From a recent PR shoot for a local civil engineering firm….

The cycle of violence got nicked before christmas, so i now walk to work, through Southern Cemetry…. without meaning to sound all goth, its kinda beautiful

Those little critters do take up a herd of time… I have been holed up reading and reading and reading – mostly very dry books on theory of photography but also some books for inspiration, the scrapbook of cartier bresson which is fascinating if for no other reason than giving an insight into the process that he took – and he took some rubbish photos… before anyone points out the obvious here i should say that as someone who takes a lot of rubbish photos i feel i am qualified to say that. Needless to say he also took some of the greatest photographs ever, and all are present in this book.

The other book that is providing a huge inspiration is a book that i managed to get that i think was given away at an exhibtion of don mcphee’s work. Examples of Dons work can be found googling around but i just wanted something tangible to be able to flick through and it is both very inspirational and just downright interesting  – Don’s potrait of enoch powell is staggeringly good.

So i’m back on track and back in the game, nikon readied, CF cards wiped clean and ready to go… A more modest output this time – 1 a week.

it should have been the dream gig, everyone has a dream gig, i think manuel did a post about this once, but i’m quite sure he never invented the concept, of the dream gig, if i remember rightly he was serving spuds to richard pryor, roy keane and morrissey… and i’m sure we all have the dream gig.

So when i get a request to photograph a line up that goes, Frank Carson, Philomena Begley, Jimmy Cricket, Brendan ‘not barry mcguigan’ O’Carroll, Henry ‘going for gold’ kelly, Gloria Hunniford amongst others… well you make damn sure that weekend is free… and you don’t let little things like Friday the 13th get in your way.

I have the small matter of a wedding later this week so i am making sure everything in my equipment list is right – 2 bodies, my relatively new d2x and my trusty but battle weary D70, i pack one flash gun, reckoning 2 will be overkill and i bring every lens i have – nothing can go wrong – oh but it does, half way through some test shots the viewfinder on my d2x goes dark – no reason, nothing just every picture coming through dark, panic.

The problem never got fixed, the camera just wouldn’t play, so it was onto the D70, running around shooting everything in sight, i take off the flash for some long lens work and decide to put the flash in my top pocket, big mistake. They never say ‘does not bounce’ anywhere on the flash, but you can take it from me that they are surprisingly unresistant to any such treatment. Now the D70 has an onboard flash, but its crap, thankfully someone lent me a flash gun.

Unfortunately for devices that are just meant to flash a light when you hit a button when you hit it they can get pretty complex. I don’t know whether i ever got it working right, looking at some of the pics, i really don’t think i did, but thanks so much to the guy who lent me the flash (these things can cost a couple of hundred quid, and you don’t go lending them to half-wits you have just met who try to bounce them off the ground.) Cheers that man, thanks to you i was at least able to save something off the night

So from a photography point of view, a nightmare, but maybe best to get these out of the way before the wedding later this week (if the groom-to-be is reading – all equipment has been shipped back to nikon this morning and replacements arranged for this week) but why oh why oh why did it have to be on this of all nights.

From an entertainment point of view? i have to say, TOP! yes, with exclamation mark – there was a few photographers and 2 camera men at the front of the stage at most points through the night, and to watch them all struggling to take pictures due to (and i assure you this is true) laughing so much at Frank Carsons jokes was an absolute joy to behold.

Full gallery here

Aperture, is awesomes like a million hot-dogs, sometimes it will import your pictures and fill your hard-drive by copying them into a database, sometimes, it will leave them in the location, sometimes you will have to reinstall it because it refuses to import anything and you will have your photos spread across two 40gb databases on your laptop and the rest on your USB Drive, sometimes you will have to delete one of these databases in order to have any space left on your laptop, and sometimes you will lose a load of photos….

Central Station NYC, Dark Hedges Armoy, i only have <1mb jpegs to remember you by now, the original RAW files have gone to the great trashcan in the sky.

I still have most of my NYC photos, but these, from my last day, were very nearly lost… but i am very very gutted, i’m actually scared to go through and try to find what i have lost.

There is a curious feeling that you get using a computer every so often, it feels like an empty bowling ball being removed from your stomach, sometimes it comes when you hit the ‘reply-all’ button on an email instead of ‘reply’ and sometimes it comes when you realise that you have lost a lot of data. Does this have a name?

So resigned for the worst I made my way into town, remembering the good times like the 54 mile midnight bike ride from Manchester to Formby, with a rocket on the back, Earlier this year

So imagine my surprise then, when I reach town and find it fully in-tact, un mollested and un scathed.. well slightly scathed… a bit wrecked in the back wheel to be fair, but as usual, throwing more money at it than it is actually worth saves the day and ‘the cycle of violence’ is back and ready to be trailered up and used as a tractor down on the allotment again.

They never even made off with the bottle opener on the saddle – people of manchester, i owe you an apology for ever doubting you.

Dunluce Castle, Co Antrim

This was my local castle- I have been trying to figure out some new software for dealing with my back catalogue of photographs and came across this pic from years back – not much photoshop on it other than levels – the sun was setting so the castle walls had that reddy glow off them, there was some more scaffolding on the walls to the left, but i removed any that was against the sky.

can’t update the site with pics at the moment as the spam database seems to have become full of the evil from ghostbusters 2…. if anyone knows anything about repairing WP databases when your ISP doesn’t allow telnet or SSH i would be most grateful if you could drop me a line

I did have rather a funny moment in NY last week though when I got the latest issue of new travel magazine ‘everywhere‘ and saw my pictures staring back at me!

I had submitted the post on there a while back, but i am very self conscious of what i write, i can barely spell never mind construct a sentence, so after several proof reads and a lot of help from the sub-editor i finally got an article together and submitted – the whole thing is basically a re-hash of a blog post i did on here some time back.

And finally I got contacted by someone at a site i have never heard off, schmap, which looks like an interesting idea, they wanted to use a photo they found of mine on flickr on their site - which is nice (in case you are wondering, Josh Rogan is an old pseudonym of mine)

which is all very nice, but i really should be out taking more pictures.