The Blood Bowl site is nearly complete — I should have it all wrapped up by next week — which is a relief.  It’s been more work than I was expecting in all honesty.  I’ve done most of the updates for the theatre school website, but failed to get a ‘quote’ to them before their last committee meeting as I promised.  One Flew Over The Cookoo’s Nest has been and gone (you can read a review here and another one here).  My dad’s starting up a company and I went to a meeting in York with him and my brother about their marketing and publicity.  Actually I had two reasons for going back up north that weekend.

My Grandma isn’t very well.  She’s 88 and has been getting slowly worse for wear.  The last year has been most noticeable with her mental health going a bit down hill.  She was diagnosed diabetic last year and had been given a whole range of tablets to take to help.  When she was being forced to take them she was generally OK.  She was keeping on top of things at home and looking after herself.  When she was left to her own devices, however, she didn’t take her tablets and got worse.  She claims there’s nothing wrong with her (I think this might be something to do with Christian Science, although I’m not totally sure), and so would choose to leave the tablets.  When she doesn’t take them her blood sugar goes haywire and she starts to lose her grip on the day-to-day running of her life.

A couple of weeks ago she was found, by the neighbours, in her night dress in the bath.  She was just lying there with no water in it, and when asked why, she said she thought she was in bed.  They took her into hospital in Middlesbrough.  After some tests they found she’s got cancer. (I’m not sure quite what kind, but it doesn’t matter.  They don’t know where it started or how long it’s been around, but it doesn’t matter.  They only found it by chance so it obviously hadn’t been affecting her very much.)

So, a couple of weekends ago, the whole family went to visit her in hospital.  She was bored.  Stuck on a ward with no interesting conversation and nothing to do (it even turned out that she didn’t have her glasses with her so couldn’t even do crosswords or anything!).  When we were there talking to her she was fine — she asked my brother and I what we were doing, and we told her about our recent activities (I told her about the set building, my brother about his involvement with some music event) — she kept up with the conversation no problem, and we even did a bit of the crossword as a family.  Of course they’d been making sure she took all her tablets when she should.

This week she was moved to Guisborough hospital, incidentally the place I was born.  I’m told it’s a much nicer hospital where she has her own room with a TV and slightly more attentive nursing care (not that they weren’t good at the James Cook Hospital, but they were a little busier and so couldn’t pay as much close attention to each patient).

My mum visited her in Guisborough at the weekend.  She said she was very weak and isn’t eating much (when we were there she said she didn’t have much appetite).  I guess there’s no getting away from the fact she’s dying.  Of course it’s sad, but she’s comfortable and seems quite happy.  I guess she’s had a while to come to terms with it — she’s had friends die and her brother died last September — and it seems to me she’s pretty much accepted it.  The doctors have given her three months from the cancer, I suspect it’ll be less than that just from old age.

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.

This obviously throws up a few issues, both morally and technically.

To be quite honest I don’t personally have a moral problem with the adult industry.  It’s not something I’ve particularly wanted to get into, but I don’t have objections to the principal.  My view is that so long as the people involved are there willingly and are comfortable with the situation then there’s no problem.  I appreciate the argument that some of the issues are with the message this kind of work gives to young people, but my general opinion is that the majority of people understand that it’s art and that the people in the images have chosen to be involved.  Not everyone I know would agree, and this is another slight issue — if I do take the job, do I keep quiet about it?

Technically it’s portrait work and normally I would turn down portrait work.  It’s not my area of expertise and I know others who specialise in that kind of thing could do a much better job.  While I have similar thoughts about this kind of thing, and it’s well out of my comfort zone, I kind of think that I wouldn’t feel as unconfident about taking these pictures as I would doing traditional studio or location portraiture.  For one thing I think these would be more casual shoots with fewer expectations of what is expected.  This would give me more freedom to experiment, and to some extent shoot in a more candid style that I’m comfortable with.

I gather that the client already has a number of ‘models’ lined up — a handful of friends who want to do some sets of this kind — and I guess he’s got a good idea of the direction of the site he’s building and so the kind of image he wants to end up with, but another concern would be how we would go about about capturing the images themselves.  I’d want the shoots to be casual and fun, but I don’t really know the best way to go about making the models feel comfortable.  I’d certainly want to take a girl with me as my assistant because I think that would help the model feel more relaxed, and then I guess the client would want to come along.  (In fact I’d really appreciate that — given I don’t have any experience in this kind of thing I wouldn’t feel comfortable myself trying to direct a shoot.  Obviously I’d be willing to put my artistic opinion in but I wouldn’t be happy being fully artistically in control, at least for the first few sets. )  I’d also be happy for the model to bring a friend along with her, be that a boyfriend or a girly friend, if that would make her feel happier, but after that I think I’d want a closed set.  That would mean there would be 5 people on set, each with a clearly defined role.  I would be concerned if it turned into a much bigger group with people hanging around not having anything to do.

