In the spirit of my previous post, and because I’ve already released a couple of these photos under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence, I’ve decided to post a few of photos I took at the West End Live event last weekend.  I’ll try to do this more often when I take my camera out just for fun.

All photos are Copyright 2010 Carreg.  Indicated images are licenced under a CC-BY-3.0 licence (attribution to Carregs-Blog.co.uk, please), for licencing of other images (as well as details of further images) please contact fluttphotographic.com.

And I think sometimes it’s the same with my photography.

I take photos for a living and, don’t get me wrong, I love it.  I get a great feeling of satisfaction from producing something which brings people joy without them thinking about who I am.  (That’s the same with a lot of the work I’ve done: when I’m doing costume character work I enjoy walking around the place I’ve just been working knowing that none of the people who I’ve been interacting with have a clue who I am, and I enjoy working back stage in theatre, adding to the magic without people giving a second thought to me being there.)  But sometimes I get home, collapse into bed, and wonder why I just put myself through that.

This happens most when I’m out with my camera for fun.  I think this is mainly because a lot of the stuff I do for myself is different to the stuff I do professionally — my professional work is usually rehearsal space, studio or theatre based and generally pretty controlled (with some exceptions, of course, and I’m pleased to do those other things), while the stuff I shoot for myself is often outdoors in unpredictable public environments.  It’s kind of the difference between photography as an art and the thrill of capturing that candid moment.

When I’m out for myself I can spend hours on my feet with my heavy kit bag, sometimes walking for miles.  And today I’m suffering from the weekend.  But I still do it.  I still go out with my cameras when I have free time.  Occasionally I have the moments I just described, wondering why on earth I would put myself through that for no apparent gain, but I do.  And you know what?  I love it.

I expect (kind of hope) a few days will be occupied by the Grim North stuff. It’s my one (perhaps two) chances each year to stretch my lighting design legs.  Lighting was something I did quite a bit of when I was younger in one way or another, and I really love.  At one stage I considered training to work as a theatre lighting designer, but it never happened.  I also do their photos for them.  I’ve read the script a couple of times now, but to be honest still no idea what’s going on.  (This is the same as last year.  Then only having seen it a few times did I begin to get the hang of it. I don’t know how anyone watching it once could possibly have understood it).  I’m hoping that I’ll get chance to talk to the director about his artistic direction at some point early in the week, then on Wednesday night I’m going to attend one of their rehearsals to see how they play it out.  By this time I’m going to have to have some idea of how I’m going to light the thing and will, hopefully just be finalising ideas by then.  I’m told we’ll have time in the theatre on Thursday for rigging and focussing, but it’s not confirmed yet.  If we don’t then we’re going to have real problems.  The company is in the theatre 6-10pm on the Friday when the plan is to have a block run and, hopefully, a quick tech run.  This doesn’t leave much time for anything else.  They are looking to hire a small space in Hebden Bridge on Saturday to do some final polishing, which hopefully I’ll be able to shoot, as I’ll have finished everything else by then (to be honest even if not there’s not much I can do by that stage), before being in the theatre 6-10 on Saturday and Sunday.  I think the show goes up at 7.30 so I’ll have an hour and a half to, hopefully, relax before each night.

One problem with this company is they don’t have anyone there all the time who is technical.  When they book the venue they don’t give any thought to when any kind of technical get-in might happen, so when I turn up and ask about it, it always seems to take them by surprise.  Along the same lines they don’t have many people with professional theatre experience, although there are some who have trained professionally, and certainly no one who has experience back stage, so no one thinks about the general house work needed around the theatre, so I end up doing all that too.  It gets a bit hectic.  I’m hoping this year will be a bit different – the production team have more experience and I gather there will even be a stage manager.  It could be all different.

Either way, I think I’m looking forward to it.  Despite the hard work last year, I really enjoyed it.  I’ll let you know how we get on.

