I want to explore "simple" in photographic terms.

I spend so long thinking of interesting, intricate ideas - how to light this, where to stage that, what outfit the subject needs to wear - and I'm starting to forget the basic reason why I love doing what I do; capturing moments, feelings, glimpses of the strangers that live inside each and every one of the people I know.

Simple portraits. A conversation, window light, simple background. An exercise in talking and listening and trying to capture a moment in the subject's life. Lose the falsehood of smile-for-the-camera; just wait for the right moment.

And I'm not pretending that this hasn't been done, that Avedon didn't do this with every one of his subjects (and do it magnificently, too). But it's a challenge to me.

Howdy, campers.

This is the first post in a series that I'm going to tag "Keep Yourself Honest" or KYH for brevity (it's in the same family as GYOA - "Get Off Your Arse," made popular by Zack Arias and others).

The point of these posts is to give myself some targets to meet, in public. That means that I'll not be able to come back to the post later to see whether I met my targets, but because I've made it public it also means that I'm less likely to welch on trying to meet those targets in the first place (one of my big flaws being that I find it too easy to listen to the lizard brain).

So, to the point at hand.

I'm planning a photo shoot in some woodlands near where I live. I've already put a casting call up for a model and a makeup artist on Model Mayhem (to which I've had several responses, rather surprisingly), and hopefully by the end of the week I'll be in a position to choose which model I want to work with (though I've inadvertently managed to offend one of said models by misphrasing "there are several people interested" in such a way as to make it sound like "I want someone better than you," which is especially galling when you consider that this particular model has a really interesting portfolio).

Anyway, in keeping with the spirit of KYH, I'm going lay out what I intend to accomplish here:

1. Try out some lighting techniques

Specifically, lighting a background for texture.

I've been itching to try out some of the stuff that Drew Gardner demonstrates in his Location Lighting DVD, and this woodland shoot is the ideal way to do that for that.

2. Practice shooting with a model

I know I've shot with models before, but not many. And let's face it, Katie Green is a gift to a photographer, otherwise she wouldn't have been doing the sessions at which I had the pleasure of shooting her. Whilst I'm expecting whatever model I work with to be professional, having them be someone with whom I've never worked before will put me slightly outside my comfort zone, which is always a good place to be.

3. Produce three different looks from the same location

Basically, I want to produce the following looks in the woodland location where we'll be shooting:

• Natural light only, daylight, quite a warm, woody, spring-like feeling, without adding any flash. I'd like to do some fairly close-up portraits and mid-range shots in this look.
• Natural light + flash, using the flash to add texture to the image and give it a slightly more artsy-feel whilst still using the natural light as the main light. This is what Bert would refer to as "flambient light". I'd like to do some wider-angle shots with this look.
• Minimal natural light + flash, using the flash as main, with the natural light as minimal fill, also using flash to selectively add to the background (which is pretty much what you'll see in the image that goes with this post). I'd like to do a range of wide angle to close-up shots with this look.

So there we are, ladies and gents. I've thrown down the gauntlet (to myself). I've no date for the shoot yet, that's obviously dependant on availability for both me and the model and the (currently hypothetical) MUA.

If you read my identi.ca or Twitter feeds (and well you should) you might have noticed this little piece of ridiculous self-pity last night:

Well, that's one project that is now effectively dead and buried. Expect blog entry about it soonish but pretty disappointed right now.

Quite aside from being made up entirely of whinge with a side-order of neediness, which I confess I found utterly galling when re-reading it this morning on the way to writing this blog entry, that dent / tweet / blurt / thing-for-which-there-is-no-good-noun was basically me realising that something that I'd wanted to do wouldn't come off.

Of course, being me, I posted about it before I'd had chance to think about it. Now that I've thought about it I wish I hadn't moaned, because it's not all that big of a deal, and it's certainly not some kind of personal disaster. I don't half talk nonsense sometimes.

The idea, you see, had been to do a series of photoshoots of people affected by the November floods in Cumbria late last year and to produce a book of all (or at least the best of) the portraits, sales of which would contribute towards the charity fund for helping the victims. I nicked the idea from Joe McNally's seminal work Faces of Ground Zero, which is a book of portraits of the heroes of 9/11.

I had all kinds of grandiose ideas, speculating how the portaits could be exhibited in various locations around Cumbria, with the entry fees for the exhibition also going towards the charity fund.

I had this idea back at the time when the floods were still happening, and I promptly emailed the Cumbria Community Foundation to ask them if they were interested and whether they could help me arrange to shoot the subjects I wanted to shoot. The email back said that it was a great idea, but that I should contact the county council, which I duly did by email.

The thing you have to remember about local government is that it moves at a glacial pace. If you want something done you need to nag, because otherwise it simply won't happen. So I nagged a bit, phoned the council, spoke to someone, got a promise of a response the next day. When it arrived it told me that they council officer writing it also though I was onto a good idea, but that I should in fact contact the Red Cross, who were coordinating all the campaigns. Because I was getting used to this by now, I emailed the Red Cross without asking any further questions (like "why are you telling me to contact the Red Cross when your website says to contact the Cumbria Community Foundation and they told me to contact you?").

The Red Cross person who replied very promptly to my email was also on board with the idea, but said that I should contact the Cumbria Community Foundation. I double checked that this passing organisation to organisation was indeed legitimate (I was assured that it was), and then emailed the CCF again. Nothing happened for about a week and then I pretty much forgot all about it because I was getting married at the end of December and not in much of a mood to think about anything else.

