My digital SLR has been in the shop recently. It seems that there is a really annoying fibre stuck in there , and it was really starting to get on my wick.

I have been using the absence of my camera to dip back into the world of analogue photography. I have not used film for many years (before I started taking photography at all seriously), so I was curious to see how the shots would come out.

This period with the film SLR has encompassed the recent deluge of snow which so thrilled us all in London, various visits to the South Bank of the Thames, and a trip to Bristol (which seems to have had a distinctly medical theme). Here are some of the shots from the roll.

I would say that the most obvious difference from digital was in the colour which is not nearly as faithfully reproduced. It adopts the characteristic of the film, processing technique, chemicals and, in this case, the sort of cross-processing involved in scanning the prints. The Images are not as crisp either.

However, there is something quite satisfying about the saturated colours. I think that a camera is is only as good as your relationship with it. Moreover, it is familiarity with the quirks, faults, niggles and inabilities of your camera and the way you deal with them that really gets you creatively engaged. I can imagine with some more rolls I would be really enjoying playing with the colour response of the film. 

But, come to think of it, I could go through a few rolls in about five minutes, and with price of film and photo development I would probably have to stop eating before long.

What do you think? Does analogue film still have a significant place?

For a long, long, long time the photo page of my website has been fairly unrepresentative of where I am at with my photography. It has had a selection of my low-fi abstract pictures I took when started getting into photography about six years ago.

But, after a ridiculous hiatus, I have finally got round to revamping the page with Flash and a new selection of pictures. You can check out the new page at:   http://tomrowland.co.uk/photos/index.html

It should be easier to keep updated now too. Comments, criticism, and suggestions all welcome of course!

I don’t know if you have ever noticed of the monkey-business bin men get up to. They work in the twilight hours when there ain’t many folks around. Rooting around in bags of used nappies, then scampering back to base before sunrise. I happen to know that bin men regard themselves as being a breed somewhere between vampires and a tramps.*

It must be an intensely antisocial yet highly social job. Imagine how popular you would be if you turned up in a caff / in bed/ at the opera after work at 8 in the morning smelling of fish poo and radishes? However, the teams of refuse-collectors always seem to be fairly tightly knit (I once saw one jokingly hold a razor blade he had just found to his mate’s eye then cut off some of his hair with it- ahh, the japes!).

Why do they do it?

The begged question.

There are the extras I suppose. They turn quite a bit of a side business by doing trade collections from scurrilous builders. You know how they will never take away that old fridge / tv / coffin that has been lying in your front garden for months? Next time they come round, pull on your pants (and bra) and run outside into the brisk morning air, and bribe them with a fiver. They will happily provide you with a bespoke waste solution. They probably make more by leasing the council’s civic facilities than by their regular pay. It all sort of balances out when you think about it.

Then there is the foraging. They love spending hours sifting through your rubbish like it is an episode of Bargain Hunt, looking for a nice figurine / desk set / wedding present. Check out these furtive snaps I took of the binmen, who jackpotted on our neighbours’ pile of about a dozen bin-bags.

They really relished it. First the clear the rubbish from the tray of the lorry, then they tear open the bags. They proceed to rifle through the stinking booty, with priority pickings ordained via a pecking order. This chap made a nice little pile of gayly coloured boxes, which he then stuffed into a recycling bag (fittingly). He then somewhat coarsely advise his colleagues that they were not to copulate with his stuff on pain of death

They spent a good fifteen minutes outside this one house. It was like they had found a fresh roll of lottery scratch cards in there. Now I could make out some of the tat they were rescuing from landfill. I cannot believe that anyone could find any financial value in any of it. But I reckon it is not about money. It is about the fun of hunter-gathering. Just like young boys hunting for conkers. Or the incontinent rush for bargains at a car boot sale.

It is funny how the hunter-gatherer habit comes back so naturally to us. Our ancestors, when gathering probably used every drop of daylight walking along, staring at the ground, discerning grass from edible leaves, poisonous berries from fruit. Every time they found something good to eat, they would have felt that that little pang of accomplishment, just like when a schoolboy finds a big shiny conker in the grass. 

I think this is also the feeling a photographer gets when he is out doing is thing. Whenever you know you have found a good composition, an interesting subject or the like, you get that tiny dose of endorphins. You carry on walking and hunt for more. It is totally engrossing. Your eyes start becoming sensitive to composition and colour, just like when you are searching for blackberries or mushrooms, your eyes become tuned to the shape and colour of those fruits. You get your eye in.

I first became aware of this parallel in Burnham Beeches, a forest west of London. I like to go there hunting for porcini mushrooms. But this time I had my camera, and I became addicted to taking photographs of the shapes and compositions thrown up by the black trees against the autumn sky (not the most interesting pics, I know, but I weirdly find them fascinating). 