I’m at Wakefield Westgate now.

Events on the main stage in Trafalgar Square were due to kick off at 12noon, so I headed into London in the morning. I had spoken to Miss T the day before and she’d talked about meeting up in the afternoon – she was babysitting for her sister the night before, and so would be passing through London.  I’d agreed to lend her and Mr S one of my old cameras, so this was an ideal chance to hand it over – so I wanted to get plenty of time in before I met her. When I arrived at the square, at about quarter to 12, there were already a lot of people waiting and so I went to find myself good vantage point at the top of the stairs leading up to the National Gallery where I settled down for things to get going.

12 o’clock came and went.  As did half past, as did 1pm.  And still we stood waiting.  Finally, about quarter past 1 our two hosts appeared on stage.  They were two young ladies (Not young young I don’t suppose.  Not what I might have referred to as young before, but from the view of my advancing age, young enough.) dressed in traditional Chinese outfits. It took me a little by surprise when they introduced themselves as Yvonne and [something equally non-Chinese].  Anyhow, they proceeded to introduce a whole load of dignitaries ranging from someone from the Chinese embassy who couldn’t speak English, through to some senior policeman, via Boris Johnson who couldn’t be bothered to turn up but sent us a video message (which we ended up seeing twice, apparently because of technical problems), all of whom made speeches about how great the occasion was and how proud they were to be associated with it.  After around 45 minutes, the painting of the dragons’ eyes and a photo call on the stage, the entertainment started.

The first, and by far the best, act was a dragon dance.  We were told that it was telling the story of a dragon who was sent into the mountains to collect some kind of special tea.  He had to overcome a whole load of problems on his journey and, apparently, was scared for a long period around the middle.  The dance was impressive.  The dragon was made up of two people and the whole dance took place on top of a set of 7 and 8 foot poles.  There were lots of acrobatic jumps from pole to pole accompanied by traditional Chinese drums and thing which no one but the front row of the crowd right by them could hear because it wasn’t amplified.  Following that there was some singing and something else (probably: I can’t actually remember, it made such an impression).

By this time I was losing interest and wanted to wander up to Chinatown, but was a little bit trapped.  Even when they moved the barriers back to make more room on the ground the steps were pretty crowded and I was struggling to escape.  I found my way down the side of the steps in the end, knocking out as few people as possible on the way down. I took some general shots around Trafalgar Square and then my phone rang. It was Miss T.  She was just setting off from her sister’s house and, after a little discussion, we arranged to meet outside of Leicester Square tube.  This was on the right line for her, and was a good reason for me to head that way.

So I did.  I walked up around Trafalgar Square stopping to take some shots of the stalls and people around the edge (as well as taking a picture for some foreign visitors. It seems if you have professional kit on your shoulders people expect you to be able to take good photos on their little instant digital cameras.  This is, of course, the opposite of the truth.), and headed up the (closed) road to Leicester Square.  There was more going on there, and I spent some time taking pictures around there.  The plan was to then go into Chinatown itself, but a little exploration revealed that wasn’t going to work because of the crowds and time.  So I just went to meet Miss T.

Once she arrived we headed off for a break at a lovely little cafe in Covent Garden.  On the way there we spotted a whole load of TV OB trucks parked outside the Royal Opera House so went to investigate. Of course neither of us had realised it was the night of the BAFTA awards; why would we? It’s not like we both work in the entertainment industry or anything. We sat for an hour or so in the cafe, Miss T had soup while I had a very large slice of Chocolate Bombe and surprisingly nice Apple juice.  We chatted and I got to take the weight off my feet for a while.

One thing Miss T wanted to do was get photographs of some graffiti which had appeared on some building site hoardings near London Bridge.  We decided we should head there before the light faded too far.  With those photos in the bag, we walked back along the south bank of the river toward Waterloo, snapping away as we went.

