May 14

Obvious Pseudonym Hit London

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A brief reminder to all our fans that there’s an Obvious Pseudonym gig in London this Wednesday 16th May. Yep indeedy I’ll be on stage bashing the keys and generally making merry. A few new songs will feature alongside old OP favourites.

The gig is at Underbelly which is in Hoxton Square, Shoreditch. I’ve photo’d there a couple of times before and it’s a nice little venue. We’re on at 8:30pm so plenty of time to get the train home afterwards.

You can get tickets in advance from this link but please remember to tick the box saying you’re coming for Obvious Pseudonym. See you there, honeypies?

Apr 26

Pikfu.com Closing Down

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It’s been fairly well documented elsewhere, but I figured there was no harm duplicating it here.

For various reasons I don’t particularly want to go into, Pikfu.com will be closing down on 20th May. Galleries will disappear on this date, but data/images will be available up to 31st July 2012 for download. Live beta users will be contacted privately so everyone has fair notice. There has been some discussion surrounding this on the pikfu-users list (over on Google Groups – now restricted and new subscribers will be refused) but that list will be closed down approximately the same date; put simply it’s been costing me money for a long time and with no income from it I’m going to call it a day.

Sad it didn’t make it out of beta, but markets change and there are plenty of reasonable offerings. I understand the place-to-go right now for that sort of thing is Piwigo, and you can also run your own Piwigo install.

Thanks for the nice words from folks over this decision. Hope to see you around for a jar sometime!

Apr 26

Disco Mix CD: Remants Of A Written-Off Weekend

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I didn’t manage to get to the Rhubarb Bomb 5th Birthday Party – domestic woes got in the way and by the time it was anywhere near peaceful the weekend had ended and I was back at my desk in Sheffield. Thus there are no photos from Record Store Day 2012, and none from the Rhubarb Bomb party – genuine apologies and I-will-make-it-up-to-yous to the people who were relying on me taking some photos. Other photogs were there.

The proceedings also involved making a mix CD: drop yours in the box as you arrive, pick one up that someone else has made. The last mix I did got left behind and ridiculed a little (pretty much like being picked for sports at school) so this time I decided to compile some classic disco tracks not readily available in other formats. Sitting in front of the record deck hitting ‘pause’ at the right time on the CD recorder brought back memories of recording the Sunday evening chart show on Radio 1 while my mother yelled at me to do my homework. Ahh nostalgia.

Here’s the tracklist for what didn’t end up in the mix CD box:

  1. Countdown/This Is It (Original Full Length 12″ Mix) – Dan Hartman
  2. Love For The Sake Of Love – Claudja Barry
  3. Not Too Shabby (James Lewis Goes Disco Mix) – Cerrone
  4. Get On Up And Do It Again – Suzy Q
  5. Turn The Music Up – Players Association
  6. Love Magic – John Davis & The Monster Orchestra
  7. What A Difference A Day Makes – Esther Phillips
  8. Ballad Of Immoral Manufacture – Cristina
  9. In My Wildest Dream – Georgio Moroder
  10. Gotta Get Outta Here – Lucy Hawkins

But as it is, the running order is now relegated to a playlist on my iPhone and a lonely CDR to play in the car. Next time Gadget, next time…

(Oh, and if anyone has a spare copy of the RSD12 Candy Flip 10″ of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ which I missed out on, gi’s a yell…)

Update: You should check out John’s photos from the Rhubarb Bomb 5th Birthday Party.

