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March 11, 2010 by graham

Simple

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.

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March 10, 2010 by graham

Hah

Dear all… Kindly disregard my last post. It shouldn’t have appeared in the feeds.

Besides, < 1000ms is not exactly bad for a webapp on a small-assed virtual server. It’s the static files (CSS and JS) that are killing load times.

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March 7, 2010 by graham

KYH: Woodland shoot

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.

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March 3, 2010 by graham

A thank you

Jono William Aloycius O’Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager and general all-round grand bloke today announced the Ubuntu rebranding. I’ve known about this for a while, because the Canonical brand is being refreshed too and we as a company were shown the new designs and asked for comments a few weeks back. However, this is a chance for me to say thank you to the people who put together the new logos, themes and so on publicly.

Y’see, thank you is something that I don’t think gets said enough in the open source world. Of all the things that annoy me about OSS development, this is one of the ones near the top of the list. Everyone who works on Ubuntu, be they Canonical employees or community contributors, works very, very hard to produce a distro that every Ubuntu member can be proud of. But – and I think this is a basic law of nature – the loudest voices we hear are always the ones who hate it, hate what Ubuntu stands for, hate that it’s not free enough (for them), hate that Mark has a vision and is dedicated to pushing towards realising that vision.

What you don’t see a lot of – or at least don’t see as prominently, because let’s face it it’s easier to jump on the haters bandwagon than it is to stand up to them – is people just saying “thank you” or “thank you for doing an awesome job.”

So, to everyone who was involved in the rebranding work – and that doesn’t just mean Canonical employees; the community have been involved in this too (though I don’t know the details of who exactly):

Thank you

(And let’s be clear, this is in no way intended to diminish all the positive comments that I’ve been seeing. Also, constructive criticisms are a good thing, especially since the new designs are not completely locked down.)

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February 28, 2010 by graham

Welcome to my humble abode

Hello.

If you’ve been here before you’ll have noticed that I’ve changed things a bit; moved the furniture around, repainted the skirting boards, stripped the old wallpaper and removed the artex from the ceiling. Hope you like it.

I’ve gone for a much simpler, more stripped-back look-and-feel this time around. I’m not interested in having a cluttered blog, and I’ve got plans to add some extra things to this site in the not-too-distant future. The idea is to keep a nice clean aesthetic throughout the entire site, which is going to become much more of a showcase for my photography work than anything else.

Yes, I’ll still post about Ubuntu and Launchpad here, but this site is primarily about me the photographer, not me the developer. If I feel that I have a lot to say here about the developer side of my life then I might think about setting up another blog to deal with it.

For those of you who want technical details about what’s changed, well, there’s not all that much. The site uses a lot more of the Frabjous codebase now than it used to – there was a lot of duplication of code in the grahambinns.com tree, so I’ve cleaned that up – and I’ve added a few things to Frabjous whilst I was working on the retheme and upgrade, which is nice and mutally beneficial.

Anyway, I’m aware that there will likely be bugs in the new version of the site that crop up over the next few days, so please do let me know if you come across any.

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February 18, 2010 by graham

One of life’s little disappointments

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.

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February 9, 2010 by graham

In which I turn 29

Today is the 29th anniversary of my birth. I can provide Paypal account details if you want to send me money.

Anyway, I appear to have caused some confusion by stating on twitter that I have now started my 30th year, and that my 29th year has ended, so I feel I should explain. Here comes the working:

  1. Birthdays are zero-indexed. On the day of my birth I was 0 years old (please, don’t tell me that I was 9 months old. I can’t be bothered to argue with you).
  2. My first birthday came at the end of my first year of life, from Feb 9th 1981 to Feb 9th 1982. My second came in 1983, after my second year of life, and so on.
  3. Therefore, the year from Feb 9th 2009 to Feb 9th 2010 was the twenty-ninth year of my life.
  4. Therefore I am now 29 years old.
  5. Therefore, my 30th year of life runs from now until 9th Feb 2011.

I hope that’s clarified it for everyone. Yes, this makes sense.

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February 5, 2010 by graham

Wailly wailly

Well, it looks like I jumped the gun with my last post. Turns out that the shiny media features that WordPress 2.9 has, and which I got so glum about not having in Frabjous have actually been in Frabjous for about a year. And I wrote them. Yes, I fail.

True, they’re a bit more rudimentary, because Frabjous’s admin interface isn’t nearly as polished as WordPress’s (because it pretty much just uses the Django auto-generated admin interface; something that I keep meaning to get around to fixing). However, for all that, they work, and work pretty well. They’ll do exactly the job I need of them and, with a little bit of tweaking, more besides, which is fantastic for me because I’m no longer having to worry about migrating from Frabjous to WordPress with no obvious migration path in sight.

Phew.

And now, back to our regular scheduled programming.

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February 5, 2010 by graham

Migrating to WordPress

Looks that way, anyway. It just happens to need to do what I need and I don’t have the time to hack those features into Frabjous, since they’re major work.

Yes, I hate myself. Yes, running PHP on my server is like allowing a busload of hackers into the Bytemark datacentre (with apologies to Chris Jones).

Oh well, using Frabjous was nice while it lasted.

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January 31, 2010 by graham

Brain porridge

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.

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