As a theatre and events photographer it’s been a long time since I took landscape pictures so it was a bit of a change for me, but still remarkably enjoyable.  It’s also been a long time since I went on a shoot with another photographer, and it’s always very interesting to see what they spot that you missed, especially when out of the confines of a performance space.

Miss T and I parted company once we reached Waterloo station.  It was pretty late by this stage and we both needed to get off home.  We sorted out who was taking what camera kit (I was still carrying some of the things she wanted to borrow in my kit bag), said our goodbyes, she headed off underground and I went and got my train.

On the train home I sat opposite a photographer who had clearly been on the BAFTAs red carpet.  He was editing and tagging his photos with the help of a celebrity cheat sheet issued by BAFTA.  It crossed my mind that it would be very helpful if something like that could be provided by producers when I’m working with particularly large casts.

I beat Miss T back home for once, although unusually we did start off from my main station rather than hers.

I was glad of a few days with nothing planned this weekend.  The last few weeks have been a bit non-stop.  Early in the year I bought a whole new load of camera kit but hadn’t had much chance to take it out for fun and play with it through January so, on Valentine’s day, I packed up my backpack and headed off to shoot the silent disco in The Scoop at More London.  I was expecting it to be a reasonably busy event with plenty going on to photograph.  Unfortunatly that wasn’t the case.

My trains arrive into London Waterloo which is just a few minutes walk away from the London Eye and South Bank.  Once on the South Bank you can walk along the Thames path right down to Greenwich (in fact the path runs 184 miles from near the river’s source, according to the National Trail website).  So I decided to walk from the station to City Hall, quite a nice walk I’ve done plenty of times before with a full kit bag.  What I failed to factor into my journey was how much heavier my new kit is when compared to my old kit, and how out of practice I am at walking with it after winter (in fact quite probably how out of practice I am at walking at all since I started using my bike for local journeys just under a year ago).

Once I reached The Scoop I was disapointed that there weren’t many people there, and it wasn’t much of a sight.  I couldn’t even easily get close to the edge of The Scoop because they had security barriers around it.  There were pretty friendly looking staff around (one of the young ladies gave me quite a smile as I walked past, actually) and I’m sure, had I asked, they would have been quite accomodating, but I wasn’t really in the mood having walked all that way, so I just stomped past, around the other side of City Hall and flopped onto the stone seating / steps for a rest and to decide what to do. For some reason I chose to walk a bit further.

I wandered across Tower Bridge, in front of the Tower of London and along some of the roads in the City. I didn’t take any pictures.  I had half an idea to walk to St Paul’s, but didn’t make it that far.  I came back down to the north side of the Thames by St Magnus the Martyr (who were ringing their bells at the time) and walked back up to Tower Bridge.  By this time I was starting to hurt; my feet and legs were the worst. I crossed back over the river with the intention of seeing if things had hotted up at the disco, but they hadn’t so I decided to head home.

By this time my shoes were feeling really quite uncomfortable and I was limping slightly.  It felt like my sock had shifted slightly aroud in my shoe and the feeling of it moving against my foot was starting to annoy me, so I stopped to sort it out.  Unfortunatly it wasn’t my sock, it was the skin on the ball of my foot which had blistered very badly.  I hobbled on to London Bridge tube and back to Waterloo where, thankfully, it wasn’t much of a wait for the train.

I continued to suffer for it the next few days.  While my feet felt a little better after a good night’s sleep my legs decided to start aching more.  I think perhaps I was a bit ambitious (albeit not intentionally) on my first outing of the summer, but at least I know now how much practice I need to get in before we really hit the summer events season…

