d not used the mobile phone in this way before. Technically I can live with (and more often than not deal with) the Nokia E61i’s many shortcomings. The only real criticism I have of it is that the lens isn’t wide enough for the kind of shots I really wanted to take, and there’s also something about not being able to provide a (for want of a better word) formal feel from the phone. These pictures would’ve worked a lot better with a dSLR, but that doesn’t make what I’m doing with the phone a complete washout. They have their own particular quality that a dSLR could never deliver, and it’s going to be fun editing the work to bring out the best qualities of the results the phone is giving for this particular style. My mobile phone provides unpredictable results under certain circumstances, making it a wholly unprofessional machine. However, the feel/atmosphere it generates, especially from the snatched pictures of ordinary life I take with it, outdo the results from every other camera I own. What it's done so far with these Jewish pictures has given a laid-back, informal, almost snapshot feel to the work that I’d like to continue to develop. It’s going to be interesting to do this project. Tune in for more as things progress.

All at sea

Kato Gatzea, Greece

One of the positive things about this course that I’m already starting to appreciate is that it makes me do things I don’t want to do. Rather than seek permission to do my first ‘At Work’ assignments on my mobile phone I thought it would be both fairer and more interesting to use my dSLR as instructed. Having been in Greece for just a week and knowing almost nobody my choice of subjects is limited, and rather than find the ‘right’ subject I thought I’d take whatever came along. In this case it was a chance conversation with the son of a friend who mentioned a friend of his who fishes early each morning off the coast a few kilometres west of where I’m staying.

At just after seven o’clock this morning in pitch darkness I clambered aboard a tiny traditional Greek fishing boat for a short trip off the coast to shoot a man called Savas as he hauled in his supposedly fish-filled net on board. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I didn’t realise just how hard it was going to be. The good thing about this is that it really forced me to think not just about what I was doing at the time, but also in general about what on earth it is I’m doing on this course and what exactly it is I want to achieve.

Already up on the Elephant site, the pictures don’t quite speak for themselves, so I thought it would be useful to the viewer to write this explanatory blog entry. As you can see I shot about twice as many pictures as required, the reasons being because the first half were shot before the sun was up, and are pretty much useless, plus contrary to what I was told, Savas didn’t speak any English so I had no idea what he was going to do. These facts, coupled with the fact I was shooting on a small boat, a great deal of it I wasn’t allowed to get access to as it meant getting in Savas’ way, in constantly changing lighting conditions, and in the realisation that most of the session was going to involve my host pulling in his net looking like a Greek statue, meant I was forced to either abandon the idea of doing it or to rethink. I chose the latter and a great many of the shots were taken in an essay style.

Considering I was using a fairly alien camera with completely manual settings whilst trying not to fall in the sea, I think I did a fairly decent job. The event wasn’t helped by the fact that Savas caught about 10 fish, got thoroughly pissed off, and set me back on shore early as there was no chance of any great shots of him boxing up his catch etc. Looking at the data I also see that the 35mm equivalent lens setting was 30mm, not 35mm as I’d planned. All of these amusing mistakes I’m happy to share with anyone interested in knowing about them. I’m here to learn after all.

Tomorrow I’m off to meet representatives of Volos’ tiny remaining Jewish population to see if there are any interesting ways of shooting somebody ‘At Work’ there.

Oh, and the pictures I uploaded by ftp today are all showing on Elephant in the reverse order.

Creatures of habit

Nothing much to report today. A leisurely stroll around Volos, espresso by the sea, a wander around the shops (where among other things I found this Greek Orthodox priest doing his shopping) and a few interesting leads relating to the first assignment. A local fisherman has agreed to take me out for a couple of hours tomorrow. Like I said, nothing much to report, but remembering we’re really just creatures of habit I want to write at least a few words here on a daily basis. I also sent a DVD of photographs to an acquaintance this afternoon, the Deputy Editor of Blueprint magazine, who wants me to send him some proposals (it’s always nice to be wanted). I have an interesting idea for a piece in Skopje, just up the road from here and where I’ve got to go and work during the next few weeks anyway.