ARTHUR CHAPPELL FIFTH PHOTO TAKING DIARY > MY 5TH PHOTO TAKING DIARY Taking more and more photos, so many that I had virtually no time to edit them for a while and ended up with a hell of a backlog, which I have now managed to bring back under control. I now have over 6,400 photos. With a long running streak of photos coming out well and getting a great deal of praise, it was a shock to the ego to find a batch ruined by over-exposure to sunlight. It’s easy to get blasé, lazy and careless if you go though too much of a good patch in your photo taking. It’s a sobering experience when the camera and the lighting bring you down to Earth. Actually got my first photo published in May 2010 – a photo I took at a presentation ceremony for young cadet re-enactors at a sealed Knot English Civil War show made it into a regiment newsletter. Very pleased by that. There have been relatively few model assignments, though that is due to change in late July. There have been lots of picnics, and summer fete events at which I’ve taken lots of shots of friends, carnival floats, etc. My burlesque show and poetry event photos continue. I got a temporary job distributing leaflets in North Manchester so I got to take some photos around he region during my rounds. The job contract has now sadly ended. The big SLR camera I borrowed from Ian Wilson, has now gone back to its rightful owner, almost a year after he lent it to me. I was sorry to part with it, and certainly aim to get myself one soon, and I am very grateful to Ian for trusting me with it for so long. I learned a lot about taking photos from handling such impressive equipment. My Canon A80 is now my principle camera. I have taken part in two important photography competitions in July. The first, a unique Photo taking marathon run by Big Issue Magazine, was basically a creative scavenger hunt for teams and individuals, in which we were assigned eight different targets to get photos of, over an eight-hour period, from 10 am to 6 pm, on Saturday 17th July. The event, run on behalf of The Big Issue magazine, used the Deaf Institute bar as a start, finish and judging point. The assignments were 1/. Your number, 2/. Inappropriate / appropriate 3/. Childhood 4 darkness 5 Jealousy 6 Inclusion / exclusion 7 the big wheel 8 The End We were pretty well given freedom to interpret any and all themes as we wished. A few initially left my mind blank and in a slight sense of panic, wondering if I’d come up with any ideas at all. In other cases I had ideas right away. MY NUMBER – I went for a number associated with me a lot, 42 – as a fan of Douglas Adams, and sharing my first name with the main character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy novels, I thought of the bus carrying this number as my own Answer To Life The Universe & Manchester. This was probably my weakest photo in the competition, as a few others went for bus numbers too. There was also no option to give photos a title or any explanatory notes, - the picture had to speak for itself, so I might as well have shot a picture of any old bus. The winning entry for the category was someone holding up some cigarettes, with a mysterious extra hand helping to hold up the packet. My personal favourite shot of the set was that taken by a team who made a number out of the contents of a packet of Skittles sweets. The judges had expected us to use our competition entry numbers as the number for our entries, and though some picked up on that, many of us, myself included, never realized. I should have been looking for a 25. APPROPRIATE / INAPPROPRIATE – I had a few ideas for this, and having photographed the 42 bus, I got on it, heading into South Manchester. I spotted some shop dummies, naked, placed half way up a shop wall in Fallowfield, so that seemed suitably inappropriate, and I snapped them. I knew they were there, having other photos of them in fact. In the slide show of all our photos as we waited for the judges decision, a few contestants gasped and I heard someone say how much she liked this image. That was heart-warming. The winning entry was a photo of a road diversion sign leading right into a road that was obviously closed for maintenance work. CHILDHOOD I knew right away where to go for this one, as I’d taken shots before in Didsbury Botanical Gardens. A park bench there is decorated in all kinds of childhood symbolism and supported on one side by a vampire bat, and on the other by an ogre-troll. I took a photo of the troll. Interestingly, in the slide show, the image was left horizontal and like many images, (not just mine), showed that the judges hadn’t altered the orientation (easier in the editing suite than on camera). It would have been nice to see all the photos submitted – about 240 in all, the right way up. The winning entry was an image of a grown man riding on a children’s play park swing-devise. It was a simple and amusing image. I was very impressed by the judge’s remarks on why this had been picked – other images (none in particular