One of the things I’ve been doing which has been getting in the way of writing this is re-vamping a website for my brother.  He’s part of a group which run a large Blood Bowl league and last year I made a site which they used to manage the league tables and match reports.  They’ve grown a lot in the last season and now need the site to manage a lot more complicated things than it did previously.  This involves doing quite a bit of rebuilding of the output and processing side of things although at least I can reuse a lot of the back-end code.  I got the brief and some design documents a good few weeks ago and the deadline is the end of September.  In my mind that’s quite a while away, so I haven’t been too bothered about rushing with it (in fact it’s probably fair to say I did nothing for a long time, to be honest).  Occasionally my brother would give me a nudge about it, and I’d say something like “yeah, it should be ok” or “I did some last night, I’ll have something to show you soon”.  After a while I started to run out of excuses and had to do some work.  I worked late on the Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday night and then emailed him with a basic version of the site.  This seems to have worked — he did say something about being worried about the deadline in his reply — but at least it’s put his mind at rest that I actually am doing something.  I suppose I should do some more soon.  Maybe tomorrow and Thursday.

I can’t do any on Friday because I’m off to build a set with Miss T.  She rang me while I was out with Mr P and Miss C last night and we had a long chat.  I’m glad she rang — I’d been worried following a short conversation on Friday night.  I’ll write about that more soon, but Sunday’s conversation ended up with me offering to help her build the set for the upcoming Sedos production of One Flew Over The Cookoo’s Nest.  I think it’ll be quite fun — certainly better being with her than being stuck at home all bank weekend by my self (Miss D will be off at Mr T’s parent’s house) — if a little tiring.  I’m meeting her on Friday night in London and staying at her house so we can get a whole day’s work in on Saturday and Sunday.  I’m not quite sure what I’ve let myself in for, but I’ll let you know how things go.

Talking about art, I’ve been following the events up on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in the last few months.  The One & Other project is a living art installation consisting of a different person occupying the plinth for an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week through until October.  There’s a live web stream so you can watch and listen to the person up there from the comfort of your own home.  It’s been quite interesting.  Some of the people are certainly art while some I’d wonder.  I think, in general, it’s got better as time has gone on with more people being creative than just sitting reading a book.  Having said that it is supposed to be a reflection of the UK at the moment, so I do believe that sitting quietly is a perfectly acceptable thing to do… it’s just not very exciting to watch!  There’s a very interesting collection of photos building up on Flickr of the project.  I’ve also been following the project on Twitter.

Talking of Twitter, I’ve jumped on that band wagon.  All being well you’ll see the latest tweet at the top of the front page of this blog.  I find it’s quite good just to drop random thoughts on to — small thoughts I just want to put out there but don’t necessarily have anyone around to say them to.  I know a lot of people who have Twitter accounts — most of my friends are on there — but having connected it to this anonymous blog I can’t really follow them.  That’s a bit of a shame, I’d certainly be able to have more friends, but it’s a choice I made to carry on being able to write this blog without feeling restricted.  If you’d like to add me then please do — @CarregsBlog.  I might, at some stage, add another account as the real me (although all my normal usernames seem to have been taken, so I’ll have to come up with something else), but I’m not really sure what I’d write on that one!

I think that’ll do for now.  I’ve lots more to write about, but at least that gets some of it out of the way.  Sorry I’ve been so useless.  I’ll try harder from now on, at least for a little while, I promise.

We arrived at the venue at 6pm and found it already open.  Inside there were two people and a very friendly dog.  One of the people, their lighting man, was up a ladder trying his best to cover up the set which had been built on stage with their black drapes – we had been promised a black box, so he was aiming for that with mixed success.

Ben and I had travelled to Hebden Bridge together on the train from his house where we’d had a chat about the play and my ideas for lighting it.  We were shortly joined by Nick, a friend who Ben had met at university, and who in the past had done the lighting for the company.  I wasn’t sure exactly how things were going to work with the two of us – I knew he would be around Thursday and for the show on Friday but not for the show on Sunday, and I wasn’t sure exactly how far his experience and knowledge stretched – so I thought best to play it by ear.  I’d already come up with some ideas from seeing the previous day’s rehearsal and had a list of what I wanted in order of preference depending on what was available at the venue.