Apr 20

Yashica MAT-124G

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You know all that medium-format stuff I was going on about with my Grandfather’s Halina A1? I’ve been bitten with the MF bug well and truly since then, commandeering the kitchen on a Sunday evening to develop whatever film I’d experimented with that week and going to bed with my fingers stinking of fixing fluid. I’ve also been painfully aware that Grandad’s Halina is a delicate thing – not an expensive item but certainly I’m emotionally attached to it and bits of it fell off long before it was in my custody! I’d already resolved a while back to get another MF setup for proper photography work, carefully digging through the pros and cons of Bronica, Rollei and Mamiya setups…

Then last week I acquired a Yashica MAT-124G medium-format twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera from Harrison Cameras in Sheffield. I’d been keeping an eye on their website and they do a great job of tweeting what secondhand kit has arrived – it’s a 10 minute walk from where I currently work in Sheffield so it was a bit of a no-brainer. The guy who served me took the time to walk me through the device which was substantially different to the Halina A1 in operation, and off I went with a fresh spool of Ilford Delta 400 loaded.

Once I’d got the hang of cocking the shutter (which hadn’t been covered in the shop) I started taking photos. I blew a stack of film over the weekend trying different things – in the park, inside Unity Hall, and at a gig. It’s definitely a lot sharper than the Halina (especially at the edges) and is much easier to focus, although in low light it’s still a pain as I can’t see what aperture or exposure time I’ve got it set to. It’ll be fine for acoustic gigs though.

The internal light meter had been frigged with a modern battery cell (it’s meant to take Mercury cells which aren’t made any more) and consequently there’s about a stop and a half overexposure if you go by the light meter itself. After the first couple of films the overexposure was pretty obvious so I spent a few hours comparing the on-body meter with a proper hand-held meter: it’s a linear difference so fairly simple to compensate, thankfully.

Overall, no buyer’s remorse yet and the remote trigger works fine with it. I’m looking forward to photographing the Rhubarb Bomb 5th Birthday this weekend (maybe with a flashgun as well), there are acoustic and eclectic acts which will work nicely on that format. Results, as always, will be posted on Flickr.

Apr 19

Dad Dancing

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A really very quick post to say that Obvious Pseudonym have a limited edition demo track streaming to promote the upcoming tour. It’s called Dad Dancing and it’s only available until 4pm today 19th April 2012. Click on the widget below to listen…

…or click here to go to the Soundcloud page itself.

Apr 10

Obvious Pseudonym – First Tour Dates

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We’ve been a bit quiet so far this year with the band because we’ve been writing new stuff, working on bits and bobs, and of course Real Life has been getting in the way. However, Bern’s gone and planned a tour so we have some live dates coming up:

On 3rd May we’re in Sheffield, at Mentholman (West Street Live) on, er, West Street. It’s a student venue and we’ll be on about 8:30pm. It’s a free gig (hooray for you lot!) and there’ll be a couple of other acts playing.

Then hot on the heels of that we’re heading over to Selby on 12th May for the Riverside venue, again we’ll be on around 8pm. This one’s free, and we’re supporting an 80s tribute band Idlefish.

We’ve been asked a lot to do a gig ‘dahn sarf’, and finally we’re playing in London at Underbelly in Hoxton Square, on Wednesday 16th May. This is ticketed too, we’ll have the links on the Obvious Pseudonym website soon-ish or you can buy on the door. I’ve photo’d at Underbelly before and it’s a nice venue, plus there’ll be some other bands on.

So there you go – gigging again, and not a Wakefield gig in sight. They’ll all be on the official gig guide in a bit and of course there’ll be Facebook events. Hooray!

Apr 04

Poor Resolution And Retro Effects Destroy Memories

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A few weeks ago I spent a spare evening importing pre-1999 photos into my Lightroom catalogue: about 10,000 images which had been taken on both digital and film since 1977. I’m not especially OCD about my photo organisation but I needed to access some of my older gig pics and a few photos from my Star Trek fanclub days (1992ish) for the Leeds Starfleet reformation – the images I waded through set me thinking how sad it was that some were such low resolution.

