Has anybody seen Tito's leg?

No time to do much of this for a few days. Work’s gone into overdrive. Funny that just as I embark on a group effort with the Kosovo photographs, of which Antrim, Martin and Rhian have all now got involved in, bless them, we start getting into both the nuts and bolts of editing (this week’s group tutorial was extremely good I might add) and talking about group projects. Looking forward to meeting everyone online on Monday evening, assuming I’ve got a decent internet connection in my hotel in Ljubljana, and bashing this all out a little further. In the hot seat with Homer tomorrow. Looking forward to more eyes and experience helping me move my work forward. On an entirely different subject, I’m in Ljubljana all next week to write a guidebook to the city. If anybody knows the city and has any information about anything to do with Ljubljana I’d be very happy and grateful to hear from them. I'm particularly interested to find out what happened to Tito’s leg after it was removed. Strange that the Croatian-born hero of Yugoslavia was half Slovenian and left a bit of him behind in that country just before he died.

The bridge

Carrying on with my stark silhouette theme and my continuing amazement at the quality of the light here I found a great footbridge this morning. Just north of the train station and crossing a series of both used and derelict tracks, the shadow the bridge casts is something else, especially when combined with the diagonal lines below, and of course when people are walking across it. When I get a bit of spare time I’ll pop down with a flask and a bag of sandwiches and see what I can get. As you can see from this test shot, the shadows of the people walking over the bridge only really work when they’re crossing on the northern half of the pathway (like me, right). Maybe I could place a load of bollards down one side to keep people where I want them. Is this cheating? I'd forgotten how just how wonderful high contrast black and white images can be. I'm reminded of the films Rain and The Bridge by the late Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens (1898-1989).

Aren't people amazing, the way they move?

Yet another spectacularly bright and sunny day here again in Greece and I remember again one of the reasons why I chose to come to this part of the world. The light really is extraordinary, even in the winter. Today was almost an entire day off. Late this morning I went for a walk and visited a few small parks in and around the centre of Volos to watch people sat on park benches. It was educational to watch them purely on the grounds of how they fit in the world compositionally. If I had the time and was driven enough I’d get a stopwatch and time the periods when people from individuals up to groups of seven or eight can be photographed well compositionally and when they can’t. It was a revelation to watch people with in such a way instead of just watching them as I usually do. I’ve only got two Street assignments to do due to my cock-up with the third Relationships one. I wanted to do two that said something about Greece and about Volos. I also wanted them to be very different. Yesterday I walked the length of a market, picking out interesting slices as I went, watching closely and taking photographs of the scene as it changed in front of my eyes. This first shoot was most certainly colour. Today, thinking about the sea, about the light, about the culture, and especially about Sundays when almost everything is closed and friends and families get together and head for the waterfront here, I decided to approach the working practice as I did yesterday and work my way down a street from one end to the other, picking up interesting scenes along the way. I knew I’d be more or less shooting into the sun all the way along, and so decided to exploit this and let my Nokia expose itself accordingly, ie. with the people in shadow. An example of each of the three places can be found above. The pictures were screaming out to be in black and white. Aren't people amazing, the way they move?

Concentrate. Look. Think. Relax

Because I cocked up my final Relationships assignment (I was drunk) I had to shoot another one. This I did last night, on my mobile phone. The location was a fabulous bar for retired working class Greeks here on the waterfront in Volos. I got a series of photographs of two exceedingly photogenic geriatrics playing speed-backgammon at a table, surrounded by a small and rather wrinkly audience. As well as watching the eyes and the hands as I was asked, I also concentrated until it almost hurt on the composition of every picture. It worked. Having a fully automatic camera certainly helped I won’t deny it, but I’m learning something. Concentrate. Look. Think. Relax.

Oh, and I just remembered! When I was taking these photographs an old man from another table called over (in Greek of course) to ask what I was doing. Somebody at the table I was photographing shouted back, ‘he’s photographing memories of us to look at when he’s far away.’ I thought that was an awfully nice thing to say!

At least I’m not in China

I was offered €10,000 cash for my passport by somebody I know and trust in Kosovo last weekend. Why did I say no?