I still have to get back to them about if I’m willing to do it, and it still might not take off.  But I’ll keep this updated with what I decide and, if I do agree (which I think I’m leaning toward at the moment) my experiences of the shoots themselves.

Then, this weekend, I spotted a copy of The Daily Telegraph on the train open on an article titled “The Mandy and Osborne Show had us in stitches”, so I had a look.  The article I had initially seen was, in fact, not very interesting at all (some comments by an actress about The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards), but the item above it was.  The section I was reading was the comment section, and the piece above related to the current economic climate.  The article is clearly comment – it’s not hard fact, it’s one writer’s opinion on the way Gordon Brown has handled the slow down in the economy.  As good comment should be it’s a very biased article.

The blog post and the article may not be related, but they started me thinking – do these issues of ethics and bias have any impact on the way I work as a photojournalist?

To deviate quickly. Charles Moore’s article begins:

“The credit crunch is not great pictorially. One can tolerate only so many photographs of screens turning red and young traders burying their lavatory-brush haircuts in their hands.”

To some extent I agree – the economy doesn’t lend itself to great photos – but there are some great shots out there which relate to this.  It makes the photographer look for new ways to go about shooting the news and brings up some very artistic work.  It also happens pretty slowly (in photography terms), so there’s plenty of time to set up and get the very best shot you can and you’re not just shooting in bulk in the hope that one image will be worth something.  Put it this way: it’s no riot.

I’m freelance and make my money (when shooting editorial work) by selling my pictures on the wires.  The more outlets that pick up an image the more money I get.  The more images I sell the more money I get.  When I’m in the field shooting a news story I don’t know how writers and editors are going to spin the story, indeed different outlets will spin it different ways.  Therefore it’s in my interest to shoot an as un-biased set as possible.  For example: if I shoot 12 pictures of Gordon Brown with a light above his head which makes it look like he has a halo.  I put them on the wires and one image gets picked up by one newspaper who want to illustrate their story about how Brown is the saviour of the economy.  However, if I shoot 6 pictures like this and another 6 where he’s waving a large knife around looking menacing (during a publicity at a butchers, say), I might well manage to sell two pictures – one halo to the previous paper, and one knife to a paper wanting to paint him as the butcher of the economy.  So now I’ve made twice as much money.  And if I shoot 12 different pictures of him doing a whole range of things I might well sell 12 images to 12 different outlets each with their own agenda.  And now I’ve made 12 times as much money and can take the rest of the week off.

You see, as a freelance, it’s in my interest to not let my own opinion cloud my artistic (and business) mind.  I guess this changes if you’re staff.  Thank god I’m not staff.

And so to Wimbles’ blog post.  He’s being taught the legal and moral boundaries journalists need to work within as part of his course (or, at least with the moral issues, he’s being made aware of the complexities he needs to take into account when choosing his own boundaries).  While I appreciate we work in different areas – he’s studying broadcast journalism while my work as a photographer is generally for print and new media – there are some similarities (the legal framework is the same, for example).  When it comes to moral boundaries I think it’s easier for me to qualify my choices.  If I take a picture of something then the thing I saw was visible to everyone.  I’m not an investigative journalist, I’m simply an observer.  If my camera can see it then anyone could have seen it and by publishing that picture I’m not revealing anything anyone’s tried very hard to keep secret.  There are gray areas – the paparazzi’s treatment of celebrities is an obvious example – but, for me at least, the boundaries are clear here too: as soon as someone courts a press photographer to further their career they have no room to complain if the photographer then uses them to do the same.

Finally I should say that, luckily for me, I’m very rarely in the situation where these issues come into play.  When I’m shooting editorially I’m at events – sporting fixtures, carnivals, concerts, etc. – and I don’t go about making a living from chasing cutting edge news.  It’s encouraging that courses like the one being taken by Wimbles teach the moral side of journalism as well as the legal side.  It’s very reassuring to know that it’s people like him, with apparently a very balanced view on these issues, who are the future of journalism in this country. But I do sometimes fear that, once out of the protected environment of the college situation, this solid grounding and common sense will come a little un-stuck when it meets with the real daily pressures of journalism and, ultimately, the need to make a living from the stories being written.

While out shooting the Hallowe’en party last weekend I was approached by a man asking if I did this professionally: “I’m looking for someone who knows what they’re doing for an event we’re holding tomorrow night in Woking” he told me, “it looks like you know your stuff, just looking at your flash”.  I shoot with a Canon Speedlite 580EXII.  He went on to tell me about his event.  “There are some big names going to be playing — N-Dubz, Jodie Steele”.  I’d never heard of either of these.  And something was making alarm bells ring.  Still, I gave him my card and he gave me a flyer.

