Can you tell which elements in this photo of my kitchen table represent the following aspects of my life?

1. My lust for upgrading vintage hi-fi
2. Looking smoooth
3. My raging poetic furnace
4. My need for home-made pasta
5. My disrespect for wooden surfaces when it comes to trimming photographs

The District Line

Some hat hanging from a wire in a half-width shop window on Goldhawk Road. Who knows what on earth it signifies?

Beautiful afternoon on Southbank. Late winter sunset under Waterloo Bridge

Shepherd’s Bush market is a peaceful place. Hang on, hear me out. It is long and narrow, running along the Hammersmith and City line arches between Goldhawk Road and Shepherd’s Bush, and so has acoustics which seem to dampen sound. Even when the market is relatively full, you sense a heavy hush underneath the bustle, disturbed only by the occasional hiss of a tube-train surfing past.

Admittedly there is some crazy, run-down shit in the market. You can buy hair-pieces and stomachs, cauldrons and fibrous thongs, jackfish and clothes of quite astonishing mis-design. This rack of oddity is typical blog fodder for me.

But today I chose to take a shortcut through the market after all the traders had packed up and pulled down the shutters. I reckon that after all the traders had left the character of the market was clearer to see, distilled in the stillness. However, my next visit will be in the daytime – I’d love to see the goods purveyed by ‘Hash Choice Gents Wear’.

These pictures were all taken on a Rolleiflex medium format twin lens reflex. The camera is a beautiful piece of German design, with stunning attention to detail and build quality. On the down side you only get a dozen (big and gorgeous) exposures per roll, and it is not cheap. On the up side the quality of the originals surpasses that of the best £2000 SLRs by Nikon and Canon. Not bad for something that looks like it belongs in a Film Noir.

The camera used to belong to my grandfather, and he took it all over Europe taking pictures of architecture, design, and generally anything interesting enough to be used his books on visual education. I am glad I can still put it to good use! Believe it or not, the TLR is designed to be light and compact- and it is surprisingly so, especially for a medium format camera.

Nowadays medium format is mainly used for studio work, where its ultra-high resolution makes it suitable for billboard size enlargements (there medium-format digital backs – they cost £50k). It is also very popular in lomography, where the fun is in marvelling at the weird effects of low-quality cameras with plastic lenses on the big squares of film.

I really loved the restriction of having so few exposures to play with. I am so used to indulgence of free photos in the digital format it is too easy to forget the pleasure of being made to wait and really read a situation. How rewarding it is to sit and wait with your finger poised above the shutter release for ten minutes before taking the one, precious exposure! It teaches you to really value every shot, to use all your skills of predicting human behaviour to catch the right moment, to read light and motion with your eye-brain and not rely on the thinking skills of a chip.

If I had to take a single shot of the most beautiful subject I would ever see, I would take it on this beautiful Rollei TLR.

I have now included an Flash portfolio of my photography in a page link which can be found running along the top of this blog.

I have tried to display a broad range of subjects, techniques, and styles. There are landscapes and lizards, police and warplanes, bowling alleys and burkas. There is even a cow who is trying to sneak in the door to steal my curry. She didn’t get a crumb.

Snappy Snaps have finally stumbled upon the secret of all marketing. A stupid dog in a hat. Nice one, you photographic specialists, you.

Argggh. It’s all so wrong

Stephen Gerrard is in the dock. He beat up a businessman in a bar called ‘Lounge Inn’ in Southport (north of Liverpool), because he wanted control of the cd player in the bar. The businessman did not like either being bossed around or being called ‘lad’ by a ruffian 5 years his inferior. Just the typical clash of antlers I suppose. Men – weekends – booze – mates – public houses – egos – disco – fists. I don’t know why we don’t just cut off a testicle and play conkers with them.

Anyway, I was curious to see what sort of a shithole it is that premiership footballers like to hang out in. The bar’s website is here if you are interested, but I wouldn’t bother visiting the place itself: the venue looks as bland  and soulless as its name suggests.

I was intrigued by the photographic diary on the site however. The proprietors have got themselves a camera and have, bless them, been having a go at some event photography, seemingly to enrich the ‘Lounge Inn experience’ for their patrons who are invited to download fullsize versions as keepsakes.

Many people take crap photos. It is when they use them professionally things get funny. I mean look at this cracker:

It looks like this rambunctious fellow is about to eructate a gobfull of manky steak into his ladyfriend’s cleavage. Also, I love that charming ‘under the stairs’ ambience. One for the mantlepiece.

I love candid photography, especially when the photographer is as unknowing as the subject. There is something gruesomely true about it.

Mind you, the only insight that I seem to have gained from this wee web adventure is that if you are a lady and wish to hang out in a footballer’s drinking den, you should get highlights and look like you want to get into ‘New’ magazine.

More often than not, I take my camera with me when I go for walks. You never know what you might find: something lying in the street, someone lying in the street, or something you have never noticed you walk past every day.

I have uploaded some photos from a walk I took the other day in my photo gallery (they are sitting there on the last page of photos). I should probably make a new section for this sort of photo. God knows I take enough of them.