I remembered all this last week and thought that, whilst maybe not quite as urgent as before, my idea still had merit, so I emailed the CCF yet again. As yet, I'm still awaiting a response, but yesterday the Cumbria Community Foundation declared the flood fund closed. No more donations needed.

So that, dear reader, is why I was being a whingebag last night. Good idea dead before it got started because I didn't chase it hard enough. I knew full well that if I didn't work to get what I wanted I wouldn't get anything at all, because I'm familiar with how charities and local councils work, but I got lazy and didn't stay as on top of things as I should have.

From this I've learned two things:

1. Working with charities is hard: if you've got an idea you must keep pushing it; don't expect anyone to do it for you.
2. As 1 but without the first sentence.

Here endeth the lesson.

So, first off, brain is better than it was early Friday morning, though I still have a head full of snot, so everything smells of the kind of old, forgotten dustiness you find in attics.

More brain-dumpery, I'm afraid, since I can't be bothered to make this into anything coherent.

Alan Bell replied to my last post with the following comment:

So the software developer box doesn't quite fit, the photographer box doesn't quite fit, the writer box doesn't quite fit. I suggest a Graham Binns shaped box, blog about whatever the heck you want to.

A good suggestion, and one which deserves a reply.

The fact is that I'm not trying to get into a box so much as I'm trying to control which aspect of me people come across when they search for me on the web. There are a few reasons for this, but it boils down to trying to make my website work for me as a sort of photography business card, i.e.: Look here, this is me, this is what I do, this is my creative process as a photographer.

Now, granted, I've come only lately to the photography game, but the fact of the matter is that in my head there's been a shift in how I perceive myself. Now I'm a (admittedly inexperienced) photographer who can write and who can hack, rather than a hacker or writer who can take a decent photograph. I need that to be reflected in my blog, or at least my website, because I intend to make money out of this photography gig (though I'm not betting on making a living out of it; I've no intention of giving up the day job and I've every intention of being a full-time developer for a long time yet).

This might seem a bit weird to a lot of the people reading this blog, because so many blogs out there on the web are about what the author is thinking rather than about who or what the author is.

Think of it this way. If you, in the course of your daily life, were given business card of, say, a landscape gardener, and told "check out my website if you want to see what I'm capable of," you might be a little confused to go to www.myfirstlandscape.com and see, on the front page, an essay about - to pick a topic at random (honest) - the pros and cons of Ubuntu changing its default search for Firefox from Google to Yahoo. It would have no relevance to you in the context in which you're viewing the site (as the potential customer of a landscape gardener). It would detract from the basic purpose of the site, which should be to sell the author's abilities in landscaping.

And that's why I'm thinking of moving all my other stuff - the writing, open source and other general blather - onto a different blog, maybe on a different domain or maybe on a subdomain of grahambinns.com, whichever suits best. I've spent some time this weekend hacking multiple site support into the Frabjous blog engine (very simple thanks to Django) so I'm at least in a position to use my existing infrastructure should I decide to go down that route.

Feel ratty beyond belief right now: really cruddy front-brain headache, eyes stinging, that kind of thing. And this is just a cold; annoying as hell and it makes it hard to think. This may be brain-dumpy in the extreme.

But thinking I am, a bit, about what to do with grahambinns.com. It doesn't serve its purpose anymore because I don't know what its purpose is anymore. I thought, long ago, it'd be a blog about writing, but then I stopped doing so much of that. It started to be a blog about software development, but never really grew into that role because I don't talk that much about it and the Open Source community by and large makes me want to scream with frustration (the subject of another rant. Not here, not now). Then I thought it would be a blog about photography but though I made some inroads there I didn't make enough; lack of dedication to the cause there; something I need to change in 2010.

But here's the thing. I want to make something of myself as a photographer (yes, yes, I've got past saying "I want to be a photographer" because I already am a photographer whether I thought so before or not. If I'm going to do that I want to be blogging about it all, the failures, the successes, the pitfalls, the ideas, the crazy, wild-eyed, midnight shoots in dodgy parts of London (probably not, but you never know). And that just doesn't gel anymore with what this blog as been about for the last five years (well, five years on February 17th).

So, what to do? Start over with a new blog? Migrate the non-photography content away from here and over to somewhere else? Rethink things entirely?

It's about identity. When people Google me, who do I want them to see? Do I want them to see me as a photographer or me as a hacker / hack / musicial hack / internet crusty? This blog is currently the top result on Google UK for my name, followed by some weird crap about finding my phone number and then something about a Maj. Gen. in the British army. And the Youtube clip from UDS Jaunty.

So keeping the site is a good idea. What to keep on it though? I think photography. I think that, when you go to grahambinns.com you should see me as a photographer, that side of me, not the developer side of me, because when I'm in public - unless I'm with the hacker crowd anyway - I'll say, if I'm asked, that I'm a photographer. It just comes out; can't stop it. I don't always add the "but my day job is as a software developer" corollary any more, which is empowering in itself.

Maybe that's what needs to happen; I need to separate those two identities so that they don't bash into each other.

Something that Ariana Osborne said a while back rings true:

If you want to sell something online, you’ve got to make a network online. You’ve got to go places and talk to people, yes – but unless you are struck by lucky lightning, you’ve also got to give those people something they can link and remember and pass along to other people.  And, for most of us, that “business card” if you will, is our homepage.  In theory, that homepage should be something people can bookmark to remember us by – but if it’s a static page there’s a very good chance that people will forget why they bookmarked it in the first place.  So most of us – by accident or with some thought – have created a blog of some fashion.

Maybe I need to get something to help me sleep. Yes, that seems quite likely too.