Back Stage

Photographing literary events soon becomes repetitious and the photographs begin to always look the same. It’s difficult to find anything to shoot, anything other than the ordinary, which is also what’s generally wanted because the people on stage don’t do it every week. On the plus side, I do get to go to some extraordinary locations in Berlin.

Places I neither knew about nor even suspected existed.

The theatre Acker Stadt Palast  https://ackerstadtpalast.de/ in Berlin’s fashionable Mitte district is such a place. I have traversed Ackerstrasse on many occasions, albeit not so often recently, but never knew the theater existed.  A small live performance space hidden behind a large front door in the second/third Hinterhof at number 169. Acker Stadt Palast is a small renovated flashback to Berlin as it was about twenty odd years ago.

As soon as I went backstage to stow some gear I knew I had to photograph the performers dressing room. All I needed was an interesting person to make the image complete. A very real benefit in being the official photographer is you can ask anybody to pose and they are generally happy to oblige. In this instance it’s the poet William Cody Maher who was reading that night and who was also perfect for the picture I had in mind.

http://www.williamcodymaher.com/html/poems.html

The colour version is what I saw in my mind and what motivated me to shoot the picture in the first place, whereas the B&W version is more suited to William Cody’s poetry, which is why I included it.

In the end it doesn’t matter which one is preferred for I am very pleased with both.

Canon 6D, 50mm, f1.4, 2000asa.

Optional Pain

Pain may not seem to have a lot to do with the lack of creativity, but I would argue that anything that nags away at you on a daily basis, will eventually build up an internal resistance and just aggravate the hell out of you, thereby disturbing the meditative state needed to think.

OK, some might argue that pressure is better than tranquility and I wouldn’t nay say that.

But, no wait, I’m getting away from the point.

Let me explain.

For years (and I do mean many years) I have been using the computer to work with photographs. I don’t manipulate in the traditional sense, it’s more a replication of traditional darkroom techniques, but it is still labour intensive.

I actually thought using the computer was safer because messing with chemicals in a small, warm, darkroom, can often lead to health problems.

Here is what I know now.

Analogue processing may not be great for the lungs and skin, but digital is murder for muscles and joints. I have Repetitive Strain Injury/Tennis Elbow or whatever your doctor’s favourite term is from the years of abuse with mouse and graphic pencil my favoured right arm endured. I had had a 6 month hiatus from the computer before I began UT’s again. However, with the increased activity the pain crept back, and with it the sure knowledge that the only way to find relief is to stop using the computer.

Tough decisions are needed. I have already managed to teach myself to use my left hand for the graphics pencil in a effort to circumnavigate the problem, but it is slow and irritating to work with this option, which disturbs the thought process and….

Enthusiasms Decline

Like most projects begun amid a flourish of excitement and enthusiasm, all went well with Unreliable Truths for a while.

Then things began to slow down.

Every day life started getting in the way and finally, with the mind deadening slowness of poured cold honey, everything inexorably began grinding to a halt.

Which is why I restarted this blog. After all, talking to an imagined audience requires far more discipline than talking to oneself. It demands a more honest approach to the problem, at least it does in my case. To write about the problem(s) necessitates I ruminate on why the creative elements of the book went into decline, and why the enthusiasm and inspiration dissipated.

 

A major problem is the slippery slope into narrative meaninglessness with which the story was/is evolving. The pictures look fine and yep, a case can be argued that each images’ layout gave meaning to those surrounding it. But lately the layouts and juxtapositions are using much the same reference points as every other book of pictures I’ve seen, and I simply don’t want that, it is just not worth all the bad tempered irritation generated by the acceptance of mediocrity.

Lessons Unlearnt

It’s sad, really, the way history repeats itself.

Now more than ever the dogs of war are straining at their leashes and as the rhetoric increases those with pretensions of greatness are on a one-way track to mass slaughter.

Or am I just being an alarmist?

Hopefully I am. If some control is exercised, common sense and a collective urge for species survival will hold the lunatic fringe in check, but I’m not hopeful.

I know, I know, we’ve been here before.

Yep, we dodged the bullet in ’62, but today’s strutting peacocks have arsenals just itching to be tested.

Am I being paranoid or does the American political class seem to be awash with Strangeloves Brig. General Jack D. Ripper clones?

Spooky when it’s the military urging caution, pressing for the diplomatic option.

This picture was shot 14 years ago during the lead-up to the never-ending war in Iraq.

Then it was about oil, now it’s about egos. There never was and never will be common profit for the world in either set of lies.

Canon EOS RT, 50mm, Formapan 400asa, processed with Agfa Rodinal diluted 50-1.

Way To Many of Me

Recently we were in Scotland for two weeks and it soon became abundantly clear that many of the interesting parts of the world are clearly suffering from too many of us tourists. Our guide on a five-day-tour was making his last trip and seeking greener pastures due to the overcrowding on many of Scotland’s roads, which he maintained had become extremely dangerous due the massive increase in self-drive holidays, and after experiencing some of the craziness in the Highlands and around Skye I had to admit he has a point.