After a quick chat with the people there we were shown around the box and told how to switch the kit on.  I asked a few questions about what we could do and the capabilities of the venue, and then we set to rigging and focussing.  At first we planned only to use the bars at the side of the auditorium to light down stage and the bars on stage to light up stage simply because of the time and effort of getting to the two front of house bars, but this plan changed after we noticed one of the luminaries FOH did not have a safety chain and we had no choice but to get a ladder up to it anyway!

We spent about three and a half hours rigging, with me taking charge, until we thought we had something reasonable to work with (at which point I also felt a bit aware of the fact the theatre tech was also still there, and we were eating up his evening!).  I took a few notes of the sockets we had plugged in to, the type of control board we were going to be working with, and took a quick look at the patch in the gallery and we left.  The plan was to work out a reasonable patch and get hold of an offline editor for the desk so I could programme it the next day during rehearsals.  Unfortunately things weren’t quite as straight forward as I had hoped…

I joined the company today in their rehearsal space and watched a run through of the piece, taking notes as to what I’d like to do.

I have some ideas but there’s one problem – I haven’t been to the theatre it’s playing (the Hebden Bridge Little Theatre) in since I was about 11, Ben’s not been able to get any kind of technical contact there, and we have an hour and a half in the space tonight to get ourselves sorted – rigging, focussing, plotting, etc.  All I know of the technical specification is that last time Ben went he thinks he saw a computer screen in the box.  If this wasn’t bad enough when I spoke to Ben quickly today about it he said he wasn’t even sure if we were going to be able to move anything and that we might just have to ‘make do with what was there’.

That’s not really good enough for me.  I need to do the best I can.  I need to make sure it’s right and I’m willing to put the hours in – I’ve said that if the problem with access to the venue is because people don’t want to hang around with keys then I’ll take responsibility and get the keys back to them once we’re done or the next day when the show goes up.  I’m willing to stay all night if we can make it right.  Unfortunately I suspect it’s more complicated than that.

So, later today, armed with notes, I’m going to meet Ben and we’re going to talk through what we both want out of it.  Then we’re going to go to the theatre and see how much of those plans we can actually do.  And I’ll let you know.

I guess it means something that when it’s a choice between theatre and anything else theatre always wins.  This has always been the case, and when I dropped out of university I think I must have realised it (at least subconsciously, although at the time I thought I was just looking for something totally different from what I had been doing) – I applied to take a course at RADA.  I didn’t get in, they said I lacked industry experience (which seems odd given they’re job is to teach people things they’ll need to get into the industry!).  I think this knocked me back into thinking it was a silly idea (I’ll admit it was a bit of a long shot anyway) and I got on and made the life I live now.

In the last year these thoughts have crept up on me a bit.  I blame Miss T – through her I’m experiencing working in theatre.  She tells me about her days and what she’s had to deal with, we go to shows together and sit there commenting on things we’ve spotted, and we’ve even sat there reading the same script talking about how we see the scene being set.

And you know what?  I love it.

Part of me wishes I didn’t.  I want to go and be involved, I want to spend my day’s like Miss T does surrounded by it, working on it, making it all come together.  But I can’t just do that.  I can’t just drop what I have and do that, it doesn’t work like that.

I spoke to Miss T today on the phone and she said that, one day, we’ll both be working in the West End, and we’ll finish our shows and head to the clubs where only those working in London theatre can go, together.  It’s fantasy, it’ll never happen… and yet she tells me it can, that I just have to get myself together and make it happen.  Perhaps she’s right, but I don’t think I know how to go about it.  Or maybe I don’t think I can go about it.

Either way, for the next 4 days, I’m in that world.  It may only on the very outer fringe, but I’m involved, and I’m going to put everything I can into it.  Because this is what I really, really want to do.