being singled out, but easily applicable to my own work among many others) were rich in detail that might be lost when the photos were presented small in the Big Issue magazine, rather than being seen in wide projection as we saw them now. It was good advise for considering with magazine submissions, etc. DARKNESS – The tricky part about this assignment was taking a darkness shot in daylight. A few obvious ideas sprang to mind, involving dark alleys and Goths. I settled on a dark woodland path running into a swamp – a very real place in the flood plains in Didsbury, by the Mersey. The ground here is designed to catch any floodwater in heavy rain, to help protect Didsbury Village from flooding – It was raining heavily and I was right in the middle of the bowl. The category winner was a macrocosmic look at a Spider’s Web in shadow. I was left wondering how much consideration the judges gave to distance and access, with some photographers making use of the transport system to move far and wide round the city (the Big Issue provided free bus passes to contestants, though I missed out having had to get two buses in to the starting point anyway). Others had not left the city centre and at least one team went to the house of one of the photographers. I experimented with alternative shots for a few themes, but settled on these as my first half submissions. We had four hours in which to do the first half of the contest, and I completed it in less than three. The remaining challenges were released to us as we returned due to the weather – there had been plans not to release them until 2 pm. I was under way by 1.30 pm. JEALOSY – As I panicked, wondering what to do for this and my next subject, a friend, Tom Clark, texted me to ask how I was getting on. As he worked round the corner from where I was, I invited him to model for me. He was happy to, and as his ex-wife, Janice was visiting him too, I got her involved, taking a shot of Tom, being slapped across the face while clutching an envelope full of money. The winning image here was someone with a very small broken bike looking at the better bikes in a bike rack round it. INCLUSION / EXCLUSION – Really was unsure how to approach this one, and considered finding a private member’s club to take a photo of the entrance way, if I could find one with a ‘members only’ sign up. Janice mentioned having seen a protest march demonstration in town, so I set off to try to find it. I found something better – an arts project jape called The March of 100 Dorothy’s was going by, with people invited to dress as Dorothy Gale from The Wizard Of Oz, along with other characters from the classic Judy Garland film. In fact only about 20 Dorothy’s were out, with a group of Scots in kilts. A few Dorothys had placards calling for equal rights for Munchkins. I had my Inclusion / Exclusion shot. Another photographer in the competition also spotted the Dorothy’s but used the image he took in a different category. The Inclusion / Exclusion winners had a shot of an adult lady drinking from a baby’s bottle while a billboard model image lady seemed to be watching her in disbelief. THE BIG WHEEL Virtually everyone realized that a photo of the Manchester Ferris Wheel would be too obvious and the judges admitted at judging to thinking that in setting the subject. (Only one photo of the wheel came in, for a different category). I went to the Manchester Museum Of Science & Industry, thinking initially of photographing a water wheel or machine wheel, but I settled on a Penny Farthing bike instead, which another team also found. Quite a few shots were taken in the museum in fact. I limited myself to just the one. The winning entry in this category, and ultimately taken as the best photo of the whole competition, (a judging decision I totally agree with) featured an ordinary bike wheel, but with people strategically placed behind it to look like they were running in its spokes like hamsters in their treadmill – a brilliant concept perfectly executed. THE END – The last category appropriately titled, and I was not alone in taking a death related photo, and someone else did take one of a graveyard tombstone too. My initial idea had been to capture a shot of a hearse parked outside the Hellfire Club, but it wasn’t there on this visit to Harpurhey – the Cemetery was my back up plan, and the grave I shot was that of Lancashire dialect poet, Ben Briefly. The winning image was also death related, but featured several stuffed animals looking out of the windows of an apartment. The slide show drew all the photographers together, including one chap who brought his live cockatoo with him, and it was a very interesting informal presentation ceremony. I certainly hope the competition runs again. The other competition I have entered is yet to be judged so I’ll hold back on mentioning it for now, but watch for updates on these very pages. PREVIOUS PHOTO DIARY ENTRY - NEXT PHOTO DIARY ENTRY© Copyright. 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