Skye in particular is ruined, he said. A once beautiful fishing village has morphed into a tourist hot spot where the exhausted cashiers at the local mini mart can no longer service endless stream of customers.

Want to buy a nice piece of local fish for dinner, good luck with that.

Berlin also has mass tourism, but the city’s size helps to absorb most of the problems. Not so the picturesque small villages and mountain tops of Scotland, which are collapsing under the strain. I shot this picture from a window at Edinburgh airport. This photo is nothing less than remarkable when you think that on a Tuesday afternoon, a city with a population of 500,000 citizens can fill to capacity a car park this size.

It’s a clear indication that too many are trying to do the same thing in the same place.

Fuji X20, f5.6, 1/400sec, ISO 200

 

 

The Last Post 2016

Since the attack on Berlin’s Christmas market we have been often asked what it feels like to be living in Berlin now.

Our answers have been almost universally the same: ‘Not much has changed, it’s not like it came as a surprise, an attack had been expected, as is another’, one lives with this knowledge.

But, and I think this is a very big but, the expectation of violence does play constantly on your mind, although at a very low subliminal level.

I’ve also noticed that my pictures have become very dark, much darker than before.

It seems that evil is afoot and the population in general is aware, although we do our best to ignore it.

In the short term things are just not going to get better, we all know this, but feel powerless to stop or even slow the triumphantly grinning fascist leviathan and its miasmatic bog of lies.

Fujifilm X20,f4.5, 1 /1000 sec, ISO320

Deconstructing, Job Done

If you’re like me and have sometimes wondered how many screws are in a colour laser printer then I have the answer, lots and lots.

So many in fact that I gave up counting while deconstructing a modern marvel – the malfunctioning home printer.

I prefer to repair rather than replace, but modern technology doesn’t allow this. It’s no secret we live in a throw-away world, but I thought if I could preserve a small part of this machine for later use it all helps the enviroment and besides, I like to save screws, because you just never know when you might need the odd hundred or so.

It also occurred to me as I prepared this post that no matter how crazy an idea you have, like how many screws in a printer, someone has posted the answer on the net.

But who knows, maybe I’ve just done a public service. It could be in the near future a desperately lost soul may look glumly at their printer and wonder what it would look like if all the screws were removed, and tragically they didn’t have a screwdriver.

No worries.

Job’s done,

Answers here.

Isn’t the Internet wonderful?

35mm, f8, 1/125sec, ISO100, single 100watt flash head without modifier

Rethinking Positions

With a free day in front of me I thought I’d take the S-Bahn to Friedrichstraße and get some mental exercise by exploiting the new battery pack to shoot frames with the camera in the vertical position. It’s not that I never use the camera like this, just not for prolonged periods. Also, I’d never taken much notice on the compositional requirements when shooting vertical, it has always just been the format that that picture required at the time.

So today I conce­ntrated on how the compositional elements of the lenses differ shooting vertically from shooting horizontally. What soon became clear is that it’s much like shooting with a wide angle: more often than not there’s too much foreground or too much sky unless you get really close, which is why I tended to avoid shooting in this manner. Also, heavily ingrained habits are hard to control, even with technological help. All morning my brain kept demanding I return the camera to the horizontal position, only by conscious effort did I avoid doing this – most of the time.

The picture was shot with a focal length of 200mm

70-200mm, f4, 1/60sec, ISO100

More Progress

It seems that the bright orange building I first wrote about on the 1st must have really upset someone important’s sense of acceptable aesthetics. Not content with stripping the outer tiles, the rounded edges of the building appear to also be anathema and so everything has to go. As far as I was aware the building had been in constant use until recently, but the powers that be want to tear down the old and make it new regardless of the cost – it is after all only public money. Who knows, I may have it all wrong but the machines have been battering the building for a week now and with half of it still standing it would be hard to convince me the destruction is a safety issue. I’m entitled to wonder as it’s tax payers’ money that’s paying for the wrecking and the resultant air pollution.

On the upside, the strong contrasty sunlight early in the day made the site a good subject to photograph.

 

70-200mm, f5, 1/500sec, ISO100

I enjoy doing high-contrast, gritty urban landscapes, especially this time of year when the overcast skies and denuded trees make it easy to render the city in harsh tones. I think it was after seeing pictures by Bill Brandt, Ralf Gibson (to a lesser extent) and later Michael Akerman that I thought that the high-contrast gritty look had something to offer me.

It’s a style I like a lot and use often with urban landscapes.

For some the look is a little too bleak as it’s more often than not employed to show the harshness of living in economically deprived areas, whereas this is Old Town Spandau, which is really a nice part of the world with a Christmas Market that went up yesterday being well worth a visit.

 

28-300mm, f5.6, 1/250 sec, ISO250