Oh well, at least I’m not in China. Towards the end of Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag writes a few illuminating lines on the country, or rather the difficulties of taking photographs of people there. This is a land whose culture dictates that photographs of people should be set-piece affairs. This wasn’t exactly news to me, as I can still remember clearly failing to film ordinary street scenes in Beijing in 1997. Every time I set the camera up and started recording, the people would stop what they were doing and form a line and grin at the camera. As annoying as it is, I must say I admire the Chinese for failing to cooperate.

This all brings me albeit rather clumsily to what I’ve been up to today, namely out and about in Volos getting the first street assignment under my belt and in the can. Greece in the winter is a wonderful place for street photography. The sun shines almost every day, and because it’s fairly low in the sky from the time it rises until it goes back under the horizon again, it throws some spectacular shadows, even in the middle of the day. Time being of the essence I chose for my first assignment to photograph one of the city’s main food markets, which takes place every day in a different location. On Saturdays it spreads out along a road running from north to south, which means the shadows the sun cast run lengthways along the street, adding a wonderful visual spectacle to the scenes. The fabulous choice of backgrounds, the bizarre mix of shoppers, the colours of the things for sale and the aforementioned light all add up to make a perfect piece of theatre.

Looking at the pictures I took I’m pretty happy. Choosing to use my mophone, I suffered some headaches such as having to anticipate not only for the shots themselves but also for the inherent (and random) delay between pressing the shutter to the camera actually recording the image. Benefits included the usual sense of blending in, plus the advantage of having a nice big screen to look at. This latter point can be awkward when the sun is shining on it at certain angles, but also allows me to keep an eye on what and who is coming up and down the street and into the picture.

Failure to do a proper third Relationships assignment means I still need to do one. I’m off now to see a friend who’s repairing a yacht to work out how to shoot him and his assistant next week.

Colour versus black and white... the verdict

The votes are in and counted, and it’s a resounding win for colour. Thanks to all who left comments on these. In a pantominesque sort of way you were all shouting, behind you! I was looking to shift the look of the photographs my mobile phone was giving somewhere, and was looking the wrong way. I’m no digital darkroom guru but I can see that by twiddling around with the levels I’m starting to get a look and feel that I’m really happy with. Onwards and upwards!

Independence Day (cont’d)

More hastily scribbled notes on my recent trip to Kosovo plus further thoughts on mobile phones in one vast paragraph

