Keeping it Old Skool in Lyon

I haven’t published anything here for quite a while, bet you thought I’d given up!  Well, no.  University study have indeed taken up the majority of my time, but I have been able to get the camera out every now and again and take some shots.  Now the course has finished, I am trying to get back in business.

So, as a birthday pressy and a kind of ‘hooray I got the thesis in’ sort of celebratory trip, I accompanied Him Indoors on a work trip to Lyon (the one in France) for a week.  While he was geeking it up with fellow computer scientists from around Europe, I was wandering around in the sunshine with my Olympus OM20 35mm camera, snapping pictures and drinking coffee from tiny cups.  So here, for your consideration, I present the fruits of my labours…. (and if you like these you can see more on my flickr page here)

Experimenting with film – faster, fitter, more productive

I found some 3200ISO film in my local Camera Exchange, and thought I’d have a go with that to see how well it performed.  Knowing that I would be going to a friend’s gig, I bought a roll and plonked it in the Canon EOS300.  I had no idea if the results were going to be a total washout of dark, grainy, blurry nonsense, or whether there might be a bit of success.  The aim was to have some great concert shots that I could develop in the darkroom myself….

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Trinity Career’s Shoot

I’ve just remembered I was supposed to put up some pics from the photoshoot I did recently for TCD.  I’m not sure if they are going to use any of them, the publication doesn’t come out until the beginning of the next academic year.  We’ll see.

Anyway, the brief was to have four or five students, equal numbers of boys and girls, all smiley and happy around Trinity on a perfectly cloudless summer’s day.  Now, day’s like that are few and far between in Dublin.  So after rounding up my happy smiley volunteers, I kept my eye on the weather reports to pick out the best day.  The weather was looking pretty grim after an unusual heatwave, but the weather changed on the last day of term and we were returned to cloudless skies.  All systems go!

My subjects were in great spirits, which helped as we spent a good hour and a half working, and they seemed happy enough with my continued barking of ‘SMILE, BE HAPPY!’  Once we’d finished, the girls asked for a couple of individual shots for the craic, so I obliged!

Rax and Christy

Did anybody watch the BBC4 Wonders of Iceland season?  Well if you didn’t you missed a wonderful programme about Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson who has been photographing scenes from Iceland that he belives are becoming rarer and rarer.

The photos are stunning, the dark moods within are amazing.  The portraits are candid and both amusing and tragic.  It was pretty inspirational stuff.

One of the things I’ve taken from the programme and in viewing his website in particular is not to worry so much about eradicating blur, or making a portrait pretty.  Sometimes honesty in a picture gives the subject more depth, and makes them a stronger character.

So, with this in mind, the next time I took a portrait, I tried to evoke the Rax-esque in my composition.  And on Friday, I was delighted to be invited along to an event that afforded me that opportunity.  A wonderful man called Christy, who along with his extensive life experience has a mischievous and enthusiastic sense of the slightly ridiculous.  Every year for the past 7 years, he and many of his friends have held ‘Eliza Doolittle Day’ on 20th May, in honour of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.  The merry band take over a Dublin Tour Bus for an entire day, and drive to various spots all over Dublin.  The Lord Mayor even gets involved.

I was able to take loads of pictures of the day, of eccentric Edwardian fancy dress, of fantastic projects showing how a community working together can create something wonderful, and most particularly of my favourite subject of the day, the man himself – Christy.  So here is Christy, in a style inspired by (but certainly not matching up to) Rax.

By the way, if you want to see the other pictures from the day, you can visit my Flickr page.

More chronological periodical bloggings

Hi all

As I sit here desperately trying to find inspiration for an essay about lexical concepts and prototypes in Welsh, I received an email from  long forgotten musician whose mailing list I’d signed up to about 4 or 5 years ago.  Turns out he’s working on a Song a Month type project.  If you haven’t heard of Thomas Truax (or indeed his trusty mechanical stagemates Spinster Sister or the Hornicator) then you may (or may not) like what you hear.  It’s not what I would call mainstream.  He likes to experiment, which is no bad thing in music – especially in a pop world of half-baked unoriginal cover versions.  speaking of which, he did a great cover version of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game about 2 years ago.  I wish I could find a copy of it somewhere.

Following the seemingly mammoth task I undertook last year with the 365 thing – I admire anyone who sets themselves some sort of periodical chronological challenge thing.  So, while you wait for me to get my act together and upload some more pics (recent Trinity Career’s Office photoshoot coming soon!), dip your toe into some off-the-wall musical whimsy here:

http://soundcloud.com/thomas-truax

Back to Analogue!

I’ve been trying out a couple of new films recently, and on Paddy’s Day took one of my 35mm SLRs out to photograph the parade here in Celbridge.  Unfortunately, when I took the film to be developed, it turns out that it was loaded into the film cartridge back-to-front, so the negatives are all wrong.  You might not think it would make a difference, but as a result, the blacks are all really washed out and grainy, so I’ve had to do some work in Photoshop to get around that.

 

Nevermind.  I still like the outcome of some of these pics.  Hope you do too

FASHION!! Part 2

TCD Junk2Funk fashion show – on the runway and posing for shots.  I’m rather proud of these

Check out TCD Environmental Society here: http://duenv.csc.tcdlife.ie/about_us/about_us.htm