Back in the late 90s when I started out in digital photography I borrowed a small digital camera from one of my Mailbox Internet colleagues for a few nights. It took photos at a VGA resolution of 640×480 which were perfectly adequate at the time but now are way too small to be used on the high-res monitors we have nowadays. Given availability of hi-res scanning I regret not using more film even though it was pricey (24 exposures would set you back at least £7 on film+processing) as I’d love to have decent, untainted, nice images. Sadly I have to resign myself that those memories are forever held in under 1MP of poorly colour-balanced postage-stamp JPEGs. The Kodak DC200 I bought in 1998 was marginally better, a great little point-and-shoot which was convenient (if you saw me taking photos in a pub with friends in the late 90s, odds on it was this particular camera) but still 35mm outweighed consumer-grade digital… put up with 2MP or shut up.

However (cue fanfare) we can make the decision nowadays: we have splendid small high-resolution point-and-shoot cameras available to us on the high street for the price of a tank of petrol… yet many people still insist on using low-resolution low-quality cameraphones. Why?!

Don’t get me wrong – I believe that there’s fun places for cameraphone pics and there’s a whole branch of imagery (“phonetography”) which takes advantage of it. My beef is that many people will use them instead of a decent little point-and-shoot at important events. Case in point: I asked a friend if they wanted to borrow one of my better P&S cameras for their best friend’s wedding; the answer came back “oh no, I’ve got my cameraphone thanks”. The resolution’s there, but the glass in the front of the phone, the absence of flashgun, the light balance issues, even image stability are all going to factor into taking a pretty bad shot.

It gets worse: with the prevalence of Instagram, Hipstagram and all those ‘retro’ iPhone apps, you don’t just get to destroy your memories with bad photos, you get to utterly demolish them with ‘cool’ effects which in a few years time are guaranteed to be cringeworthy. Those wonderful memories of your honeymoon? The gorgeous photos of your newborn son? “Oh, yeah, they’ve got that really really cool negative ID mark and colour-burn and they look oh so retro, but… well, sorry we can’t fix it, we’ve only got that pic of Grandad holding Billy when he was just a few hours old and it’ll have to just do.”

There’s a final issue: when was the last time that you, as a consumer, copied the images off your camera onto a better storage solution? I’m not talking about uploading to Facebook (see arguments passim along the lines of “online is not a storage solution”), I’m talking about sticking them on a memory stick and putting it in a drawer. Several friends have lost images through phone resets, broken memory cards and such; when I’m asked to help, sometimes I just can’t and I have to break that news to them. So copy those images off, frequently! Memory sticks are less than a tenner from WHSmith, are your memories worth less than a tenner? Can you guarantee they’ll be worth less than a tenner in a few years time?

So here are some suggestions: get a reasonable little point-and-shoot, stick it in your handbag, take that to your events. Don’t rely on your cameraphone, and especially don’t chuck your images through some naff retro-image-processing tool without keeping the originals safe (I’m picking on Instagram and Hipstagram here but there’s loads more). No matter how random the photos, they’ll form part of your memories in later life so keep them safe and untainted.

PS. Some may consider this hypocritical considering my enthusiasm for B&W photography recently. In actuality I’ve made this mistake myself but using B&W instead of my 5Dmk2 at a family event, so it’s still fresh in my mind…

Apr 02

Kylie’s K25 Anti-Tour, Manchester

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It was all our friend Gary’s fault in the first place: if he hadn’t popped up early last week asking if I’d seen the announcement about Kylie Minogue’s K25 ‘Anti-Tour’ I’d have spent the week in blissful ignorance, been £160 better off and had a good night’s sleep last night. Then again, I’d have been absent from one of the most amazing gigs I’ve ever attended.

Kylie’s been around for yonks – 25 years give or take a few months – and to ‘celebrate’ she wanted to do another tour. Not the big pomp-and-ceremony hundreds-of-costume-changes epic-stage-set type thing but just her and a band, doing B-sides and ‘rarities’. Three gigs were announced: two at Manchester Academy (a 2000-capacity venue) and one at Hammersmith Apollo (around 5000 capacity). The tickets sold out in less than 10 minutes – phew!