While surfing the BBC News website last Friday it became increasingly clear to me that Kosovo was almost certainly going to declare independence from Serbia within the next 48 hours. It’s not every day a country declares independence, especially in such a controversial manner, and the idea of dropping everything and travelling there to take photographs was a gamble more than worth taking. With my mobile phone fully charged and my dSLR in my bag as backup, I boarded a bus the following morning at the start of a two-day journey that would take me through northern Greece (Macedonia) and FYROM (also known by the local population as well as most of the rest of the world as Macedonia, a particularly Balkan-style problem), where I’d have to spend the night in Skopje, and finally over the UNMIK-controlled border and into the centre of the action in Kosovo’s tiny capital city, Pristina. The ultimate aim of the trip was to start putting into practice a combination of my own theories and ideas about using a mobile phone as a serious tool for photojournalism and documentary photography alongside the things I’ve learnt so far on the course. Most importantly I wanted to put myself inside a significantly important news story the whole world was talking about, to benefit from working on the factory floor as it were, in an authentic news environment. As I remain neither trained as a photographer nor have any desire (to date) to concentrate on specialising in any one type of photographic style or technique, I thought it’d be both fun and instructive to mix the discipline I’ve so far learnt on the course with an open mind about the events unfolding around me and how to react to them photographically. I had the advantage of knowing Pristina fairly well, and knew more than the average person in the street about the issues that had sparked the revolution. Thus comfortably armed with the appropriate tools and knowledge, the following morning I bought a ticket in the bus station in Skopje after a pleasant evening with friends who live in the city the night before and started the two-hour journey to where the action was taking place. During the course of the day I took what I believe to be a personal record of 692 photographs on my phone, from the moment I boarded the bus in Skopje until myself and my Kosovar-Albanian friend Vullnet had downed our final beers in one of Pristina’s heaving bars at the end of an extremely long, enjoyable, moving, extraordinarily unforgettable and unique day. The contentious recipient of the positive rewards of doing something a little out of the ordinary, I believe I was compensated for my efforts with some fairly interesting work, some of which I can say I’m extremely proud of (although everything now needs some serious post-production work, something I know even less about than taking the photographs themselves). Despite the fact that the day was clearly one of the most photogenic Pristina had ever known, I was still grateful for the things I’ve so far learnt during our online course sessions and the limited number of accompanying assignments. Of the multitude of unforgettable photographic moments during the day, particularly poignant highlights included arriving at the bus station in Pristina at the same time the bus station staff were having their independence party, being surrounded by hordes of brightly decorated, horn-beeping vehicles covered in jumping, dancing Kosovar-Albanians, trying to frame shots taken into the blazing sun of screaming-shouting-flag-waving revellers as I walked backwards trying not to fall over things, finding by complete accident the special cake made for 35,000 people as it was being cut and eaten by hundreds of hungry partygoers, taking the time to snatch candid pictures of the press, ruling elite and gatecrashers inside the Grand Hotel, likewise stumbling on what appeared to be a UCK bigwig giving it large through the open roof of a car complete with a huge poster of Ibrahim Rugova on the wall in the background, catching the Prime Minister getting out of his car as he arrived at the Grand Hotel to start his public affairs for the evening, and, finally, taking a handful of pictures in an almost pitch black bar as the night wore on and the party broke up into smaller, more personal, local events. Almost every photograph I took involved me being more aware of what was going on in within the frame, not just compositionally but also in what the things in the picture meant and/or conveyed. As mentioned before, a large part of what I wanted to do was to simply get out into the crowd as it were and play with my camera, but at the same time equipped with the additional knowledge I’ve been learning feeding into the pictures I was taking. It was frightening, interesting and fun to be confronted with a new kind of discipline, but looking through the pictures (through the ones that worked anyway), I can see that the course is already having a positive effect on my work. Why exactly I chose to use a mobile phone and will continue to use it more and more in my work still remains a partial mystery to me. One thing I do know for certain is that what I’m attempting to find with the mophone is far from just a gimmick. The reasons for using a mobile phone instead of a more professional camera are many. The freedom it allows both in terms of how it can be used in a large crowd without having your dSLR lens thrust up your nose every few seconds as well as how it can at times make you feel invisible, especially during times when a certain sensitivity towards the subject is required, is truly amazing. As a discreet tool in the service of the experimental gathering of visual information at a large international news event I really don’t think a mophone can be beaten. My interest lies in using images intelligently and to interact with the people in my pictures with as much dignity as can be expected during what can always be seen as an invasion of the press. I’m tempted to declare that the often cheap, blurred, wobbly, burnt and generally bruised pictures my mobile phone produces say something about the nature of the world I’m capturing, but that would be rubbish to say the least. Neither am I particularly interested in the growing popularity of the so-called citizen journalists on hand to capture everything from the July 7 bombings in London to the hanging of Saddam Hussein. If anything I’m more a convert to people such as Bert Hardy, the self-taught Leica user who once wrote an article for amateur photographers showing them how to take professional pictures using a Box Brownie. It’s all about finding my own voice with the help of the course and everyone on it. Sometimes I get tired and frustrated at my lack of academic ability as well as the pressure of doing this course whilst trying to run a business. But I’m not complaining. Really. Just as I was finishing scribbling this blog entry I got a nice comment on a previous blog from Antrim, offering to help edit some of the pictures I took in Kosovo. This is the best news I’ve had all day. Now I just need some help with the post-production, although I doubt anyone reading this has managed to make it down this far. It really would be nice to do something with these photographs, and to work with other people to produce something would make it even better. Back to the future, and I’m planning to do my street assignments with my mobile, whilst sticking with the dSLR as much as I can for most of the other work. I love and enjoy my dSLR, and would hate to see it not getting used. It too needs its roles in my photographic life. Watch this space!