Now this is not the first time I have taken photographs obsessively. I do that more often than sitting on things. But it was because of the association with mushroom picking that I noticed feeling a similar sense of gathering-pleasure. As though I was looking for bereft cutlery / door furniture / children’s toys in a pile of rubbish.

*this is clearly a lie

I was walking around Chelsea late on a Saturday night  with my camera a few weeks ago. It is an amazing area to perambulate. Of course you feel the annoyance and amazement at the stultifying prices and wealth in the area. But it does seem like the place where no expense is spared, and you can get a weird and fascinating glimpse into the lives of people who will spend a tenner on a slice of fabulous cake, and who feel a lot better because of their postcode.

Inevitably, next to the ornate shops filled with thousand pound teapots and the devastatingly expensive bars, I found someone sleeping rough on the street. There are quite a lot of homeless sleepers around Chelsea. I once agreed with Serena that I would probably sleep round those well-heeled streets if I was in such an unfortunate situation. Not so many people on their way home from the pubs pissing on your patch. They are all too posh.

Anyway, because I was photographing everything I saw that evening I took a snap of this person. I didn’t want to disturb him so I made sure there was no flash. When I reviewed the photo later I found there was a silhouette of a figure who must have been between some car headlights and the wall at the right moment. It adds a lot to the picture, I think.

On a similar theme, I saw this anti-homeless sign in a shop selling London tourist-tat on the Strand. It seems a little cruel to stop people sleeping in front of your shop. The shop would be closed anyway, and it’s not like there would be late-night window-shoppers deterred from returning the next day to buy a London bus mug. It would not be because they saw someone sleeping by the shop window, at any rate.

The image struck me because the red of the sign reflected the red in the buses. It seemed to make a point about London.

On an entirely different note I though I would post a photo I took last night from my rooftop:

Now I think that it could be said that the picture is attractive because of the light and colours of the sunset. There is a modest element of aesthetic quality from the composition using the silhouetted buildings. But as far as I am concerned, such photos are show no skill.

If you look on all the submit-your-own flickr photo competitions, many of the submissions are of sunsets, each one as worthless as the last. Sure they look pretty. But the art of photography, I would suggest, is capturing energy (light and human) in interesting ways. A sunset essentially is a facile shortcut in the pursuit of aesthetically-pleasing light. The sun is the most fascinating and important source of light we have. Clouds and the thicker atmosphere splinter the light randomly as the sun approaches the horizon. It is beautiful to capture on film, but shows no skill. Point and click. And it will always be more beautiful in the flesh, partly because it is transitory, yet it will return, and partly because our eyes are far better at capturing the myriad wavelengths.

I think a skilful photographer finds beautiful configurations of light and situations which resonate with human emotions in places and moments we normally overlook. We don’t need photographers tell us a sunset is beautiful.

Rant over.

This is a stack of film reels in the back of one of the finest venues in Bristol: The Cube Cinema. Nestled in the back-roads behind Jamaica Street and King Square, The Cube is volunteer-run, and a lot of love goes into its upkeep, organization, and programming.

Over the years I have been to see many bands and films there, as well as to the occasional birthday party. I first went there in 2000 (I think) when a friend of mine was volunteering. Back then you had to walk through a Chinese restaurant to get into the cinema.

At the back of the theatre is a cosy projection room filled with stuff like that stack of reels in the header photo and this faintly lewd health and safety diagram:

I was there for a gig that night – I think it was Twocsinak’s album launch. Twocsinak is the alias of cunning Joe Grounds who can be seen here at various stages of the evening:

a. before the gig:

b. during the gig:

c. after the gig, smoking a cigarette:

d. on his merry way home:

This is the element of a heater in the One-Stop Thali restaurant in Bristol. The One-Stop Thali, for those of you who don’t know it, is a kitsch little indian diner in the heart of a pretty area in Bristol called Montpelier.

Montpelier ‘came up’ a few years back, mainly due to the influx of students who wanted a bohemian alternative to Clifton, with a a strong community feeling (and was not quite as dodgy as St Paul’s). I don’t know what the people who already lived in the area felt about this influx. But I can guess. Now the area is being invaded by young professionals, due to the grand regeneration of Bristol city centre. I believe the bohemians are quite unhappy about this invasion of outsiders.

Anyway, I was having breakfast in the Thali one grey hungover morning, and I liked the look of this warm glowing honeycomb, which was the only source of heat in the room. You can imagine what the other breakfasters thought of me photographing and filming a rotating heater. I can suggest: ‘idiot’; ‘retard’; ‘fucking outsider’; or a combination of the above.

The hangover was caused by my friend Ollie’s house party, summarized in this photo:

There is grass under the sofa. Not because someone had lugged furniture into the garden, no. Ollie had gone to the trouble of turfing his bedroom, for some reason. I think there was a sports theme to the party and Ollie wanted his bedroom to be like Wimbledon.