The band came onstage at 8:30pm and already off to a good start: I didn’t recognise the first song Magnetic Electric (that had to wait for Made In Heaven and Cherry Bomb) but I don’t think it bothered the crowd who were bouncing away (with the exception of the idiot in front of us with the camera, do I bloody attract them or something?). The lass worked her way admirably through the set and when she started a chunk including Drunk (a track from the much-underrated album Impossible Princess) she just blew me away.

What really impressed me was the frankness of it all and the absence of any scripted dialogue – the band chatted to each other and joshed, Kylie was in the thick of it. She announced at one point she’d decided to try another song and she couldn’t remember the lyrics so Googled them (“…and I apologise if they’re wrong, they’re always wrong when you Google them aren’t they?”) before launching into an acapella version of something else obscure. Wow. It’s always easy to forget the sheer talent when there’s a massive staged production such as the Aphrodite tour we saw at Manchester MEN Arena last year, but there was no Spinning Around, no I Should Be So Lucky, not much which bothered the charts in 25 years – just her favourite stuff hardly ever performed on stage accompanied by the occasional anecdote.

The audience joined in a lot, singing along even to the more obscure numbers and sometimes launching into songs not on the setlist. Unfazed, Kylie joined in, mumbling when she couldn’t remember words or music, yet at one point the keys player worked out what she was up to and started accompanying. She finished up after a solid hour-and-forty with Tears On My Pillow and Enjoy Yourself as gold confetti showered the audience, the only concession to glamour.

Admittedly, when I booked tickets they were an impulse purchase and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect: I’d seen a leaked rumoured setlist and recognised a few from older albums as well as a couple from really early PWL days and the odd B-side, but Googling song names revealed little. With it being ‘real’ fans it was a splendid evening and easily ranks in my top 3 gigs.

She’s on tonight again in Manchester, and then in London at Hammersmith Apollo. Good luck getting tickets – they’re like hen’s teeth, and ‘proper’ Kylie fans will eventually regret ‘not being there’. I was there, and I don’t regret it… worth every penny.

Feb 16

Box Brownie

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Today’s fun, assuming it gets sunnier in Headingley by lunchtime… a Kodak Brownie Model I!

20120216-091829.jpg

Acquired from the Wakefield Hospice warehouse for a fiver, it takes 620 film although I’ve managed to frig it for 120… and it’s f/14 so I’ll need the sun! More info about this particular model on Camerapedia.

Feb 02

You’re So Square: Photography Developments

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It’s been almost a month since I wrote about my adventures in B&W photography and there have been some developments (pun intended) since then.

As it seemed to be a hobby which was sticking around, I invested in an Epson V700 scanner – various places including DPReview and Amateur Photographer stated that this was pretty much the best flatbed I could get. Why was I after a flatbed? Well I’d already anticipated I wanted to do some medium-format (MF) photography and most affordable slide scanners are limited to 35mm film and slides so would be useless after a while. The Epson was an investment, and proved to be an exceptional one.

Sadly what lets the Epson down is the software. It’s bundled with a package called SilverFast (version 6.6SE in the case of my purchase) which doesn’t work very well with the Apple UI and can be quite hard to use. It frequently crashed and ate a lot of CPU, and the version shipped was crippled in various ways (including being able to profile film emulsion – the entire reason I’d bought the scanner in the first place). When trying to use the support forum I came up against messages such as ‘Sorry but you cannot use search at this time. Please try again in a few minutes.’ Eventually I gave up and bought a copy of Vuescan which at a few cents shy of $40 was a lot cheaper than the SilverFast upgrade, gave better results and has a reasonable English-speaking support base. It would appear I’m not the only person to have done this switch…

So back to the photography: I did a photoshoot on Ilford Delta 3200, the subject being a punk-electro band called Minny Pops. Back in the early 80s they were on the same billing as Joy Division, they were a Martin Hannett-produced band and they were signed to Factory – hell, even Rob Gretton was involved with them; this made the act a perfect band when they played at The Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, perhaps in the style of one of my favourite photographers Kev Cummins. Here’s an example shot (dig around my Flickr stream for more), processed using Ilford Microphen high-grade developer (that particular image was picked up for publication by a UK music national which I’m quite chuffed about – still to see it ‘in the wild’ though). Not bad, and I resolved at that point to start using film a little more on gig shoots where the act would warrant it.