The plan was to meet the runners around mile 9 just past Canada Water, and then jump back on the tube and go to Bermondsey then Westferry, Poplar and finish off at Embankment.  This quickly went out of the window.  I arrived at Canada Water in good time and made my way around to Canada Street just in front of the Standard’s press building.  At first the crowds were a little too deep to get any good coverage so I wandered down the road the way the runners were going.  After a short distance the spectators thinned out and I managed to get some shots in.  A little further down the road I came across my first water station.

Last year all the water stations I came across were fenced off and without a route pass I couldn’t get very close, but this year I managed to get up close and personal with a couple of them.  One benefit of having professional equipment at events like this is that people often just assume you’re doing something official and either don’t question you when you’re in a slightly strange place, or actually get out of the way for you.  This happened a few times with the water stations and I got some good pictures from right in the middle of the action.

Having come this far from Canada Water I decided to press on a little further rather than fight my way back past the crowds again.  While I did have my own plan on me with tube stops marked, I didn’t get it out to check and just walked on.  In the end I walked about 3 miles from Canada Water to Bermondsey by which time I was really hot, pretty tired and well behind schedule.  At Bermondsey I bought myself a bottle of water and took stock.  It was too late to get to Westferry on time so I decided to ditch that step.  The previous year I’d had a bad experience with changing on the DLR so decided I didn’t want to try that again and decided to skip Poplar as well.  That left me just with Embankment, so I set off there.

I decided to head to Westminster and walk back along Victoria Embankment rather than change to the District or Circle line to Monument or anything partly because it would give me more time above ground on the Marathon route, and partly to see if I could get any interesting shots of the current protests in Parliament Square along side the runners.  So I headed up to the surface.  On the way up it amused me that London Underground were making announcements about the best exit to use for the protests — customers for the protests should use exit three.  Once I got out I had a look around.  Slightly sadly I couldn’t get anywhere near the protests because of the police cordon, so I decided to head back the other way.  Just as I was turning back to walk towards the Houses of Parliament and around the top of the Marathon route I was approached by a foreign visitor who asked me to take their photograph in front of Big Ben.  This I did but made a bit of a mess of — I managed to cut the top off the tower.  She probably thought that someone who looked like a press photographer would be able to take a decent photo and I felt bad not framing it right, but I decided it wasn’t exactly the right time to spend a couple of minutes getting it all right.  That takes my tourist photo taking to 2 (the other being outside of Buckingham Palace).  I wonder how many other professional photographers have had this pleasure.

Anyway, I wandered down Victoria Embankment looking for interesting things to get pictures of but was pretty disappointed.  The crowds were too heavy to get to the road most of the time and where I could there wasn’t much of interest to photograph, so most of the pictures I got on this section were of supporters.  I walked a good mile down the road and back again although pretty much gave up taking pictures on the way back.  Once I got back to Westminster station I tried once more to get a reasonable picture of runners and protests but still couldn’t.  I wandered onto Parliament Street and sat down for a while — by this time I was hot and tired.  I thought I’d head back to Waterloo on the tube to save pushing through the crowds.  The entrances to the station on the junction with Parliament Street were exit only, so I decided to head back to the entrance next to the mini Tesco.  Unfortunately as I tried to get back on to the road by Parliament Square I was met by a policeman telling me it was closed.  At this point I have to say that, despite all the complaints the press have with the Met, he was very polite about it (I know I wasn’t working, but knowing what’s been alleged by photographers of their experiences with the police it does skew your expectations a little).  It was, however, a little irritating:  if you know that area of London you might know that it’s a long walk back down Parliament Street onto Whitehall before you can turn right again and get back to Victoria Embankment, cross the river and get back to Waterloo.

By the time I got back home I couldn’t be bothered to sort out the pictures and instead went to bed.  I’ve still not sorted them out.  It makes me glad I’m not in the editorial market — I don’t think I could be bothered to turn these things around in such a short time — at least in my area of work I can just flop when I get in from a shoot and sort the rest of it out the next day!