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.

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.

Feeling a little world-weary tonight. An afternoon spent battling with Launchpad's ec2 test facility and a gym workout that didn't go as well as planned (I really need a trainer - or at least a workout buddy - to make me do things some times, and I don't have either) have left me drained and a touch on the grumpy side.

You have been warned.

And again, I'm going through one of those phases where I'm not picking up and working with a camera much. Oh, I'm shooting bits and pieces here and there for the Countdown project, which I'm going to have to turn into videos some time in the new year because right now I just don't have the time, but I'm not shooting anything serious. It's all just frivolous shooting. Well, not frivolous but... I guess 'unimportant' would be the right word. It's keeping the muscle memory going - here's the ISO control, there's the shutter release, there's the bracket function, that sort of thing - but it's not challenging me creatively and it's making a part of my inner brain itch like nobody's business.

I've got some grand ideas written down, and I keep fleshing them out - more on that as and when I get round to actually carrying them out. That I've imposed a photoshoot moratorium on myself until the new year - because trust me, organising a wedding and holding down a programming job are quite enough to be getting on with - doesn't help matters, but at least I know that when the new year rolls around I'll be able to start sending out casting calls, talking to potential subjects and organising teams to be able to put these things together.

A part of me worries that the ideas are a little too grand - one of them calls for no less than eight different fashion styles in the same series, and the change in style extends to the location, too - but if I don't aim high now I'll never do it later.

On the slightly less complex side of things I'm working on a project that's not even embryonic yet - I'm still waiting for it to be a Zygote (okay, let's discard that metaphor before it goes any further, shall we?) - but, should it work out will be extremely simple, at least technically, though I suspect there will be a lot of work to do with regard to getting subjects and other parties involved.

All of which, of course, tells you bugger all about anything. Maybe in a couple of weeks I'll be able to tell you more.

I started a new personal project yesterday, which due to a complete and utter lack of imagination on my part I'm going to call Countdown. As of 11th September 2009 it was exactly 100 days until my wedding to my Awesome Fiancée, Sarah. Seeing as how I'm handy with a camera, and seeing as how I'd like a record of the days leading up to the wedding day, I figured I'd document them in photographs.

I probably won't be posting every day (though I will post every day's photos eventually) because I'd likely go mad if I tried. You can follow my Flickr stream for updates, and I'll post here periodically (probably every ten days or so). 

I just uploaded yesterday's photos - which just so happened to be of a family friend's wedding - to Flickr. Why not take a look?

A few months back, when I was on a Launchpad Bugs sprint in Vilnius, Tom and Gavin asked me whether I'd thought about open-sourcing the engine that runs grahambinns.com. My answer then was that I'd thought about it but never done it because:

1. It wasn't very good
2. The code had a lot of grahambinns.com-specific code in it
3. It wasn't very good.

It's still not very good, but I've removed all the grahambinns.com specifics and now I'm reasonably happy to announce (like the father of a slightly ill-coordinated child) Frabjous version 0.1, "Not a lot of men can carry off a decorative vegetable", is now available for download under the GPLv3 at launchpad.net.

Some questions and answers:

• Q: Why 'Frabjous'?
  A: Because I was reading Jabberwocky at the time I was trying to think up a name.
• Q: Should I replace my Wordpress installation with Frabjous?
  A: Emphatically no, unless you really, really want to. Frabjous is, for all that I've removed a lot of the me-specific code, pretty awkward to adminster just yet (well, I think it is). Wordpress is as good as it is because it's very mature; Frabjous isn't.
• Q: Do you want Frabjous to be a Wordpress killer?
  A: Not really. I want it to be better than it is at the moment and I'd like people to use it, but Wordpress is a fantastic piece of software and people will doubtless find it easier to use and set up than Frabjous for quite a while.
• Q: That being the case, why do you use Frabjous rather than Wordpress?
  A: I originally wrote what would become Frabjous because I wanted to learn Django. I also had a cordial dislike for PHP after years of working in it and wanted never to have to run it on a server of mine ever again. So far, I'm succeeding.

So, please go and try it out. You can grab the trunk from Launchpad using bzr branch lp:frabjous; please feel free to have a look at the code, hack on it and file bugs. Patches welcome, branches even better.

For the record, I have no illusions that anyone other than me will ever use this code, especially with so many other blogging and site management platforms available. However, you can always treat it as a learning exercise, and that's fine too.