I spent most of January experimenting, and mentioned to my Grandmother what I was up to. She told me that she had a big box of photographic kit once belonging to my Grandfather and I was welcome to have a dig round and see what might be useful. It was quite a fun box-ful: the cache consisted of lots of lenses, a few USSR and GDR-manufactured 35mm bodies in varying condition, some filters and a few unexposed spools of film – but the unexpected bonus was finding a Halina A1 twin-lens reflex medium-format camera from the late 50s/early 60s… it had a spool of film inside which I wound on.

Now I’d thought about doing MF back in December, even going so far as to working out if I could afford a second-hand Bronica ETRS camera outfit, and I’d decided I would eschew the 645 format in favour of jumping straight to square 6×6 (being a substantial move from plain 35mm so I figured I’d appreciate it more). Dale Photographic in Leeds had a Hasselblad I coveted, but spending £1500 on a MF film setup rather than getting a family holiday wasn’t going to endear me to Nicky so I left it for a while. However, the whole MF thing was still bimbling in the back of my mind, and finding the Halina was timely.

I worked out a short workflow to see how it would fare – heck, I didn’t even know if it was light-tight. Thoughts of light-meters led to the brainwave of downloading one from the App Store for my iPhone (perhaps a bit of cheating, others may say ingenuity!). It hardly made a noise when the shutter activated I wasn’t even sure it was working and spent ten minutes exploring to make sure! So far so good.

The next day I wandered round the streets of Headingley with the Halina and a fresh roll of Ilford FP4+ 120-roll film. Colleagues at work were curious. I scared the living daylights out of some poor lady in St Michaels Cemetery in Headingley taking photos of gravestones (sorry missus!). Once back at home out came the dev tanks and (after following this tutorial on YouTube on loading 120 film into the Paterson tank) I ended up with some perfectly passable 6×6 medium-format negatives. The images were a lot sharper than I’d anticipated, having seen reports that this particular camera was favoured by the lomography crowd because of its soft focus – hooray!

Into the scanner. Set the controls. Forgot I set them for 35mm and of course MF has larger negs so I ended up with a gigapixel image – Lightroom struggled over it and Flickr hated it, so eventually settled on 4800dpi, 95% JPEG, 4-pass-plus-IR out of Vuescan. Here are the results (click backwards to see more I took that day) – banal subject matter but I’m very very pleased how they’ve turned out! Wonderful square high-contrast images which would make perfect album covers!

As a sidenote, you remember I mentioned that exposed film in the Halina? Purely on a whim I developed it. It was a Kodak X-Pro film (I think) and thought there wouldn’t be any harm in giving it a shot – but the bloomin’ thing dev’d fine and after scanning I saw the face of my Great-Grandfather staring at me. Blimey – I didn’t actually think almost 40 year-old film would process properly (nor had I really worked out timing for the dev tank, I just left it for 7ish minutes in Microphen). Ellie was fascinated, and we’re soliciting family members to try and date it as it’ll give us an idea when the camera was last used!

Anyway, as I left you in my last blog entry tonight I’m heading to another gig, this time to try and shoot a friend’s acoustic act in MF using Ilford HP5 which I intend to push to 1600. How I’ll get on I don’t know – this is a completely manual attempt! Even the practicalities of winding film with only the red-coloured rear window of the camera body may defeat me (given stage lighting) – maybe I should take a torch! I’ll be sure to post the results on my Flickr stream if there are some presentable images, of course.