When I got home I decided to do a little bit of research.  He’d told me about their new website (in fact he offered me publicity through it — he said that he’d let me us it to promote my work.  I explained I pretty much had that covered myself), so I started looking there.  It looked reasonable.  It explained about the event, a 16+ club night, their launch event.  Their gallery section had some images which had obviously been stolen from somewhere else.  Next I checked their Facebook event page.  This looked a little less professional.  They had over 1000 people saying they were going to go, but the text was very poorly written and all the contact details were mobile numbers.  People seemed to be excited about going.  I still wasn’t convinced.  I decided that I wouldn’t ring them as he’d said I should, I’d let them ring me.  And I went to bed.

Next morning I woke up thinking about it.  This is my kind of work, and normally I wouldn’t think twice about it if I had a gap in the diary, but still something didn’t seem right.  My mobile rang about half 10, I didn’t check it, but I decided not to answer.  It turned out to be the letting agent asking if we had any post for the previous tenants.  The day went on as normal, no one rang.  Just as I’d pretty much decided they weren’t going to ring my phone rang again.  This time it was the man I’d met last night.  I didn’t answer.

It was about half 7 in the evening and the event was due to start at 9pm.  This was pretty much the deciding factor — any properly organised company would have sorted this out before now, especially given that they had promoted that photographers would be there on their publicity.  I think this is part of what made me feel uneasy the night before: why would a well organised company approach someone in the bar the night before asking if they could shoot their event?  So I didn’t go.

Next morning I checked in on the Facebook group again, had people enjoyed themselves?  The first comment: “WHAT A LOAD OF BOLLOCKS THAT NIGHT WAS!! FUCKIN RIP OFF! COMPLETE N UTTER SHIT!”.  Oh good.  The next wall post was from the organisers claiming they had problems with the club management and that “At 11pm on the night we were threatened with the club being shut down”.  Sounds like a rocking night.  I think my suspicions were well placed.  Who knows what would have happened if I had turned up…

He still has my card, and they are promising to do another event at the end of this month for everyone who was let down last time so maybe I’ll hear from them again, but I think that’ll be another job I’ll be turning down.  Besides I think this next event might never happen — their website has now disappeared.  I wonder if that was done on a promise like they tried with me (“we’ll give you publicity!”) and with the failure of this event that poor person, who has already put the time an effort in, has decided to pull out.

Either way, it’s times like that sometimes it’s better to listen to your gut feelings than just grab work when it’s offered.  My horoscope for the day of the event gave the best advice, in fact: “Well, on the 1st, if somebody comes your way peddling something that, while appealing, just makes no darn sense, say no.”

The building the install is going into is an old grade 2 listed coach house which was converted into an office in 1984.  It already has structured cables installed for general office work and it has false floors, although it’s effectiveness is a little patchy.  There are 23 cameras being installed covering pretty much the whole building inside and out.  Everywhere I can I’ve tried to use the existing cable to carry the data but for some of the cameras installed in hallways and stairwells this hasn’t been possible.  That’s where the hard work has come in.  Friday was spent pulling new Cat6 cables from the ground floor to the 1st floor through a pretty full riser, so full, in fact, the cables don’t run through holes in the rider itself, but through holes in the ceiling next to the riser.  It still all looks very neat.  It then went under the floor on the 1st floor and through ducting out to the stairs.  Yesterday I spent 8 hours finishing the job by running the cables under the floor in the main office on the ground floor and patching into the rack in the the comms room.  It’s certainly been a learning experience and I’ve enjoyed it, although I’ve found that I’ve been much more sleepy in the evenings for the last few days than I normally would after a day working at the computer.  I think this week will be much more back to normal.

I watched an episode of the new version of Beverly Hills 90210 on Friday.  It’s a pretty standard American teen series thing, but one thing struck me.  The episode I saw involved a lot of photography — there was a fashion show and there was a load of photographers taking pictures.  Only the actors playing photographers didn’t seem to know anything about photography.  They were shooting portrate, and one woman caught my eye — she had a full-frame camera (something like a Canon EOS1D) with side grip but was holding it all wrong.  For a start she was still using the main grip up over her head rather than the grip and shutter release on the bottom of the camera.  On top of that her other hand was just kind of holding the body on the side.  Not only did that look silly but it also meant she couldn’t possibly be focusing the lens.  I suppose you could argue she was using auto focus, but in that case she still couldn’t be changing the zoom range and I think it’s unlikely that she’d be using a prime lens in that situation.  I find it amazing that no one putting the programme together noticed and did anything about this.  There must have been at least one person on the crew who knew how to use a camera properly (after all I presume the programme was filmed using a camera…), and it wouldn’t have taken much to explain to these actors how to at least look like they were taking real photographs.  Sometimes I despair.  Miss D thought it was an odd thing to get upset about.